On Stupidity & Trying

When learning something new, many students will think, ‘Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid.’ Because stupidity is such an unthinkably terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus.

We’ve set the bar so low for learning in Western culture, it’s no wonder so few of us (myself included) ever do anything extraordinary. So go do something you don’t know how to do. And when you hit that wall of “this is hard for me” don’t cave, keep pounding and break through it.