Believe in your capabilities

Question : At BYU, Tara recounts going to a professor for moral advice, and instead getting advice that she should apply for a very competitive study abroad at Cambridge University, which she’d never imagined she could qualify to do. “He’d seemed to say, ‘First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are,’” she writes. What does this mean? Has anyone ever given you advice to do something beyond what you thought you were capable of? Did you follow it?