I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really — I mean — I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, “I want to go there.” But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in.

This was a co-educational school, with many progressive features. The emphasis was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and any kind of interest in examination performance and grades was severely discouraged. ("She is quite a serious thinker," I remember one of my teachers telling me about a fellow student, "even though her grades are very good.") Since I was, I have to confess, a reasonably good student, I had to do my best to efface that stigma.

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world!

I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue. That being discriminated against does not make you somehow morally better.

Surrounded by my great-great-grandchildren.

Putting my grandchildren to bed.

A sense of humor, integrity, intelligence. Also, factual accuracy.

Some of the worst advice I've been given doesn't sort of sound like terrible advice. And maybe it's the way I've internalized the advice. Always stand up for your principles is probably good advice. The way I've internalized it is burn your bridges. So I think that--you know what I mean?

I had to ask people about this, because I couldn’t think of anything, and the consensus seems to be: a general lack of self-awareness.