Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.
"Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals."
"Growth mindset: The belief that the ability to learn is not fixed: that it can change with your effort...When kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they are much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition."
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Emotional Intelligence - EQ | Travis Bradberry

As the bestselling coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, I'm often asked to break down what emotional intelligence is and why it's so important. Here goes...

Emotional Intelligence Is the Other Kind of Smart.

When emotional intelligence first appeared to the masses in 1995, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success—IQ. Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. Emotional intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence is made up of your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen.

• Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people’s moods, behavior, and motives in order to improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on.

• Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others’ emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional Intelligence, IQ, and Personality Are Different.

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply can’t predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it’s the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. 

Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren’t born with it.
Personality is the final piece of the puzzle. It’s the stable “style” that defines each of us. Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can’t be used to predict emotional intelligence. Also like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn’t change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.

Emotional Intelligence Is Linked to Performance.

How much of an impact does emotional intelligence have on your professional success? The short answer is: a lot! It’s a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with a tremendous result. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills—it impacts most everything you say and do each day. Emotional intelligence is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.

Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim. Naturally, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence make more money—an average of $29,000 more per year than people with a low degree of emotional intelligence. The link between emotional intelligence and earnings is so direct that every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary. These findings hold true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. We haven’t yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren’t tied closely to emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence Can Be Developed.

The communication between your emotional and rational “brains” is the physical source of emotional intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However, first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

“Plasticity” is the term neurologists use to describe the brain’s ability to change. Your brain grows new connections as you learn new skills. The change is gradual, as your brain cells develop new connections to speed the efficiency of new skills acquired.

Using strategies to increase your emotional intelligence allows the billions of microscopic neurons lining the road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain to branch off small “arms” (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures it’s easier to kick this new behavior into action in the future. Once you train your brain by repeatedly using new emotional intelligence strategies, emotionally intelligent behaviors become habits.

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Will Smith shares his secrets of success

Will shares what motivates him in various interviews, all brought together in this clip.  What comes across most is his incredible work ethic!
You don't set out to build a wall, you say "I'm gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.  You do that every day, and soon you have  a wall!"

"He who says he can, and he who says he can't are both usually right."
"Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity."
"If we dream something, if we picture something, if we commit ourselves to it that that is a physical thrust towards realisation that we can put into the Universe.."
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The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves | Emily Esfahani Smith

We’ve all created our own personal histories, marked by highs and lows, that we share with the world — and we can shape them to live with more meaning and purpose.

We are all storytellers — all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an “act of creation” of the “composition of our lives.” Yet unlike most stories we’ve heard, our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.

Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams is an expert on a concept he calls “narrative identity.” McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself — your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.

An individual’s life story is not an exhaustive history of everything that has happened. Rather, we make what McAdams calls “narrative choices.” Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events, good and bad, because those are the experiences we need to make sense of and that shape us. But our interpretations may differ. For one person, for example, a childhood experience like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water by a parent might explain his sense of himself today as a hardy entrepreneur who learns by taking risks. For another, that experience might explain why he hates boats and does not trust authority figures. A third might leave the experience out of his story altogether, deeming it unimportant.

People who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion and agency.

McAdams has been studying narrative identity for over 30 years. In his interviews, he asks research subjects to divide their lives into chapters and to recount key scenes, such as a high point, a low point, a turning point or an early memory. He encourages participants to think about their personal beliefs and values. Finally, he asks them to reflect on their story’s central theme. He has discovered interesting patterns in how people living meaningful lives understand and interpret their experiences. People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. There was the man who grew up in dire poverty but told McAdams that his hard circumstances brought him and his family closer together. There was the woman who told him that caring for a close friend as the friend was dying was a harrowing experience, but one that ultimately renewed her commitment to being a nurse, a career she’d abandoned. These people rate their lives as more meaningful than those who tell stories that have either no or fewer redemptive sequences.

The opposite of a redemptive story is what McAdams calls a “contamination story,” in which people interpret their lives as going from good to bad. One woman told him the story of the birth of her child, a high point, but she ended the story with the death of the baby’s father, who was murdered three years later. The joy over the birth of her child was tainted by that tragedy. People who tell contamination stories, McAdams has found, are less “generative,” or less driven to contribute to society and younger generations. They also tend to be more anxious and depressed, and to feel that their lives are less coherent compared to those who tell redemptive stories.

