Practice Under Duress

From a post about how to ace an interview with venture capitalists:

4. Practice the interview under extreme circumstances

A friend of mine whose wife recently got accepted into YC shared a hilarious but clever tip: practice under manufactured duress. He told me that he would literally throw socks at her, dance in the background, or yell at her while she was reviewing answers — anything to try and throw off her focus.

Last week I was talking to a friend who was about to go to Thailand for the first time, and I told her about our trip there with wee Oliver, many years ago.

That trip was, in a sense, an example of “practice under duress”: if we could fly halfway around the world with Oliver and make our way in utterly different cultural circumstances, we could do anything.

When we flew to Europe a year later it felt like crossing the street by comparison.

That trip to Thailand made all the trips that followed it possible.