Videos

Eduardo Briceño - TEDxManhattanBeach

Our performance can plateau if we spend less time than we should learning how to get better, and too much time delivering on the task immediately ahead.
Example: To become great, Demosthenes didn't just spend all his time just being an orator or a lawyer. Instead, he studied acting and the great speeches of others, practiced his own speeches underneath a sword suspended from the ceiling to eliminate an involuntary tendency to lift his shoulder, and practised talking with stones in his mouth to help with a lisp.
The best approach for continuous improvement is to alternate between the performance zone and the learning zone.

University of Bristol biologists, climate scientists, physicists, psychologists, geologists, and others

Science is an exciting field to work in, but it is also full of all sorts of setbacks, frustrations and difficulties.
To push beyond these challenges can require perseverance, collaboration, an open mind and creativity.
For all of its difficulties, the thrill of a new insight or discovering something that nobody has ever thought of before is immensely rewarding and makes it worthwhile.

J. K. Rowling - Harvard Commencement 2008 - Harvard Magazine

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously you might as well not have lived at all.
Failing can be enormously beneficial, teaching us things about ourselves that can be learned in no other way.
We can never truly know ourselves until tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won.