Silicon Valley mantra: Fail fast and fail cheap. - Eric Barker

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down.

Ironically, even the most noted researcher in the field of grit, Angela Duckworth, agrees with this. In her paper “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” she says, “A strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths.

Like Churchill’s paranoid defense of the British state, these qualities were a poison that under just the right circumstances could be a performance-enhancing drug. Mukunda calls these “intensifiers.” And they hold the secret to how your biggest weakness might just be your greatest strength.