Grit is what’s left over when nothing’s left.

perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

the importance of developing grit in the first place for the challenges you know about and the ones waiting around the corner to surprise you.

Spencer explained the downside of grit: “I know plenty of people for whom grit is a liability because it allows them to stick with something that makes them or others miserable and towards no long-term good aim. The alternative of which is the thing that you would most like to do that would bring you the most joy and might bring other people the most joy or be the most productive.

Angela Duckworth, agrees with this. In her paper “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” she says, “A strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths.

Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.

"To be successful in our quest for happiness, we need to tackle life with the grit, determination, and persistence necessary to achieve meaningful goals, whilst possessing a protective armor against possible, even likely, failures. Successful individuals are almost always "anti-fragile" when it comes to failure. They
lean from their failures but are not broken by them."

Without some optimal level of grit and persistence, few new businesses would ever have seen the light of day, and few New Year's resolutions would ever be kept.

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn’t need to be fought in the first place.

a system that leads people to downplay previous experiences, as if they were entirely wasted, is a counterproductive one. We shouldn’t be ashamed of broad experience, or of needing time to find match quality. Take it from Angela Duckworth, the researcher whose work popularized the psychological construct of “grit.

Peak performance is dependent on passion, grit, determination, and a willingness to do something poorly until you can do it well.

The possibility of highly visible failure has an exceptional power to propel us to want to succeed, and that power can be harnessed to motivate a team or even a community to do something difficult.

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment.

We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle.