This is similar to the explore/exploit dynamic, an idea from computer science, which says that to make the best decisions we should find the correct balance between gathering information (exploring our options) and making the most of what we know (exploiting that information). To make the best decisions, we need to balance exploration and

There are no shortcuts. Our lives, if they are well lived, are long works. Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue

He crept out of bed at night and read by a small crack of light that reached his cell floor, sneaking back to bed once an hour as the guard passed. In this painstaking way, Malcolm Little spent years educating himself.

a five-part model where the work phase starts with a phase of exploration and where periods of work (involving challenge and growth) are then punctuated with periods of transition.18

‘Creativity is not random among individuals; it builds up in intergenerational chains.’

Wang was a near-Olympic figure skater as a teenager. Aged nineteen, she changed tracks when she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the top. ‘I really lost my way when my figure-skating career ended. I was nineteen, and I was in a panic because nothing had played out the way I’d hoped, after years of hard work.’12

Finally, Neave was a crucially influential person among MPs.

Let me make a strange argument: more people should have a midlife crisis. Declining happiness might be a natural phenomenon that you can’t ‘cure’ but it can also be the inspiration to change.

Being able to pass information between people and to cross class and social barriers allows for influences to spread further.