She calls the people whose inspiring tales she recounts “grit paragons”. These include the commitment to finish what you start, to rise from setbacks, to want to improve and succeed, and to undertake sustained and sometimes unpleasant practice in order to do so. Swimmers, chefs, army cadets, telesales executives … Duckworth examines them all, and what she finds is that natural talent – the genius prized by her father – does not make humans disposed to succeed so much as the qualities she sums up as “grit”. Subtitled The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the text is the fruit of years studying the psychology of success. Duckworth, now 45, doesn’t recall how she answered her father, but her book Grit is her considered reply. This approach to raising children seems inauspicious but, in a funny way, it has worked pretty well. For Duckworth’s mother, an artist, the disparagement was adjusted to fit: “You’re no Picasso!” He did it at random moments, over dinner, watching TV or reading the newspaper, and the sentence was always the same: “You’re no genius!” Duckworth’s older sister and brother got it too. W hen Angela Duckworth was growing up, her dad often applied the word genius to his daughter.
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