all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - Malcolm Gladwell

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called — appropriately enough — the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.