Read Online Grit by Angela Duckworth - Free Book Online

talent seriously.”
    Irving recalls earning a C– in high school English. HisSAT verbal score was 475 out of 800, which means almost two-thirds of the students who took the SAT did better than him. He needed to stay in highschool an extra year to have enough credits to graduate. Irving recalls that his teachers thought he was both“lazy” and “stupid.”
    Irving was neither lazy nor stupid. But he was severely dyslexic: “I was an underdog. . . . If my classmates could read our history assignment in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. If I couldn’t learn to spell, I would keep a list of my mostfrequently misspelled words.” When his own son was diagnosed with dyslexia, Irving finally understood why he, himself, had been such a poor student. Irving’s son read noticeably slower than his classmates, “with his finger following the sentence—as I read, as I still read. Unless I’ve written it, I read whatever ‘it’ is veryslowly—and with my finger.”
    Since reading and writing didn’t come easily, Irving learned that “to do anything really well,you have to overextend yourself. . . . In my case, I learned that I just had to pay twice as much attention. I came to appreciate that in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural becomes almost second nature. You learn that you have the capacity for that, and that it doesn’t come overnight.”
    Do the precociously talented learn that lesson? Do they discover that the capacity to do something over and over again, to struggle, to have patience, can be mastered—but not overnight?
    Some might. But those who struggle early may learn it better: “One reason I have confidence in writing the kind of novels I write,” Irving said, “is that I have confidence in my stamina to go over something again and againno matter how difficult it is.” After his tenth novel, Irving observed,“Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or screenplay than I take to write the first draft.”
    â€œIt’s become an advantage,” Irving has observed of his inability to read and spell as fluently as others. “In writing a novel, it doesn’t hurt anybodyto have to go slowly. It doesn’t hurt anyone as a writer to have to go over something again and again.”
    With daily effort, Irving became one of the most masterful and prolificwriters in history. With effort, he became a master, and with effort, his mastery produced stories that have touched millions of people, including me.
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    Grammy Award–winning musician and Oscar-nominated actor Will Smith has thought a lot about talent, effort, skill, and achievement. “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented,” he once observed. “Where I excel is ridiculous,sickening work ethic.”
    Accomplishment, in Will’s eyes, is very much about going the distance. Asked to explain his ascendancy to the entertainment elite, Will said:
    The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first,or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.
    In 1940, researchers at Harvard University had the same idea. In a study designed to understand the “characteristics ofhealthy young men” in order to “help people live happier, more successful lives,” 130 sophomores were asked to run on a treadmill for up to five minutes. The treadmill was set at such a steep angle and cranked up to such a fast speed that the average man held onfor only four minutes. Some lasted for