Redemption and contamination stories are just two kinds of tales we spin. McAdams has found that beyond stories of redemption, people who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion and agency. These stories allow individuals to craft a positive identity: they are in control of their lives, they are loved, they are progressing through life and whatever obstacles they have encountered have been redeemed by good outcomes.

Even making smaller story edits to our personal narratives can have a big impact on our lives.

One of the great contributions of psychology and psychotherapy research is the idea that we can edit, revise and interpret the stories we tell about our lives even as we are constrained by the facts. A psychotherapist’s job is to work with patients to rewrite their stories in a more positive way. Through editing and reinterpreting his story with his therapist, the patient may come to realize that he is in control of his life and that some meaning can be gleaned from his hardships. A review of the scientific literature finds that this form of therapy is as effective as antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy.

Even making smaller story edits can have a big impact on our lives. So found Adam Grant and Jane Dutton in a study published in 2012. The researchers asked university call-center fundraisers to keep a journal for four consecutive days. In one condition, the beneficiary condition, the researchers asked the fundraisers to write about the last time a colleague did something for them that inspired gratitude. In the second condition, the benefactor condition, the participants wrote about a time they contributed to others at work.

The researchers wanted to know which type of story would lead the research subjects to be more generous. To find out, they monitored the fundraisers’ call records. Since the fundraisers were paid a fixed hourly rate to call alumni and solicit donations, the researchers reasoned, then the number of calls they made during their shift was a good indicator of prosocial, helping behavior.

After Grant and Dutton analyzed the stories, they found that fundraisers who told a story of themselves as benefactors ultimately made 30 percent more calls to alumni after the experiment than they had before. Those who told stories about being the beneficiary of generosity showed no changes in their behavior.

Grant and Dutton’s study suggests that the ability of a story to create meaning does not end with the crafting of the tale. The stories the benefactors told about themselves ultimately led to meaningful behaviors — giving their time in the service of a larger cause. Even though the fundraisers knew they were only telling their stories as part of a study, they ultimately “lived by” those stories, as McAdams would put it. By subtly reframing their narrative, they adopted a positive identity that led them to live more purposefully.

Excerpted from the new book The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters by Emily Esfahani Smith. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2017 By Emily Esfahani Smith. Reprinted with permission.

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Weekend workouts can benefit health as much as a week of exercise, say researchers | Ian Sample

Risk of early death is as low for those who meet recommended activity targets in one or two sessions a week as it is for daily exercisers, study shows.

People who cram all their exercise into one or two sessions at the weekend benefit nearly as much as those who work out more frequently, researchers say.

A study of more than 60,000 adults in England and Scotland found that “weekend warriors” lowered their risk of death by a similar margin to those who spread the same amount of exercise over the whole week.

The findings will reassure people who find it hard to make time for a daily exercise routine and opt instead to break a sweat once or twice a week in the hope of keeping fit.

“Millions of people enjoy doing sport once or twice a week, but they may be concerned that they are not doing enough,” said Gary O’Donovan, a physical activity researcher and author on the study at Loughborough University. “We find a clear benefit. It’s making them fit and healthy.”

The UK’s National Health Service recommends that to ward off an early death, people should spend 150 minutes a week performing moderate exercise, or 75 minutes a week doing vigorous exercise. As a rule of thumb, moderate exercise can be done while maintaining a conversation, whereas during vigorous exercise talking at the same time is too hard.

In the study, those who met the physical activity target by exercising through the week had a 35% lower risk of death than the inactive adults, with cardiovascular deaths down 41% and a 21% lower risk of cancer death.

But the weekend warriors also saw substantial health benefits if they met the physical activity target too. Their overall risk of death was 30% lower than the sedentary adults, with the risk of cardiovascular and cancer deaths lower by 40% and 18% respectively.

“Weekend warriors are people who meet the recommended volume of physical activity each week through only one or two sessions. There are doing a large proportion of vigorous exercise and that makes you fitter than moderate exercise,” said O’Donovan. Men and women benefited equally, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine.

The results are based on medical data gathered for 63,591 adults aged 40 and above between 1994 and 2012. Nearly 9,000 of the study participants died in the period.

For those who have resolved to get fit in the New Year, O’Donovan recommends to start with moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, and then to set realistic, incremental goals to boost confidence without running the risk of setbacks due to injury. “A middle aged or older person should do as much as 12 weeks of moderate exercise before introducing vigorous exercise,” he said.

Ulf Ekelund at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo said the study emphasised what researchers have found time and again: that even a small amount of regular exercise wards off death. In the study, those who exercised a little had a 29% lower risk of death than those who did no exercise at all. “The novel finding is that it appears the duration, and possibly the intensity, of leisure time physical activity is more important than the frequency,” Ekelund said.

