Some of you might have heard of Khan Academy. It’s a rather marvelous website that got started when its founder, Salman Khan, made some videos to help his young cousins with their studies.
The kids loved them, so Khan made more, and more, until it snowballed into an amazing website with dozens of contributors creating hundreds of hours of engaging videos on every subject known to humanity.
They even have a motto for their movement to make education not just free but awesome for everybody : You Can Learn Anything!
I signed up for said website, and hence I get its newsletter. The latest newsletter had a rather attention grabbing deadline: “Why I Will Never Tell My Son He’s Smart”.
Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Like some kind of testosterone laden Dragon Mother bullshit. But that is not the sort of thing that fits with my image of Khan Academy, and so I read on.
Turns out, what the author means is that he reserves his highest praise not for when his children excel at things they are good at, but when they apply themselves to something that does not come easily to them and, through perseverance, improve themselves in that area.
In other words, you get the most praise not for turning an A into an A+, but for turning a C into a B.
Once I got over the shock of this novel idea, I realizes what a profoundly superior scheme that is. Learning to overcome obstacles is one of the most live-improving skills a person can have. To someone who is confident that they can overcome obstacles, the world is at their command. They are not stuck in the rut of trying to only do the things they are good at. They can go wherever they want in life without having to worry about whether it requires something they are “good” at.
From this point of view, the very concept of aptitudes comes into question. Perseverance is the meta-aptitude that unlocks all the rest. If you learn that you can learn whatever you need to learn to accomplish your goals, then you are unstoppable.
That’s why you have so many stories of successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of high school. They realized that if they just applied themselves, they didn’t need to be the smartest or the most gifted.
They were the most persistent, and that’s why they the high school dropouts ended up rich and powerful while the straight A students ended up working for them.
If I had been educated like that, it would have vastly improved my character. One of my main problems as a kid (a problem, I admit, a lot of people would have loved to have) was that it was all too easy. The schoolwork offered no challenge to me, and so I never had to learn to overcome difficulties because for me, there were no difficulties.
Being unable to challenge your gifted students does not merely leave them bored. It leaves them weak.
Admittedly, getting me to try things that did not come naturally to me would have been difficult. I was ferociously stubborn and could out-think my teachers ten times over. It would have taken someone with a very strong will and oodles of patience to convince me to just keep trying at things I found difficult, like arts and crafts, or gym, until I got it right.
Jesus, I was a difficult kid.
Still, the point remains that I could have benefited greatly from an obstacle based education. It would have both challenged me and led me to develop that all important perseverance muscle that I lack to this very day.
I have a lot of trouble sticking with things, and following through on them. I give up things far, far too easily. The moment something becomes tricky or scary or work, I tend to give up. This is especially true if it is something that will only benefit myself, or that only involves myself.
If it involves others, then my strong desire not to let them down and to do my part will keep me motivated. But if it’s just me? Well, who does my giving up hurt? Only me.
And honestly, who cares about me? Not me.
And it’s not just me. I have seen the same sort of weakness of spirit in dozens of my fellow intellectually gifted people. People who have oodles of intelligence and therefore oodles of potential, but there is some vital ingredient missing between them and the things they theoretically can do, and so they end up lost in society’s wastelands.
People with excellent marks that lead to brilliant academic degrees…. only to have them give up faced with even the thought of competing with many similar people for scarce slots in a master’s program. People with amazing programming skills who nevertheless can’t keep a job doing it, or even finish their own projects, because they flee at the slightest sign of pressure. Even people with full doctorates who end up as Starbucks baristas because they can’t face the scramble for professorships.
What is this malaise? It’s more than a lack of confidence. It might seem like you have to be a tower of confidence to overcome these obstacles, but you don’t.
You just have to keep going. You just have to have faith that you will make it there as long as you don’t give up. And you get this faith by overcoming obstacles.
Start slow. Start with something that isn’t very important that only seems sort of hard. Once you overcome that, try for something a little tougher. Work that perseverance muscle just a little bit each day, till it is strong and powerful and you are no longer locked in the box of being only able to do what comes easily to you.
There is a world of possibilities out there. Name it, and you can have it. You just have to hang in there and not immediately give up in favour of something more immediately rewarding.
Learn to hang on.
I will be with you, learning too.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.