I’ll be climbing onto my soapbox in this post, so please bear with me.
I’ve noticed a mounting aversion in our culture to anything that feels hard.
There. I said it. Now let me explain.
I was listening to an episode of Hidden Brain on NPR the other day and the guest speaker, Dr. George Bonanno, was sharing his research about grief, trauma and resiliency. He mentioned that in the last 10 years he has noticed a sort of protectionist movement emerging within our culture: a focus on human fragility, and an emphasis on avoiding suffering (rather than navigating it).
This resonated with me. In the last 5 years or so, I’ve increasingly noticed that students resist engaging with difficult ideas and skills. When information is complicated, when proficiencies are not immediately adopted, I see more than frustration – I see defeat, despair, detachment and even apathy.
The slang term “cringe” gets used liberally now in connection with any undertaking that requires significant effort. It describes the aversion of publicly demonstrating effort and/or struggle when attempting a given task. And there’s growing cynicism in younger students surrounding the idea that they must struggle and maybe even fail in arenas where others can see them.
These days I’m told “I just can’t do that,” rather than “I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.” This scares me, because it exposes a sense of defeat rather than curiosity or determination. Even more worrying, I see students avoiding their practice. When they feel challenged or incapable they tend to give up and, instead, come to lessons hoping that I can make the skill less complicated or demanding.
But the truth is: learning is hard. It’s always been hard. It will continue to be hard.
The space between wanting to know something and actually understanding it is deeply uncomfortable. And it requires resilience and grit to push through that discomfort.
My husband like this analogy: “If you are learning to ride a bicycle, there is a certain amount of force required to make the pedals turn. I can’t reduce the amount of force needed – you must learn how to push the pedals.”
Learning an instrument is about skill acquisition and mastery. That requires time, effort, attention, and determination. Try as we might, teachers cannot make the learning process easier. We can change our language, present the information in different terms, encourage, support, answer questions…. but the student is ultimately the one responsible for practicing, integrating and mastering the information they’re given.
Valuable things require struggle. Aristotle had a word for this: eudaimonia. He used it to describe the “highest human good,” but “human flourishing” or “prosperity” are also useful translations. It describes a profound, fulfilling state of well-being that comes from realizing one’s highest potential. And achieving that potential is not always a pleasant undertaking.
Accomplishing difficult things requires sacrifice, energy and a willingness to fail. If we never fall down, how do we learn to stand back up? Struggling and striving and, ultimately, conquering a goal brings more satisfaction than instant gratification could possibly provide.
So I suppose my final message is this:
Yes, learning is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Lean into the hard and I promise, you won’t regret it. As Tom Hanks famously said in the movie A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”
