I have been wrestling with two very different philosophies on life and growth recently. One was presented to me while reading The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography. According to this piece, whenever she is asked why she joined Google after getting her master's in symbolic systems at Stanford, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer tells her "Laura Beckman story" about the daughter of her middle school piano teacher. I'll let Marissa tell it in her own words: