Book Review: “Grit” by Angela Duckworth
Great insight but lost in an ocean of words
In a nutshell, the book contains profound advice, insight and tools for developing grit — a.k.a. sticking with something and becoming exceptional at it. Although, this gem is wrapped in a slow-moving text.
What do I mean?
It almost seems like the editor forced Angela to flesh out the manuscript purely for the purpose of producing a thicker book spine. The word count feels forced. And the (truly great) advice is like treasure that you have to dig up from amongst buckets of words. I would have enjoyed it much more if it were more concise and had better flow.
Why do I think this?
Firstly, I like reading books and usually go through them pretty quickly –anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. Grit took me almost a year to read. Secondly, I always underline great hints and make a lot of notes when reading nonfiction. In this case, I have pages filled with notes and lines, followed by many clean pages, and so on and so forth. This means that each chapter has chunks of useful info, followed by text that doesn’t add any further value to what was already said, and feels like it was repeating itself, only using different words.
