Comment by jama211
17 days ago
Grit is something you gain once you already have an intrinsic motivation, such as already having a belief you can do this. Something has to spark in people that they’re capable in the first place.
17 days ago
Grit is something you gain once you already have an intrinsic motivation, such as already having a belief you can do this. Something has to spark in people that they’re capable in the first place.
People forget that struggling is part of the learning process. It's great that people want to make things easier to learn, but struggling is essential. You want to ensure that people don't struggle so much they get stuck (one extreme), but you don't want to make it so easy people don't struggle at all (the other extreme). There's balance, but that balance requires struggling.
I think this is one of those statements that sounds reasonable on the surface but if you read it over a few times it doesn’t say anything concrete enough to pin down anything that could be refuted, even though I think the vibe is off.
So in return I’ll share my vibe, which is that my point was a small amount of struggle can be good once people are already determined to learn something, perhaps because they have found a spark for it. But before they’ve found their spark, all it does is turn people off. And in general, I don’t think struggle is essential at all. In fact I’ve learned a great many things successfully without struggling.
You must have a different brain than mine. I'm finding (and increasingly as I age), that the act of learning feels inherently uncomfortable. Like my brain really wants to use its existing toolset instead of learning something new, and is saying so quite loudly. A similar discomfort happens with exercise. If there's zero struggle to lift the weight, then your muscles aren't really developing. I think this is pretty well-known and well-documented.
So how do you learn without struggle? Are you being spoonfed the material on a learning happy path so you happen to never make a mistake and thereby have to redo your work? Do you not experience effort and mistakes and frustration as 'struggle'? After you're "done" learning a particular skill without struggle, what happens when you have to apply that skill at a higher level than you learned it at? Is it just joy and rainbows all the time?
3 replies →