People assume you have to have some special talent to do mathematics," Sylvia has said. "They think you're either born with it, or you're not. But Rh… - Angela Duckworth

the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.

Follow your passion was not the message I heard growing up. Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving "in the real world" were far more important than any person living a "sheltered life" such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of "finding something I loved" could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment.

As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong — so they can fix it — than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.