Grit is having stamina.

Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years,

and working really hard to make that future a reality.

Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Welcome back to the Quote of the Day show.

I am your host, Sean Croxton, and Sean Croxton.com.

We got Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, on the show today. She's going to talk about why talent and IQ are not the best predictors of success.

Dr. Angela Duckworth is coming up. When I was 27 years old,

I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding,

teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.

And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests, I gave out homework assignments.

When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference

between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest

performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me

thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,

sure, they're hard, ratios, decimals,

the area of a parallelogram,

but these concepts are not impossible.

And I was firmly convinced

that every one of my students could learn the material

if they worked hard and long enough.

After several more years of teaching,

...