Angela Duckworth: Passion and Perseverance

Michael Gervais (0:09)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to sit down with people who are on the path of mastery, who have a point of view about mastery. And the hope is that we can work to understand their psychological framework, what they're searching for, their thoughts and habits and how they train their mind to deal with internal and external setbacks and obstacles and what they're really investing their life efforts toward.

I wanna take a minute here to announce a really exciting event that we have coming up. As you continue to navigate the challenges and opportunities of 2024, I wanna pose a question. What are you doing right now to be great with stress? How are you working with stress on your pursuit towards your most important ambitions and goals? And I just wanna get right to the heart of the key elements, one in particular, for what it takes to excel in today's high heat, high stakes world. Because stress is not the problem that we think it is. Stress is a synonym for change. And our ability to be agile with change, that is the real opportunity at hand. So if you're wanting to unlock extraordinary results and sustainable performance in your life, it's not about avoiding or reducing stress. And as simple as that sounds, it's very tricky to do, but it is about fundamentally changing your relationship with it.

And that's why I'm so thrilled to invite you to a special event. It's a free virtual event that we're offering, and it's called The Power of Embracing Stress. It's on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. So to sign up, just head over to findingmastery.com/training, whether it's advancing in your career or improving your health or cultivating stronger relationships, I think a new approach to stress can be one of the most powerful unlocks for you in your life. So join us for this free virtual training, The Power of Embracing Stress, on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to findingmastery.com/training to sign up. Once again, that's findingmastery.com/training, and I'm really excited to see you there.

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And in this conversation, we get to sit down with Dr. Angela Duckworth. And Angela is a professor at UPenn and is the founder and scientific director of CharacterLab.

It's a nonprofit that she set up whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. Now, she's most widely known for her research on grit and her interest in self-control.

And she defines grit as passion and perseverance for long-term goals. We'll get into that in this conversation. And why you might be interested in this is because, according to research, that grit might be one of the more important characteristics that's associated with people who experience success. So it's worth an investigation if you're new or unfamiliar to it. I think, hopefully, that this will prime you to either buy her book, which is just launched, and or do some other research around the concept.

Now, if it is one of the more important characteristics, you know, what exactly is it? And there is conversation in the scientific community about how do we really understand what grit is. And we get a little bit into that in this conversation, so I hope you enjoy that.

And as the title of her book, which is Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the book that the title of grit might conjure up this idea of hard work. And certainly that is part of anybody's process toward world leading and performances and really understanding what it takes to pursue potential. However, my experience and it's and I think she draws a really bright line around this is that it's really about passion and understanding and feeling what it feels like to be switched on and to have that passion about oneself and then to have practices in place that allow people to allow us to, you know, to manage the fatigue and the fear that are the culprits that just pull up that passion in a way that doesn't allow us to breathe life and have that just exactly that switched on ability. And so I think that when you think about passion and perseverance, my hope is that you'll index a bit more on finding passion, understanding what it's about for you, what it feels like for you, including the practices that support it and making sure that we really fight against fatigue and fear and I mean fight like in a hostile way, but really be mindful of how those two concepts really zap, if you will, our ability to live with passion. Okay, there's another hidden layer here, is that she has absolutely demonstrated mastery in the academic path.