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Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk: Grit, Passion Or Failure?

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Success, in the words of the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is: The correct or desired result of an attempt. Granted, there is a vast collection of definitions for the word success. You would think that Merriam-Webster would know the true definition of success, but what exactly defines true success? In fact, how does one embody success? Using examples from TED talks, a true definition of what the characteristics of a successful person are will be revealed. I believe a successful person demonstrates the qualities of grit, passion and failure. In the TED talk of Angela Lee Duckworth- “The key to success? Grit.” she talks about her 7th grade math students. When grading papers she discovered a staggering difference between her best and worst students. She noticed her stronger kids didn’t have amazing IQ scores and that many of them weren’t doing so well in her …show more content…

It’s what makes us that way. There is no way to avoid it so, what happens during a time of failure? Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk- “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating.” creates a well brought statement on the term “failure”. Many people would consider failure as bad, that it ruins us both mentally and physically.However, these statements are baseless. Gilbert begins by expressing her feelings on being known as the girl who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. She says that the fans who loved her book would be disappointed because her next book would not be Eat, Pray, Love and her haters would be disappointed as well. She had no way out, she was trapped in a whirlwind of failure. Regardless, she used grit and reminded herself of her passion and continued on. She states, “I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own

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