Why do parents encourage their children to play baseball, soccer, or any other sport? Why, for years, did my husband drive our daughter Lucy to viola lessons? 

We know that most kids won’t grow up to go pro or make their living playing in an orchestra. Bill Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, tells me that most of the very serious athletes and musicians whom he admits each year develop new passions once they come to campus. 

So why, as a scientist, do I believe these endeavors matter? It’s not easy to do random-assignment studies of sports, music, or any other extracurricular activity. Ethically, you can’t force kids into a pursuit, or prevent them from doing what they love, in the name of science.

But there is correlational evidence suggesting that extracurricular activities are the fertile soil in which passion and perseverance take root. Consider, for example, the economist Arthur Brooks, who had played French horn professionally when he was young. One of the most charismatic speakers I’ve ever seen, Arthur was once asked whether he’d learned anything as a serious musician that applied to his current work:

Number 1…is endless repetitions. It’s reps. It’s getting your reps. Again and again and again. Playing the same passage over and over and over again. Because, until you actually get the reps, you won’t have the ballistic movements into your brain. Which is to say, you won’t be able to bypass your prefrontal cortex in playing music. You need to do everything automatically. It’s just happening too fast. You won’t get technical perfection, otherwise. But that takes reps.

The second is slowing everything down. If you—when you are playing a classical instrument, and you are learning a piece of music, to make it such that it will sound great, flawlessly, over and over again, you need to play everything incredibly slowly—it’s the rule in classical music that you shouldn’t be able to recognize the music. If you can recognize the piece, you are playing it too quickly.

And the last is…an appreciation of failure. You are just going to fail a lot. You are going to fail a lot before you can succeed, because the level of technical perfection is so demanding that there is just a lot of failure involved. Those are really the three things that have guided my ability to…be the president of the American Enterprise Institute.

In part, we send our children to coaches and teachers to learn character. We want them to discover the magic of repetition, of slowing things down to focus on an area of improvement, and failing failing failing in order to succeed. 

Don’t tell your kids that the point of competing is winning. The victor doesn’t always walk off the field with the championship trophy. 

Do help your kids see the broader significance of practice. A wrestling coach once told me, “I don’t coach wrestling, I coach life.” The founder of a dance program in New Mexico says: “We don’t just teach dance. We teach excellence.” And one of the best math teachers I’ve ever seen tells his students, “Why are you learning math? Because math is hard. And in my classroom, you learn how to do hard things.”

With grit and gratitude,
Angela

Originally published at Character Lab

Author(s)

  • Angela Duckworth

    CEO and Co-Founder of Character Lab, UPenn Professor of Psychology

    Character Lab

    Angela Duckworth is co-founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive. She is also a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she co-directs the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change For Good Initiative and Wharton People Analytics. Prior to her career in research, she was a math and science teacher in the public schools of New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Angela’s TED Talk is among the most-viewed of all time and her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, was a #1 New York Times best seller. You can sign up to receive her Tip of the Week here.