The first and last thing which is required of genius is the love of truth.

Talent without a taste for what is actually the case produces impressive work that goes nowhere. Real ability starts from wanting to know how things really stand, and ends by submitting to that even when it spoils a beautiful idea. Everything else, the fluency and the speed, is decoration on top of that willingness. Without it, cleverness only builds more elaborate versions of what you already believed.

Take a belief that matters to your work and go looking for the evidence against it. If you find yourself avoiding a number or a conversation, that avoidance is the thing to walk toward.