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Started reading
March 21, 2025
But you don’t have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things.
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
ambition is the outcome you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become.
Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.
And when the Raging Rooks fell behind in the penultimate round of nationals, Maurice Ashley didn’t pull out a book of secret plays. He didn’t talk to them about strategy at all. “I reminded them about discipline,” he notes—a skill they’d been practicing together for two years.
But he believes character matters more than talent.
They weren’t worried about being the smartest player in the room—they were aiming to make the room smarter.
If I had judged my potential by my early failures, I would have given up.
What makes a difference is not the activity but the lessons you learn. As Maurice says, “The achievement is in the growing.”
When we admire great thinkers, doers, and leaders, we often focus narrowly on their performance. That leads us to elevate the people who have accomplished the most and overlook the ones who have achieved the most with the least. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
What if we all invested as much time in our character skills as we do in our career skills?
Others, like Sara Maria, believe they missed the opportunity—if only they had started learning as toddlers, they might have picked it up.
I was surprised to discover that when they finally picked up their first foreign tongue, it wasn’t due to overcoming a cognitive block. It was because they cleared a motivational hurdle: they got comfortable being uncomfortable.
Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.
What we now know is that your preference isn’t fixed, and playing only to your strengths deprives you of the opportunity to improve on your weaknesses.
Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments.
But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.
Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing.
if you want to become proficient in a language, rather than aiming to reduce your mistakes, you should strive to increase them. It turns out that he’s right.
“The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest… the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt. —Leon C. Megginson
Determination and discipline became virtues; idleness and wastefulness became vices. That might be why many people today worship at the altar of hustle and pray to the high priest of persistence. But the distance we travel is due less to how much labor we do than the fruit it bears.
They’re not worried about whether criticism will hurt their egos; they embrace the discomfort and internalize whatever input might help their development.
The sweet spot is when people are proactive and growth oriented. That’s when they become sponges. They consistently take the initiative to expand themselves and adapt.
Warning: may cause stunted growth.
