I agreed with many of the concepts that Angela Lee Duckworth presented in her TED talk, “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance”. In summary, in her teaching job, she observed that the most intelligent students didn’t necessarily achieve the highest grades. This encouraged her to pursue psychology, where she found in her research that across most career fields, the individuals that lasted the longest were the ones that displayed “grit”, otherwise defined as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” Additionally, she found that talent and grit were most likely unrelated to each other, or even inversely related. I wasn’t surprised to hear about “grit” being an underlying quality for high-achieving individuals. However, I thought that it was interesting how much more of a powerful role grit has on the success of individuals over talent, as Duckworth described it.
The concept of grit being a monumental factor in the success that an individual can achieve was additionally displayed in the stories presented by Steve Jobs. Jobs’ story about the period of his life where he dropped out of college to save money while also only learning about the courses that he enjoyed seemed to epitomize the “grit” factor that Duckworth explained. Although Jobs’ struggled during this period by
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Additionally, I think that Jobs’ needed to have certain values in order to be successful, as described by the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. For example, it appears that Jobs’ had valued stimulation and self-direction, which are two values that complement each other. Schwartz described these values as resulting in an intrinsic interest in novelty and mastery, which I believe characterizes Jobs’ interests in