First, a couple objections to your phrasing. I dislike the term 'reach their full potential'. That would require precognition. Perhaps you do study topic X, bu

First, a couple objections to your phrasing. I dislike the term 'reach their full potential'. That would require precognition. Perhaps you do study topic X, but your full potential would have been better reached by going for a walk, where you ended up meeting a group of like-minded people who support and challenge each other to do better. (For that matter, there are many worthy paths in life. You can't take all of them, so will never reach your 'full potential'. Perhaps I could have been a great figure skater, had I tried, so I'll now never reach my full potential.) I also dislike the term 'grit', because it has so many meanings. It's often interpreted needing an internal quality of perseverance and resilience. But what's also important is external support. This could include teachers or trainers, but also a community which doesn't resort to "LOL, N00B - RTFM!" when someone comes with a beginner question. Most people don't like feeling ignorant. Even fewer like it when others highlight that ignorance. As a personal example, years back I went to buy a new iPod and brought in my old one for a trade-in. The Apple store staff pointed out it was an old model "is it 3rd generation"? I had no clue, and didn't like the feeling like I was supposed to know this information. Now, as to your topic, there's an entire field of learning science. For example, Greg Wilson, at Software Carpentry, recommends (http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2016/09/small-teaching.html http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2016/09/small-teaching.ht... ): > Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher changed how I think about teaching, and sparked some good discussion in our community. Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know had a similar impact a few years earlier, and now there is James Lang’s Small Teaching. As its title suggests, Lang’s book focuses on little things that teachers can do right now to improve their teaching, rather than on big, systemic changes that might have larger impact, but which require larger effort (and probably buy-in from other people). To be included, a practice had to: have some foundation in the learning sciences, have been shown to have impact in real-world situation, and have been used or observed by the author. ... Frequent low-stakes quizzes to prompt recall, interleaving different material, having students write a one-minute thesis or draw a concept map, making the assessment criteria clear, setting aside time for self-explanation and peer explanation—none of these should be new to anyone who has been through our instructor training course Perhaps reading the literature from that field would help more than random HN commenters? As the Software Carpentry instructor training page points out at http://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/ http://swcarpentry.github.io/instructor-training/ : > "Over the last hundred years, researchers have discovered an enormous amount about how people learn and how best to teach them. Unfortunately, much of that knowledge has not yet been translated into common classroom practice, while many myths about education have proven remarkably persistent." It's likely that people here may repeat those same myths. This also gives you the chance to ask yourself if you want to spend the time and energy to learn that topic enough to really be able to answer your own curiosity. And if not, perhaps that same answer can be applied to others?