There is a story for very young children called “The Carrot Seed” where a little boy plants a carrot seed and waters it and pulls out the weeds around it, and keeps on doing so even though everyone keeps telling him nothing will grow. At the end, of course, a giant carrot comes up. I’ve always had mixed feelings about reading that story. On the one hand, you don’t want to send the message that things are true just because you believe, and that evidence to the contrary doesn’t matter. On the other hand, you do want to innoculate the kid against excessive self-doubt and against taking too seriously people who, out of malice or out of instinctual aversion to different ideas, or because the idea of someone else succeeding is an implicit rebuke to them for not having tried, love to tell people what they can’t do.
There is a story for very young children called “The Carrot Seed” where a little boy plants a carrot seed and waters it and pulls out the weeds around it, and keeps on doing so even though everyone keeps telling him nothing will grow. At the end, of course, a giant carrot comes up. I’ve always had mixed feelings about reading that story. On the one hand, you don’t want to send the message that things are true just because you believe, and that evidence to the contrary doesn’t matter. On the other hand, you do want to innoculate the kid against excessive self-doubt and against taking too seriously people who, out of malice or out of instinctual aversion to different ideas, or because the idea of someone else succeeding is an implicit rebuke to them for not having tried, love to tell people what they can’t do.