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      The Key to Achievements

      The daughter of Chinese immigrants, an Oxford graduate, Angela Duckworth made a career in the international consulting company McKinsey for several years, had brilliant prospects and was paid well. However, at the age of 27, she left the consulting world and went to a regular high school to teach math. Then she trained as a psychologist, gained knowledge in the field of neuroscience, became a scientist and devoted years to the study of "genius". What helps people to succeed, what is talent, what is the role of vocation and self-discipline in achieving long-term goals. These are the questions for which Angela Duckworth was seeking answers.

      In 2013, Angela Duckworth got a MacArthur Fellowship for "exceptional achievement and potential for long and rewarding creative work". This award is also commonly known as the "Genius Grant".

      The book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance", written based on the results of her extensive research, became a world bestseller. Angela Duckworth's TED talk on the same topic has over 15 million views and has been translated into 49 languages and still remains one of the most popular reports in the history of the conference.

      The main idea of the book is that the key to outstanding achievements is not talent and innate abilities, but a special mixture of perseverance and passion for one's activity, which Angela Duckworth calls grit.

      In her book, she argues that interest and passion for a certain activity do not appear by themselves, but they can be discovered, developed and retained. She also offers specific techniques (such as the "deliberate practice" technique and the method of value hierarchy) that will help you set big, ambitious goals and achieve equally impressive results.

      Formula for Success

      As a result of her countless studies, Angela Duckworth discovered that success is determined by two main factors:

      ▶the ability to survive failure and continue to move towards your goal, even when something does not work out;

      ▶craving for self-improvement, the desire to constantly learn and improve the quality of your skills.

      Success follows stable, efficient and hardworking people who know exactly what they want. They understand how much effort the result will require, and are ready to go towards their goal, despite the difficulties. In other words, they have a grit.

      In society, it is generally accepted that talent is of decisive importance. For example, if a child has a natural aptitude for mathematics, it is logical to assume that he will get only high marks, and over the years the gap between him and his less capable classmates will grow. However, Duckworth, who worked for many years as a school teacher, discovered that talent is far from the main key to success. What really matters is a person’s attitude.

      Experiments are known where teachers were made to believe in the exceptional abilities of some students. Without realizing this directly, the teachers immediately began to show much more attention and care to the "geniuses", and also set much higher bars for them. As a result, the average and even underachievers had better results than one might expect. Duckworth is sure that talent is a highly relative and unstable category for assessing the future. What really affects the fate of a person is perseverance and the ability to get what he or she wants.

      True mastery is born from disparate skills and habits that take shape only after years of practice. At the same time, it is absolutely not necessary to do something outstanding every day, the main thing is to develop a routine and consistently stick to it.

      Angela Duckworth’s two-level equation

      (explanation of how talent translates into achievement):

      Talent is the speed at which you acquire a skill if you put the right amount of effort into it. Achievement is the result of the consistent application of this skill. As you can see, effort is present twice in the equation. It is the amount of effort applied that determines the quality of the acquired skill, and this same factor determines the productivity of its application.

      Talent without effort is untapped potential. Skill without effort is untapped achievement.

      "Find a job you love, and you will not work a day in your life." To some extent, this is true: an activity on which you spend a huge amount of time should captivate you. However, people who have achieved real success say that passion is not an obsession similar to falling in love, but loyalty to one’s chosen path, stability and a systematic approach to activities.