Children in every school in the country should watch Harry Kane’s Ballon d’Or acceptance speech. The striker spoke with frank eloquence about the long and painful trek to this moment of glory.

“I wasn't the kid who went straight to the top," he admitted. In a six-word confession, he added: “I had to experience the downs.” Kane knows what it is like to be substituted, to battle injury during critical weeks in your career, to miss a penalty in a World Cup quarter-final and to see your team fail to lift silverware. He has proved his grit in fire.

Our culture celebrates instant success. Musicians and authors are dropped if their first works fail to find an immediate audience.

But academics have documented how people who develop resilience in the face of failure outperform rivals. Perseverance produces winning character. Kane went further, acknowledging the unique power of unconditional love in his life.

His words to his wife show be hewn in stone: “We've been through ups and downs for sure … You always want the best for me, you sacrifice yourself to help me achieve my dreams, and I know they're your dreams as well, so it wouldn't be possible without you.”

Children everywhere should hear Kane kick away the wretched idea that success is a solo effort. True champions do not walk alone.

Former CIA deputy director David Cohen wants spies to steal secrets from foreign companies and pass these on to American companies. He argues adversaries and allies alike have engaged in economic espionage while the US has abided by a self-imposed ban.

Cohen wants spy agencies to collect “commercial secrets” and hand these onto companies producing “frontier technologies that will be vital to US national security in the years to come”. During the early days of the US, he writes in Foreign Affairs, the “newly formed republic paid bounties to private citizens to encourage the theft of crucial technology from Britain”.

What a let-down it will be if the next keenly awaited James Bond adventure involves 007 stopping the Yanks pilfering the design for an energy-efficient vacuum cleaner. I can’t see punters queueing round the block to see Live and Let Dyson.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so Britain’s airports should be architectural celebrations of this land that make new arrivals gasp in wonder, convinced they have come to the greatest nation on Earth.

It’s a crying shame that so many of our airports are dismal, grubby sheds. At the very least, can we get passengers off planes without them losing the will to live?

On Monday night, I arrived in Gatwick on a flight from Belfast that was already around an hour late. We then spent about two cramped and cold hours on the plane waiting for buses to take us to a gate we could have walked to in a few minutes. I clambered into bed sometime after two in the morning, muttering to myself: “Surely we can do better than this?”

Artificial intelligence wizards are getting closer to perfecting the human voice, but as I listened to a series of public announcements at the weekend, something sounded wrong.

These computer-generated voices don’t pause for breath. Humans do. A colleague who had to talk for extended periods of time on television while standing outside No 10 told me that learning how to take a breath while commentating is a key skill.

In both Hebrew and Greek, a single word is used to communicate the concept of breath and spirit. The Genesis story begins with the creator breathing the breath of life into the nostrils of the first man, formed out of the dust of the Earth.

Artificial intelligence may never get wheezy, but a quick exploration of the artwork and music it creates shows it lacks that creative spirit which burns so brilliantly in humanity.