Book Review by Samia Mehbub
Angela Duckworth, an astounding psychologist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a daughter of a scientist, proves that success is more than just “genius.” Talent gains more value when there is skill and effort. Through many interviews with great people that aim for the stars and beyond, Angela’s thoughtful and innovative research into how success results from hard work, consistency, and motivation only leaves readers on the edges of their seat. Everyone that reads this book comes to know how practice, purpose, interest, and hope are one of the main keys to having grit, and it can often lead to greater outcomes.
Through her insightful language, Angela helps readers by promoting a growth mindset and gritty attitude to move forward. She influences others to be optimistic, encouraging them to think positively to achieve excellent results. She shares her own personal experiences of her setbacks that pushed her to try harder, which has inspired many lives. She unlocks everyone’s abilities to achieve their best potential when they have many long-term goals that they feel are out of reach. She includes surveys and graphs of the results of the population’s growth of being gritty and producing positive outcomes.
With certain self-assessments on how to find out how gritty her readers are, she only leaves them motivated to improve their score. Through self-reflection, she actively propels readers to be diligent, set goals, and complete a task that they started. Additionally, this book includes parenting children to help them be more disciplined and grow up to be someone that can do anything they set their mind to.
With her proven studies, she indicates how children that are involved in extracurricular activities at a young age are more likely to be successful when they’re adults. Angela also reveals the qualities of determined individuals that make them the role models they are. Readers can’t pull themselves away from this book, especially because they come into self-exploration and understand how important character and integrity is to be an achiever.
Angela manifests how grit is not just being at the top. It’s those that fail and get back up as many times as they need that are truly lionhearted individuals. The most fascinating part about this book is that it is possible to grow grit anytime in our lives. As someone who has over 16 million views on her Ted talk, she reviews these core beliefs from her book to her audience. She used to be an award-winning math and science teacher, so she really has knowledge of what every person needs to thrive. Besides, hard work is what makes this world a better place.
One constructive piece of feedback that could be addressed more in this book is whether Angela could include a deeper dive into how hard-working as a student she was, but not as passionate until later. It would be important to know what she did to be successful in education, and to find that love for learning, without just “doing it” every day with no interest.
You must be logged in to post a comment.