Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

doing deliberate practice”:
K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, in conversation with the
author, December 2005.
intentionally seek out challenges
:
Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”
“I’d try to hold 1: 14”:
 Gaines, interview.
“that needs problem solving”
:
Roberto Díaz, president and CEO of the Curtis Institute of Music, in an interview with the author,
October 7, 2015.
“every single piece of my game”
:
An additional 15 percent of his time, he says, is for playing pick-up, either one-on-one or three-on-
three, so that the microrefinements he has worked on can be integrated into team play. And, finally, the last 15 percent is for organized
games. “Kevin Durant,” 
The Film Room Project
.
“there we were, stuck”
:
Ulrik Juul Christensen, executive chairman of Area9 and senior fellow at McGraw-Hill Education, in an
interview with the author, July 15, 2015.
first studied in chess players
:
Herbert A. Simon and William G. Chase, “Skill in Chess: Experiments with Chess-Playing Tasks and
Computer Simulation of Skilled Performance Throw Light on Some Human Perceptual and Memory Processes,” 
American Scientist
61 (1973): 394–403. See also: Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”
“and corrected them”
:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: With an Introduction and Notes
(New York: MacMillan
Company, 1921), 14.
“no gains without pains”
:
Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth,” in 
Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1839), 7.
“a small number of practices”
:
Peter F. Drucker, 
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things
Done
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), ix.
“for years on end”
:
Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve: Like Everyone Else, Surgeons Need Practice. That’s Where You Come In,”
New Yorker
, January 28, 2002.
“that’s what magic is to me”
:
David Blaine, “How I Held My Breath for 17 Minutes,” TED video, filmed October 2009,
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min
. See also Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strenth
(New York: Penguin, 2011).

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Barrie Trinkle, Carolyn Andrews, and Paige Kimble, 
How to Spell Like a Champ: Roots, Lists,
Rules, Games, Tricks, and Bee-Winning Tips from the Pros
(New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2006)
James Maguire, 
American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds
(Emmaus,
PA: Rodale, 2006), 360.
Angela Duckworth et al., “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at
the National Spelling Bee,” 
Social Psychological and Personality Science
2 (2011): 174–81. Getting quizzed also predicted doing
well in competition, but when comparing kids who got quizzed the same amount of time to each other, I found that those who did more
deliberate practice did better. In contrast, when comparing kids who did the same amount of deliberate practice to each other, I found
that more quizzing produced no advantage.
Henry L. Roediger and Jeffrey D. Karpicke, “The Power of Testing Memory: Basic Research and
Implications for Educational Practice,” 
Perspectives on Psychological Science
1 (2006): 181–210.
:
Duckworth et al., “Spells Success,” 177.
:
On the effortfulness of learning, see also Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert Bjork, “Making Things
Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning,” in