Peroikos

“I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In a fascinating treatise on teenage behavior in Brandeis magazine, former Psychology Today editor in chief Robert Epstein, PhD, wrote that “there is overwhelming evidence from multiple fields that adolescence is caused by cultural practices, not the brain. These practices do two things to young people well past puberty: infantilize them—that is, control and restrict them as if they were still children—and isolate them from responsible adults, trapping them in the inane world of teen culture.”
― Marc Bloom, Amazing Racers: The Story of America's Greatest Running Team and its Revolutionary Coach

“Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends’ compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.”
― Anders Ericsson;Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in,”
― K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: How to Master Almost Anything