Mark Twain once summed up his life. “I became a silver-miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold-miner; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torchbearer on the lecture circuit; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.”

The domain of discovery is a magical one. It allows us to move beyond the fight, beyond success, to an open realm of possibility. Look at the masters of discovery—infants. There is no evaluation when an infant is learning. There is no good, bad, right, or wrong. It is all discovery. When an infant successfully grasps an object in her crib for the first time or stands upright and walks, she doesn’t need to look around for approval. She is too busy discovering. When she knocks over a glass of milk, she doesn’t feel guilty. She’s too busy examining the flow, the texture, and the interesting patterns the milk makes on the tablecloth. She is discovery.

– Thomas Crum from ‘The Magic of Conflict’