Lesson four — Nobody is only one thing

School sorts you early. You become "the maths one" or "the one who is good at languages", and by Class 9 you may have accepted it.

Look at where the roads in this book actually go, and you will notice how few of them use only one ability.

A doctor needs biology and the ability to speak to a frightened person. A civil engineer needs physics and the judgement to manage a site full of people. A lawyer needs to read enormous quantities of text and to argue on their feet. A designer needs drawing and an understanding of how strangers behave. A teacher needs a subject and patience with the thirty children who do not yet share it.

The point is not that you should be good at everything. It is that the label you were given at school is smaller than you are, and it should not be allowed to close a road.

If you are told you are "not a maths person", ask whether you dislike maths or whether you had a bad year of it once. The two are different, and only one of them has to be permanent.