Quotes About Determination

In his wolf-skin he was as strong as any of them, but he was a gentle person in many ways. He'd feel so bad about failing he'd probably step aside for someone else without a fight.

out and skinny

good—forever," said Ivy. She had come up behind Crummy Matt, and now she stood next to Bean. "She'll never do

Sammy La Barba

There has to be a way," she said, determinedly. "Nothing is impossible." Bean stared at her. "It's impossible for us to be good at ballet." "Well, that, sure," said Ivy. "But it's not impossible for us to break our arms.

When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

If you feel like you've got a close call between quitting and persevering, it's likely that quitting is the better choice.

Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That's how they win.

When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can't know for sure whether you can succeed at what you're doing because that's probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer.

What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life's too short to do that.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.

One of the steps to becoming a better quitter is to not accept "I'm not ready to make a decision right now" as a sentence that makes sense. At every moment of your life, you have a choice about whether to stay or whether to go. When you choose to stay, you are also choosing to not go. When you choose to quit, you are also choosing to not continue.

The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it's not even in the vicinity.

When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don't know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn't determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

Quitting means failing, capitulating, losing. Quitting shows a lack of character. Quitters are losers (except, of course, when it involves giving up something obviously bad like smoking, alcohol, drugs, or an abusive relationship).

The English language itself favors grit, describing those who persevere with positive terms like can-do, unwavering, steadfast, resolute, daring, audacious, undaunting, gutsy, and hardy. Or as having backbone, pluck, mettle, tenacity, or stick-to-itiveness.

Our track to nowhere could be refusing to quit our college major even though it's making us unhappy, because we already took so many classes and put so much time into it.

I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don't try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place.

I'm certainly not knocking these books. But whether you say "pivot" or "moving on to the next chapter" or "strategic redeployment," all of these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

Or we don't leave a career we spent years training for, because that would mean our training was for nothing. Or we keep watching a bad movie because of the time we've already spent watching it.

There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long, particularly in the face of bad news.