What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’
When I was 12, I disappeared into my bedroom with a $40 folk guitar and a giant book of Beatles songs, with elementary, large-type chord diagrams to follow. My fingers stung as I tried to press down on the strings without making them buzz and my left hand ached as I tried — and for a long time failed — stretching it across the neck. Nonetheless, I worked my way through “Rain” (abbreviated to two chords) and “Love Me Do” (three) and finally “Yellow Submarine” (four chords, or was it five?) and discovered by myself the matchless thrill of homemade musical harmony.
Fifty years later, I am still not a very good guitar player, but that week’s work, and the months and years of self-directed practice on the instrument that followed it, became a touchstone of sorts for me, and a model and foundation for almost every meaningful thing I have done since. It gave me confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished, that perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.
I think of it as accomplishment, different from achievement. Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an activity we have chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the happiness that rises from absorption in a thing outside ourselves. Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote-work of achievement. All our observation tells us that young people, particularly, are perpetually being pushed toward the next test, or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into. We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, with the point of it all never made clear.
My own accomplishment of learning those songs seems to echo in the experience of almost everyone I know. My wife recalls learning to sew her own clothes by the same process I undertook — breaking it down into small, manageable tasks, getting the pattern, choosing the fabric, working the machine, until you find yourself making something like music — in the clothing maker’s case, wearing that beautiful thing you have made. The experience of breaking down and building up that she learned then informed her later professional work as a film editor and producer.
Sometimes the process actually produces a vocation: Another friend recalls struggling to draw anything as a kid — Superman, Spiderman — and being astonished by his own growing skill as each week one more piece of the world got decrypted on paper. He became a realist painter. But most often these early self-directed obsessions produce not a job to earn from but a platform to leap from — they produce a sense of fulfillment through passionate perseverance that crosses over into the most seemingly alien enterprises.
As a parent now, I have seen the pure satisfaction of accomplishment, of a particular passion arduously pursued, arise in my own children. Yet I have also seen it actively discouraged by the well-meaning schools they attended. Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self, and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.
I know there are objections to this view: At some moment, all accomplishment, however self-directed, has to become professional, lucrative, real. And surely many of the things that our kids are asked to achieve can lead to self-discovery; taught well, they may learn to love unexpected things for their own sake. The trick may lie in the teaching. My sister Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, puts this well: If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science; but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both.
Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect.
The beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.
The pursuit of accomplishment, what I call the real work, never ends, and always surprises. I learned in that chord-building week so long ago that if you simply lifted one finger from the C chord, you got the most tender and poignant harmony. I did not know then that it was a major seventh chord, favorite of the bossa-nova masters; but I later learned that Paul McCartney, like me, did not know that was what it was, either, when he first made the shape, and referred to it simply as “the pretty chord.” From the most gifted to the least, we are brothers and sisters in the pursuit of accomplishment, and our stubborn self-propelled decoding of its mysteries. That is our real human achievement.
Accomplishing a task of our choosing gives us confidence.