A recently post TED talk by author/journalist Andrew Solomon.
Wow.
“…many people were astonished and said, ‘but how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?’ and I said, ‘I’m not studying everything that can go wrong, what I’m studying is how much love there can be even when everything appears to be going wrong.'”
So what is grit? Well she answers with a few descriptions….
Grit is….
– passion and perserverance for very long-term goals
– having stamina
– sticking with your future day in and day out
– living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint
One of the best learning experiences I’ve had in 7.5 minutes — both for its rundown of history and in the idea that we can frame difficult scientific quandaries in basic ways and still come to some understanding. These men just happened to come to magnificent understandings.
Mythbuster’s Adam Savage leads this wonderful Ted-Ed talk….
It reminds me of what Elon Musk answered in his most recent TED talk. When asked how he keeps coming up with these innovative ideas (Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Solar City) he says that he thinks back to the basic laws and assumptions of things (he uses Phyiscs as an example) and just begins to rethink them from the ground up.
The instruments and things of modernity are wonderful, but some great discoveries come just from breaking out of the logic we’re told to use constantly.