Believing you’re gifted can make you lazy. Believing you’re trainable makes you dangerous.

Being told early that you are naturally good builds something fragile, because if it is supposed to come easily then struggling means the label was wrong. So you start steering around whatever is hard, which is precisely where the growth was kept. Thinking of yourself as trainable takes the threat out of it, since difficulty just means you have reached the edge of what you can currently do.

When something gets hard this week, say it is hard and keep going instead of deciding what it proves. Count the reps, not the talent.