What was your most triumphant moment?

My sophomore year in college, I finally got around to taking the required freshman biology course. The study of biology had never particularly interested me: I would rather pet a dog than delve into its morphology, rather look dreamily through a tree's branches than demand that it validate to me the mechanical utility of its green-ness. And so I worked half-heartedly through the first semester, heedless of the textbook's introductory admonition to stay abreast of an extremely fact-filled course that, for instance, required its students to learn more new terms than a freshman foreign language course did. My scores on tests were mediocre and by the end of the semester I needed to do well on the final exam.

I was ten years old, playing little league baseball. Early in the season I was in a league in which I was near the top of the age bracket, and thus one of the biggest, strongest, and best players. But someone figured out my birthday was just over the cutoff, so I got moved suddenly to the next higher age bracket, which made me one to two years younger than most other players. The coach and other players didn’t know me and I seemed small and thin, so I was left on the bench nearly all the time, never even getting a chance to find out how well I could play or learn anything.