I expected you'd come up with such a question.

As a matter of fact, I did.

It was not that I didn't have struggles. I knew I am way too OOOOLD, considering to improve a foreign language to some unreasonable level. However, like with a spouse or a coworker, most of the times with our own 'defects', we have to "step back", rather than moving forward and force the other party to retreat. Or in an other word, we should learn to live with it. Only so, a win-win situation can be achieved.

I liked Cinsia's line in "The Snow of Kilimanjaro". She says: (I'm not trying to be a writer, nor a painter, nor a singer ...) "I am only trying to be happy." When a person feels happy about doing something, (and she is making her closest ones happy in the mean time), why should she change her style of living so to follow the social (e.g. others') standards? The world won't be different with one fewer top scientist or business woman, but myself and my family would feel so much less happy without having a me the way I am right now. :-)

Plus, I don't think the first class researchers are all, always, doing the world good. Think about the examples Hamming used in his speech. -- Certainly, I understand that people are born different, men and women are different, each individual is a different animal. And it is the very difference among us all that makes the world rich, and beautiful.