Just finished Grit by Angela Duckworth. Great insights for entrepreneurs/start-upers

The popular book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance", explores this topic in more details, for those interested in the topic.

I read the Grit book and it talked about having high expectations. I had never heard of this Pygmalion effect before. Thank you for sharing. Here is the article I just found on it

https://www.wisdomtimes.com/blog/the-pygmalion-effect-at-hom...

If you can suggest a better one, I would be grateful.

I actually pre-ordered Grit based on the excerpt I had read with Pete Carroll. It sounds fascinating but I have yet to read it.

Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott

Grit, Angela Duckworth

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

Deep Work, Cal Newport

Also the work from Angela Lee Duckworth are on this subject.

https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_powe...

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance https://g.co/kgs/tprZP4

Wanna change your mindset? Ill keep it simple to save us all time to START reading.

Read these 3 books, even if its just one chapter of each book in any order, but READ them!

They will change your mind more than any money ever can.

·THINK AND GROW RICH - Napoleon Hill
· GRIT - Angela Duckworth
· THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE - Rick Warren

She can learn just about anything nowadays from sites like Coursera, edx, and Udacity.

Books like Realm of Racket can be fun introductions to programming that happen to teach some advanced stuff.

Books that the parent's might like are Carol Dweck's Mindset, Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers, and Angela Duckworth's Grit. If she shows an interest in mathematics, the Art of Problem Solving books and forums are great.

I am really glad to see Mans Search for Meaning on here for another year in a row. It is a short read with a very powerful message.

A few others I would really like to see on this list would be:

- Principles by Ray Dalio

- Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

- Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

Adora, applaude YC's efforts to do the right thing! Admitted applicants, however, are getting a diluted experience; thus the solution takes away fairness from the admitted applicants. It's an impossible situation and all the time/energy YC is spending to fix it is incredible!
Some suggestions:

1. Give the originally accepted applicants access to a separate pool of 100 $10k grants - so they have the same odds of accessing the grants.
2. If 1 isn't possible, try to think of other perks that the accepted pool gets access to (in addition to what was already offered to make up for the larger pool of people with access to the grants)
3. In tandem with 1 or 2, put some meritocratic constraints around all participants. In order to stay in start-up school, partcipants must read x book, conduct x experiments, etc. This way those who will really put effort into the program and be a part of the community will get to participate. After all, as Duckworth's book Grit outlines,and some research at Google, effort coupled with curiosity is an important predictor of success.

Few suggestions that didn't make that list:
The Innovator's Dilemma (and everything by) - Clayton M. Christensen
Measure What Matters - John Doerr
Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday
Factfulness - Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling
Grit - Angela Duckworth

The books which I have read which have had a profound impact on how I think and improve what I do are:

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us - Daniel H. Pink

2. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance - Angela Duckworth

3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck - Mark Manson

4. Be Obsessed or Be Average - Grant Cardone

5. High Performance Habits - Brendon Burchard

6. The Obesity Code - Jason Fung

The summary of what I've taken out of this is really fall in love with the intrinsic reward of doing things, take on the challenge but work at it pragmatically and patiently. It's okay to be a little crazed at what you want, do it for you, and always reflect, learn, adapt and try again.

Here's my whole list for the year in reverse chronological:

- Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

- Tools of Titan by Tim Ferriss

- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

- Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims

- Build Better Products by Laura Klein

- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Picketty

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

- Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin

- Grit by Angela Duckworth

- Love Sense by Sue Johnson

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

- Sprint by Jake Knapp

- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock

- The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

- Design Sprint by Richard Banfield

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

- Advanced Swift by Chris Eidoff

- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Some of these books are older and had been on my list for awhile. Some were released this year. Most of these books are very good. I usually stop reading bad books by the end of the first chapter.

1. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth - http://amzn.to/2mLuQyU

2. The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman - http://amzn.to/2mXSlFB

3. Strengths Finder by Gallup Press - http://amzn.to/2mqDNuY

Reminds me of this TED talk about 'Grit' by Angela Lee [1]

  [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=en

Influence by Robert Cialdini
Grit by Angela Duckworth

Syntopic reading can be really rewarding. For example, once you read Thinking Fast and Slow, and a few of Taleb’s books, suddenly you notice implicit and explicit references in virtually every business book published later than those.

