Dr. Angela Duckworth

Those two psychologists are two wonderful women, Elena and Deborah, and they were disciples of a psychologist that I don't think a lot of people have heard of, but it's a real shame, Lev Vygotsky.

He was a Russian psychologist and one of the great developmental psychologists in history.

And Lev spent a lot of time observing young children

And he found that, for example, young children learn in play, right?

They try things that they can't do.

They pretend to do things like be a doctor or, you know, to be a mom or to, you know, do things that they are not.

And then they, of course, can't do them and they do them very awkwardly and clumsily and they fall down and they spill things and they break things.

And I think this insight that this native desire to learn, this native desire to experiment, this complete, you know, lack of self-consciousness when it comes to screwing up, missing the mark, is it is in all of us because we were all babies.

I mean, you were that young, innocent, hopeful child.

And, you know, when you ask Elena and Deborah about this

hypothesis that maybe when you're five and you start to go to school and you see the facial expressions of your teachers and the disappointment and, of course, your classmates and so forth, they will tell you that this is a little bit more of their speculation than mountains of hard data.

But clearly, self-consciousness is something that you are not born with, but you acquire.

So is it kindergarten?

Is it

you know, something else that's happening around the same time.

Whatever it is, I think the lesson for us is to try to recover something of that, you know, the beginner's mind, it's sometimes called, right?

It's like the gift of just being a complete rookie and to be unselfconscious.

And I speak as somebody who like wishes she had that all the time.

I think I've gotten better at it, but I remember going to a hip hop class and

I was in my 20s.