I never enjoyed cooking very much because I always had the vague sense that I didn’t know what I was doing.

Even though I spent years working in commercial kitchens, I didn’t have much of an awareness of knife technique or other aspects of food preparation. Therefore, I was intimidated by recipes. I stuck to routine meals that I could figure out through trial and error.

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I am participating in a longitudinal study: What happens if a person doesn’t worry about whether they’re smart or not?

Granted, I'm the only one participating in this study. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something from the results.

I'm not saying that I don't care if I'm smart. It's just that, at a very early age, I developed enough confidence in my intelligence and capability to carry me through pretty much the rest of my life.

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I’m building a new business, and I’m finding it hard to shake the feeling that I need to be moving faster.

In the past, when I’ve created a new offering, it was often accompanied by the desire for a quick return on investment. I wanted to launch a thing because I needed some money coming in.

But now, despite COVID, things are more stable. I’m creating something new because I want to, not because I’m desperate and digging myself out of a hole. And that means I can take my time. However, I still feel that underlying sense of urgency. And this urgency carries a cost.

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As part of our program for The Little Middle School and The Rulerless School, we’re making use of an online learning platform for certain topics.

For each lesson of this program, there is an explanation, written in the format of a graphic novel. There is also a short video.

Some students read the explanation and watch the video, and then they are able to successfully complete the lesson. Others go directly to the lesson. Unsurprisingly, they get stuck.

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I don’t know where they learn it, but even lots of little kids are totally fixated on “easy” and “hard.”

They divide the world neatly into this organizational scheme, defined as follows: If can do it easily, it’s easy; if I can’t do it easily, it’s hard.

These kids are missing a lot of context, to say the least. They tend to relish what is easy, even as they treat it with a bit of scorn. Meanwhile, they resist what is hard, assuming that it will be out of reach.

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