Shadowing Angela Lee Duckworth

Summary

Angela Lee Duckworth describes how teaching mathematics led her to investigate success beyond intelligence. Some students learned quickly without performing well, while others succeeded through sustained effort. Her later research across demanding settings focused on grit, which she defines as passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. She presents grit as a significant predictor in those studies while acknowledging that researchers still have much to learn about how to cultivate it.

Key points, in order

1. Her research examples include military cadets, spelling competitors, new teachers and salespeople. Across these different challenges, she reports that sustained commitment helped distinguish those who persisted or performed successfully.
2. In Chicago public schools, she followed students after administering grit questionnaires. She says the grittier students were more likely to graduate even after accounting for several measured differences in background and achievement.
3. Grit concerns effort maintained over years, rather than a brief burst of enthusiasm. Duckworth cautions that talent alone does not ensure people will follow through on their commitments.
4. She identifies Carol Dweck's growth mindset as a promising idea because it frames learning ability as changeable and failure as temporary. Her conclusion calls for testing interventions, measuring results and revising unsuccessful approaches rather than claiming the problem is solved.

Five useful phrases to practise

Choose a caption line to open Repeat mode. Listen, then say it after the speaker.

1. 0:36 What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students.
2. 1:42 depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
3. 3:01 Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
4. 4:32 What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.
5. 5:40 We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them.

Based on the video’s captions. Original video: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED · TED.

Everyday phrases from this video

• in other words

• Level: B1
• Accent: American
• Length: 6 min · 72 lines to practise
• Speed: about 148 words a minute (an average pace)
• Words: about 860; the talk asks 8 questions
• Timing: Sada measures how far behind the speaker you are on every line

What to focus on in this talk

Clear, steady and only six minutes — a good first full talk. Watch the past-tense endings: “calculated” ends in an extra syllable (-id), “struck” doesn’t. “Stratospheric” (strat-uh-SFEER-ik) is the one long word to practise on its own.

What this talk trains

Angela Lee Duckworth speaks for about 6 minutes: roughly 860 words in 72 caption lines. The pace stays fairly even, about 144 words a minute in the first quarter and 136 in the last. Overall it is faster than 20 of the other 66 talks on Sada. Its sentences average 15.7 words, longer than the middle of the library (14.3), and 15.0% of its words fall outside the 3,000 most common English words (library middle: 12.9%). It asks 8 questions, so there is plenty of question intonation to copy. Phrases that fast speech often shortens come up again and again: “going to” (4 times).

Lines from across the talk, and what each one trains

One line from each quarter of the talk. Press a line to open it in Sada, ready to record. “Linking” marks words that run together: a word ending in a consonant sound joins the vowel that starts the next one.

1. 1:19 I came to the conclusion that what we need in education

   Linking: say “need in”, “in education” without a break between the words. One of the quicker lines: about 177 words a minute by the caption timing, against 148 for the whole talk.

2. 2:37 We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?

   “going to”: fast speech often shortens it to “gonna” when a verb follows. Listen for whether the speaker does here. A question: listen to where the voice rises or falls at the end, and copy it.

3. 4:16 Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids?

   A question: listen to where the voice rises or falls at the end, and copy it. Linking: say “parents and”, “teachers ask”, “grit in” without a break between the words.

4. 5:40 We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them.

   Linking: say “best ideas”, “strongest intuitions” without a break between the words. Several commas: say it in short chunks first, then as one line.

Words that keep coming up

Words outside the 3,000 most common English words that Angela Lee Duckworth uses more than once. The number is how often each is said. Look up any you don’t know, then press it to practise the line where it first comes up.

• grit ×13
• teach ×2
• seventh ×2
• strongest ×2
• perspective ×2
• predict ×2
• characteristic ×2
• grittier ×2

How the pace changes through the talk

The fastest minute starts at 1:48 (about 164 words a minute): practise that minute once the rest feels easy. The slowest starts at 2:44 (about 138): a good minute to warm up with.

Measured from the caption timing, so the numbers are close, not exact.

How the talk opens: press any line to practise it

1. 0:12 When I was 27 years old,
2. 0:14 I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.
3. 0:23 I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
4. 0:28 And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.
5. 0:31 I gave out homework assignments.
6. 0:33 When the work came back, I calculated grades.

How to practise this talk

1. Warm up on the slowest minute (from 2:44) or on the opening lines above.
2. Then take the chosen lines above one at a time: linked words, a quick line, a shortened phrase, a question, a line said in chunks.
3. On each line, press Record and say it after Angela Lee Duckworth (Repeat) or along with them (Shadow), then open Compare and go again until every word is green.
4. Save the fastest minute (from 1:48, about 164 words a minute) for last.
5. At one minute a day you finish the whole talk in about 6 days, and Sada shows your first try against your latest.

More talks to practise

• Rita Pierson — Every Kid Needs a Champion (B1 · 147 words a minute · same level)
• Sir Ken Robinson — Bring on the Learning Revolution! (B1 · 149 words a minute · same level)
• Robert Waldinger — The Secret to a Happy Life — Lessons from 8 Decades of Research (B1–B2 · 148 words a minute · same accent)
• Denzel Washington — Penn Commencement Address (2011) (B1 · 147 words a minute · same accent)

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