welikesnow

“ When it all really boils down, learning something - being good at something - takes effort and the better you are with a skill, the more effort it takes to improve on all the little subtle pieces that you hardly even noticed before. If there’s a single piece of information I wish I understood growing up, it would probably be this: zero effort is a myth, effort yields results, innate skills are limited to passing gas. ”

“ Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia. ”