“My take home message is that the greatest risk reduction and the greatest gain for the individual and for public health is if those who are physically inactive take up some activity,” he added.

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You Cannot Always Change Situations, but You Can Change Your Attitude | Remez Sasson

I am sure that there are certain situations and circumstances in your life that you would like to change. Often, it is quite simple to make changes, but we let laziness, procrastination or fear to stand in our way.

You might be surprised to hear that many of the changes you would like to make are within you reach, and often, within your immediate reach.

For example, you might always complain that you have no time to read. If reading is so important to you, what’s so difficult to arrange your day so that you can find the time? You can always get up half an hour earlier in the morning, or give up half an hour of watching TV in favor of reading a book.

Do you want to learn a foreign language, swim twice a week or arrange your wardrobe? These are simple to accomplish goals, but you might always seek excuses why you don’t have the time for them. You simply do not give them any priority, and prefer to stick to your comfort zone.

Sometimes, we might encounter situations and circumstances that we are unable change. What should we deal with such situations?

If you cannot change a situation, accept it, and learn to live with it. Sure, this requires a certain degree of self-discipline and inner strength.

You might complain, resent the situation and the people involved and be unhappy. This would not help change the situation, and you will be creating suffering and unhappiness for you.

You cannot always change a situation or circumstances, but you can change your attitude toward it.

Changing external situations and circumstances might not always be possible, but changing your attitude is possible.

Read this sentence several times and try to remember it. You cannot always change situations and circumstances, but you can certainly learn to change your attitude. Instead of feeling resentful, frustrated and unhappy, you can learn to be calm, accept the situation, and not fight with it. You can try to look at the situation dispassionately, and try to find out what you can learn from it.

• Are there people you cannot get along with at work?
• Do you have neighbors you do not like?
• Is your boss too demanding?

Will you leave your job or go live somewhere else because of that?

Often, by accepting the situation, it will stop bothering you, or a solution might come along.
Various situations and circumstances could be lessons you need to learn, and after learning and acknowledging the lessons, the situations and circumstances will start to change.

If you accept what you cannot change and learn to live with it, it will stop to be an issue and stop to bother it.

When you accept what you cannot change, you save yourself a lot of energy and time, and can devote your time to better things than thinking about the situation you cannot change.
When you accept what you cannot change, sometimes, even without any effort on your part, as if miraculously, things start to change and improve.

Some people might misinterpret what I said and think that accepting situations means giving up. Others might regard acceptance as an excuse for laziness and doing nothing. This is far from the truth. Acceptance of situations that you cannot change is wisdom and not passivity, and has nothing with giving up and should not be an excuse for passivity.

You cannot change the past, and regretting and feeling bad about it is not going to change it. However, you can learn to stop dwelling on the past and move on.

If you don’t like one of your colleagues at work and you do not get along with him, anger and resentment would not help. However, you can try to be friendly and stop being resentful.

Suppose it is raining outside, but you need to go to work, go the grocery or meet friends. You cannot stop the train and you cannot fight the rain. Would you give up and stay at home, or wear a raincoat and go outside despite rain?

If it is very hot outside and you need to go somewhere, will anger and unhappiness change the weather? You can let thoughts about the weather to cause you suffering and unhappiness, and you can accept it and live with it.

When you change your attitude toward people, situations or circumstances they stop bothering you and they stop causing you suffering.

When you change your attitude, you start to feel better, you become happier, recognize opportunities to make changes, and on many occasions, the situations or circumstances you could not change, begin to change. By changing your attitude, situations and circumstances would start to change, as if by magic.

Are there any tools that can help you change your attitude? Yes, there are a few, such as repeating affirmations, practicing visualization and developing inner peace.

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Mark Twain’s Top 9 Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life | Henrik Edberg

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.”

You may know Mark Twain for some of his very popular books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He was a writer and also a humorist, satirist and lecturer.

Twain is known for his many – and often funny – quotes. Here are a few of my favourite tips from him.

1. Approve of yourself.

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

If you don’t approve of yourself, of your behaviour and actions then you’ll probably walk around most of the day with a sort of uncomfortable feeling. If you, on the other hand, approve of yourself then you tend to become relaxed and gain inner freedom to do more of what you really want.

This can, in a related way, be a big obstacle in personal growth. You may have all the right tools to grow in some way but you feel an inner resistance. You can’t get there.

