Grit

Grit by Angela Duckworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.” 

I heard Angela Duckworth on the TED Radio podcast and was intrigued by the idea of grit, a combination of passion and perseverance that high achievers exhibit. Duckworth is a psychologist and developed a grit scale to measure this quality. The book is full of stories about people in a wide variety of fields who she thinks are especially "gritty" and how they came to be that way. Grit is a combination of research, interviews, and how-to-apply-this info. The chapter on practice--how the quality of the practice and focusing on your weaknesses is more important to the value of the practice than quantity of time spent--was particularly interesting.