Angela Duckworth

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.

Meeting a teacher who believed in his potential was a critical turning point: a pivot from This is all you can do to Who knows what you can do? At that moment, Scott started wondering, for the very first time: Who am I? Am I a learning disabled kid with no real future? Or maybe something else?
And then, to find out, Scott signed up for just about every challenge his school had to offer. Latin class. The school musical. Choir. He didn’t necessarily excel in everything, but he learned in all.
What Scott learned is that he wasn’t hopeless.
Something that Scott found he did learn fairly easily was the cello. His grandfather had been a cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly fifty years, and Scott had the idea that his grandfather could give him lessons. He did, and the summer that Scott first picked up the cello, he began practicing eight or nine hours a day. He was fiercely determined to improve, and not only because he enjoyed the cello: “I was so driven to just show someone, anyone, that I was intellectually capable of anything. At this point I didn’t even care what it was.”

In my view, the biggest reason a preoccupation with talent can be harmful is simple: By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that these other factors—including grit—don’t matter as much as they really do.

Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it’s related to staying true to our commitments even when we’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.

If you'd like to follow you passion but haven't yet fostered one, you must begin at the beginning : discovery.
Ask yourself a few simple questions : What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do I enjoy spending my time? And, in contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable?
If you find it hard to answer these questions, try recalling your teen years, the stage of life at which vocational interests commonly sprout.

Je découvrit au fil de la conversation que Bill a depuis longtemps compris que les dispositions ne sont pas les seules qui importent. A l’époque où il recrutait des programmateurs de logiciels chez Microsoft,il confiait aux candidats de longues et laborieuses tâches.Il ne testait ainsi ni leur Q.I. ni leurs capacités professionnelles mais leur aptitude à s’entêter-aller jusqu’au bout,quoi qu’il en coûte.Bien sûr,il ne retenait que les programmateurs menant à bien leur mission.

The “naturalness bias” is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.

(...) face the fact that time and energy are limited. Any successful person has to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do.

(...) demanding Enron employees prove that they were smarter than everyone else inadvertently contributed to a narcissistic culture, with an overrepresentation of employees who were both incredibly smug and driven by deep insecurity to keep showing off. It was a culture that encouraged short-term performance but discouraged long-term learning and growth.

Ça ne signifie pas que les modèles de pugnacité soient tous des bienfaiteurs de l’humanité mais qu’ils rattachent plus volontiers leur objectif à l’intérêt de la société.
L’important reste que la volonté de se rendre utile contribue à la motivation de beaucoup.Il existe sans doute des exceptions mais leur rareté même confirme la règle.