Phoebe Jones When Rachel Simmons was a teen and young adult, she thought if she just did everything the right way she could make her life amazing. “Life was like a test that I could ace if I only worked hard enough,” she told me in our interview for "Inflection Point." It wasn’t until Rachel was a Rhodes Scholar studying at Oxford that she realized that in her relentless pursuit of academic excellence, she had denied herself the confidence and wisdom that can only be gained through risk, rejection and failure. “I came to understand that my whole life and self-esteem had been defined by my accomplishments,” Rachel said.