What you may be bumping into there are success barriers. You are putting up barriers in your own mind of what you may or may not deserve. Or barriers that tell you what you are capable of. They might tell you that you aren’t really that kind of person that could this thing that you’re attempting.

Or if you make some headway in the direction you want to go you may start to sabotage for yourself. To keep yourself in a place that is familiar for you.

So you need give yourself approval and allow yourself to be who you want to be. Not look for the approval from others. But from yourself. To dissolve that inner barrier or let go of that self-sabotaging tendency. This is no easy task and it can take time.

2. Your limitations may just be in your mind.

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

So many limitations are mostly in our minds. We may for instance think that people will disapprove because we are too tall, too old or balding. But these things mostly matter when you think they matter. Because you become self-conscious and worried about what people may think.

And people pick up on that and may react in negative ways. Or you may interpret anything they do as a negative reaction because you are so fearful of a bad reaction and so focused inward on yourself.

If you, on the other hand, don’t mind then people tend to not mind that much either. And if you don’t mind then you won’t let that part of yourself become a self-imposed roadblock in your life.

It is, for instance, seldom too late to do what you want to do.

3. Lighten up and have some fun.

“Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”

“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

Humor and laughter are amazing tools. They can turn any serious situation into something to laugh about. They can lighten the mood just about anywhere.

And a lighter mood is often a better space to work in because now your body and mind isn’t filled to the brim with negative emotions. When you are more light-hearted and relaxed then the solution to a situation is often easier to both come up with and implement. Have a look at Lighten Up! for more on this topic.

4. Let go of anger.

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

Anger is most of the time pretty pointless. It can cause situations to get out of hand. And from a selfish perspective it often more hurtful for the one being angry then the person s/he’s angry at.

So even if you feel angry at someone for days recognize that you are mostly just hurting yourself. The other person may not even be aware that you are angry at him or her. So either talking to the person and resolving the conflict or letting go of anger as quickly as possible are pretty good tips to make your life more pleasurable.

5. Release yourself from entitlement.

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

When you are young your mom and dad may give a lot of things. As you grow older you may have a sort of entitlement. You may feel like the world should just give you what you want or that it owes you something.

This belief can cause a lot of anger and frustration in your life. Because the world may not give you what expect it to. On the other hand, this can be liberating too. You realize that it is up to you to shape your own life and for you to work towards what you want. You are not a kid anymore, waiting for your parents or the world to give you something.

You are in the driver’s seat now. And you can go pretty much wherever you want.

6. If you’re taking a different path, prepare for reactions.

“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

I think this has quite a bit of relevance to self-improvement.

If you start to change or do something different than you usually do then people may react in different ways. Some may be happy for you. Some may be indifferent. Some may be puzzled or react in negative and discouraging ways.

Much of these reactions are probably not so much about you but about the person who said it and his/her life. How they feel about themselves is coming through in the words they use and judgements they make.

And that’s OK. I think it’s pretty likely that they won’t react as negatively as you may imagine. Or they will probably at least go back to focusing on their own challenges pretty soon.

So what other people may say and think and letting that hold you back is probably just fantasy and barrier you build in your mind.

You may find that when you finally cross that inner threshold you created then people around you may not shun you or go chasing after you with pitchforks. They might just go: “OK”.

7. Keep your focus steadily on what you want.

“Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.”

What you focus your mind on greatly determines how things play out. You can focus on your problems and dwell in suffering and a victim mentality. Or you can focus on the positive in situation, what you can learn from that situation or just focus your mind on something entirely else.

It may be “normal” to dwell on problems and swim around in a sea of negativity. But that is a choice. And a thought habit. You may reflexively start to dwell on problems instead of refocusing your mind on something more useful. But you can also start to build a habit of learning to gain more and more control of where you put your focus.

8. Don’t focus so much on making yourself feel good.

“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”

This may be a bit of a counter-intuitive tip. But as I wrote yesterday, one of the best ways to feel good about yourself is to make someone else feel good or to help them in some way.

This is a great way to look at things to create an upward spiral of positivity and exchange of value between people. You help someone and both of you feel good. The person you helped feels inclined to give you a hand later on since people tend to want to reciprocate. And so the both of you are feeling good and helping each other.

Those positive feelings are contagious to other people and so you may end up making them feel good too. And the help you received from your friend may inspire you to go and help another friend. And so the upward spiral grows and continues.

9. Do what you want to do.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Awesome quote. And I really don’t have much to add to that one. Well, maybe to write it down and keep it as a daily reminder – on your fridge or bathroom door – of what you can actually do with your life.

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