After five years as an education entrepreneur I've learned, perhaps to the chagrin of my gold-seeking peers, that success will come only from those who remain harder working than the competition, more optimistic than the critics, and more dedicated than those who thought it'd be easy.
After reading your essay, I learned that perhaps I was delusional, a bigot and suffering from a psychiatric disorder.
But while I intend to be clear and honest about the difficulties involved over the coming months, especially in the digital age, I'm just as fascinated in exploring what lessons about life – myself, society, the natural world – I might learn; perhaps things my cyborg-mind cannot yet imagine.
And Democrats learned, perhaps, to be bold.
How to enumerate what I learned from her? Perhaps her greatest lesson was to never take "No" for an answer.
"The last few years have been frustrating but in a way I learned a lot, perhaps more than if I had played the whole time.
It was like living with a protocol officer, and I learned my lessons, perhaps too well, delivering on these occasions an imitation of a boy, a twelve-year-old martinet.
Though I never managed to beat my linguist mother, or poetry-quoting-mathematician father, I learned to derive (perhaps too much) pride from small wordish successes that still buoy me when the days get long.
I was never taught and I will not learn"—perhaps she could have had a chance to work through her pain and not pass on a legacy of abuse to her surviving child.
"Contrary to my wide-eyed, rather opportunistic outlook at 18, perhaps I learned that there are no short cuts in life," she tells me in an email after the interview.
