Chapter 1

The predictor for success is not actually talent, it’s perseverance and passion.

Chapter 2

People believe that talent is best, but it is not.

Chaper 3

Talent x Effort = Skill

Skill x Effort = Talent

Woody Allen — “Eighty percent of success in life is showing up”.

“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”.

Chapter 4

Warren Buffett’s three steps guide to prioritizing goals

1. Write down a list of 25 career goals
2. Do some soul-searching and circle the five highest priority goals.
3. Take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at any all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.
4. (Duckworth suggests adding this one) Ask yourself “to what extent do these goals serve a common purpose?”

A Mrs. Cox made a 800+ page summary of the most intelligent historical figures in which she concluded that “high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence”.

Chapter 5

Grit can be grown

Chapter 7

Do deliberate practice.

Have stretch goals. When you achieve mastery of that; get a new one.

Deliberate Practice requirements

• A clearly defined stretch goals
• Full concentration and effort
• Immediate and informative feedback
• Repetition with reflection and refinement

Chapter 9

Have a growth mindset.

Chapter 11

Work on hard tasks to condition yourself.

Hard thing rule.

Have discipline.

Chapter 12

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

― Theodore Roosevelt

Chapter 13

You are not practicing to become someone else.