Video resources

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.