Getting your spelling impeccably correct is more important than it seems. If you don't get your ABC straight, your spelling mistakes may well (literally) be dug out and ridiculed even after three thousand years, as demonstrated on this display at the British Museum.

'I remember one morning, getting up at dawn,' Clarissa Vaughn tells her daughter Julia. 'There was such a sense of possibility. I remember thinking: 'This is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And, of course, there'll always be more.' It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning: It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.

For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled: the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money.