A similar effect can be found with Grit, Fogg’s Behavior Model, Superforecasting, and most Gladwel books.

On the coding side, I’ve only noticed this with Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, and maybe Phoenix/Unicorn project. Could I don’t read enough of those or they’re too focused on specific technologies instead of broad ideas … or I get too much of my technical reading from blogs and twitter. Those do get repetitive and you quickly find common patterns, but no titles to refer to.

I you watch the TED talk by Angela Duckworth, author of Grit book, she says one thing where they still really have not figured out how to teach resilience to kids.

I was speaking to a high school teacher last week, and they use these grit scores and all the tips mentioned in the grit book. But at the end of the day, they still do not have a sure fire method to teach it or the growth mindset.

Years ago I spoke to a retired mathematics professor on this subject. I remember he pointed out that Évariste_Galois was an interesting case in home education. There was not too much written on this, but he was taught by his mother the classics. What he accomplished at such a young age is still be used today in all sorts of fields.

Here are some books I listened to on Audible in the last year and a half, listing those that I enjoyed the most. Each of these books changed me in some ways, I never thought how much fun it is to listen to biographies and how many lessons there are.

0. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition

1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

2. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

3. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

4. Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

5. What Got You Here Won't Get You There

6. The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage

7. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

8. The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over

9. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

10. Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

11. Thinking, Fast and Slow

12. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

13. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

14. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

15. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

16. Sapiens

17. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

18. If you like space: Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery

19. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

20. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

21. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

22. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

When I worked for a pensions company they sat me next to the CEO. He was a pleasant man most of the time, who could sometimes show a touch of arrogance towards his PA. I saw him mostly work at a slide deck all week and reading a book called Grit. Later I noticed he put a few sentences from the book into his deck. "We don't go home when we are tired, we go home when we are done" stuck in my head.

After a few years of my own struggles at being consistently productive my conclusion is grit is an emergent behaviour you cannot optimise for. You most probably want to use different words such as 'consistency' (this one works for me). I see grit as something opposite of health and balance. A short-term display of stamina that might trigger unwanted consequences in other areas of life.

"Company" is a broad word, and can include a wide variety of different types of organizations - but if you're talking specifically about startups, look at the following:

Cash in the Bank / Burn Rate - How much cash does the company have? How much of that cash is it spending each month? How long until the company reaches profitability? Could the company be profitable now if it wanted to be?

Headcount - LinkedIn actually tracks this now. How has the total headcount of the company changed over time, particularly recently? Headcount is certainly not a measure of success, but a significant decrease in headcount may be a red flag.

Growth Rate - How fast is the company growing? Ideally you're looking at this in terms of revenue.

Unit Economics - Even if the company is growing, is it making money from every sale? Or is it "spending $1 to earn $0.95" ? Getting a handle on the bottoms-up unit economics of whatever the company is selling is important to really getting a picture of its overall health.

Grit of the Founders - This may be more important than everything else on the list! Every startup is going to feel - frequently - like it's in "bad health." Founders with determination, grit, and the ability to fight through the tough times will overcome a lot of the problems presented by other items on this list.

Grit by Angela Duckworth (https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duck...) goes into deliberate practice quite a bit.

She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery. The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's almost definitely the result of hours and hours of deliberate practice.

Grit by Angela Duckworth [1].

I wish I read this back in my high school days. It's a different thing learning hard work and grit from a book than the constant "nagging" I get from my parents. The latter came in on my left ear and went out the right ear almost instantly. I was a lazy kid back then despite getting relatively good grades in school. I've learned to become grittier on my current day job (there's always something to fight for, especially as part of a startup riddled with uncertainties), but I kinda wish I could go back and pick this book up if it was available/released back then. Would have helped me better understand college applications too.

[1] - http://a.co/gJnmxfR