TED Talks Under Ten | Angela Lee Duckworth On Grit

Last updated on 8 January 2025

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Welcome to the TED Talks Under Ten series.

The year was 2018, or as we like to call it around here, ‘the year Anjali got addicted to TED Talks under ten minutes’. As the tagline for TED reads, these are ‘ideas worth sharing’, so what kind of person would I be if I didn’t share with you guys some of the fascinating, inspiring, beautiful, and insightful clips I’ve been devouring? No kind of person at all.

Title: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Speaker: Angela Lee Duckworth

Length: 6.09 mins

Date: April 2013

Synopsis: “Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.”

My thoughts on Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Before watching this TED Talk, I didn’t really have any concept of ‘grit’, not in the way that Duckworth talks about it here. But the more I listened, the more it made total sense.

“We have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.”

Duckworth says that grit in learning is ‘passion and perseverance for very long-term goals’. It’s about stamina and sticking with something not just for weeks, or months, but years. She talks about life as a marathon, and not a sprint, and that in education especially, one can learn to cultivate grit. We need the ‘belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.’

I love this idea. It seems simple on the outset, but really how often do we lose interest in things, or give up because we failed at it the first or second time. Grit, says Duckworth, is predictor of success, not talent or IQ. It’s this sort of thing that I needed at school. School, in my opinion, doesn’t help you find out what you’re passionate about, it doesn’t teach you to persevere when you get it wrong. You simply fail, and move onto the next ridiculous assessment that you hate and aren’t excited about. School teaches you to pass, it doesn’t teach you to persevere.

May we have passion and perseverance in all we do; may we be gritty.

What do you think about this TED Talk Under Ten?

Disclaimer: TED did not as me to write this; I’m simply sharing a clip which I think is great.