‘Passion and perseverance’: the secret sauce for the world’s best talent
About Angela
- Rosa Lee & Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania
- 2013 MacArthur Fellow
- #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit
- TED Talk among the most viewed of all time
- Co-director, Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative
‘Passion and perseverance’: the secret sauce for the world’s best talent
What do Michelin-star chefs, Olympic athletes, and Nobel Prize winners share? Psychologist Angela Duckworth says it’s not raw talent — it’s passion and perseverance. And the most surprising part? It’s not the intensity that sets them apart. It’s the stamina.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts may be automatically generated and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.
I love the Olympics. I love three-star Michelin chefs, even if I don't go eat in their restaurants. I love people who win the Nobel Prize. If you're a world-class plumber, I want to watch you work. And what I was looking for is not what made them different from each other. What I was looking for was the common denominator. You know, what makes a prima ballerina the same as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist? I mean, that's a great question to ask, right? Because they're so different in so many ways. I found that they had this common, you know, trait. They had this combination of passion for what they did, unfakeable, 24-7 love of what they did, and they had perseverance. I mean, wow. They had this incredible ability to work and to outlast other people. And I think in both dimensions, passion and perseverance, the thing that was most striking was not the intensity but the stamina.
