And You Can't Make Me

I was thinking about all of the things I was taught as a child and a young person and how lackluster my efforts and the results were. I finally realized why that was. It was because someone was making me do it. It wasn't because I wanted to, but because someone was forcing me to do something I didn't want to do against my will.

When I was a kid I was enrolled in a club called 4-H. It was for rural kids and we learned how to do just about everything from displaying cattle we'd raised ourselves to weaving and baking and appraising grain quality. Seriously, I did all of it. Leather stamping, ceramics, photography, sewing. I was given piano lessons and swimming lessons. I learned to play the trumpet and the clarinet and how to touch-type. (Not all of it through 4-H, obviously). Still, I wasn't good at everything. I didn't even try that hard to be honest. Why? Because there was too much pressure to be good at everything and live up to someone else's expectations. I also suspect there was some hope that if I was talented that it would reflect well on the people making me do it all. Maybe they figured that if they threw enough at the brick wall that was young me, something had to stick.

Unfortunately I was a willful child and resisted all attempts to force me into anything. When I did learn something, it was because I wanted to learn it. If even half of the effort that they had put into forcing me and trying to overcome my willfulness had been put into making me want to learn it, they would have had a lot more success. It made me think of a time when I was working in a daycare and I had three kids who were waiting for their mother to pick them up. Instead of trying to engage them I went off to the lego table and started building a tower. It took less than a minute for the two that were old enough to handle lego to come over and help me build my tower. It was because nobody was making them do it. Kids are natural mimics. If they see you doing something, they want to do it, but you have to offer resistance. If you tell them it's too hard for them, they'll try to prove to you that it's not. They'll be the ones trying to convince you to let them do what you're doing. It's classic Huck Finn and whitewashing the fence. Tell them they can't, and they'll volunteer. I think the way we teach children might be all wrong. Reverse psychology has applications that are both honorable and useful.

Maybe it's not just kids that we're motivating all wrong. Maybe adults would be a lot more open to learning new things if we didn't try to force it on them. If we could make them want to learn. In other words, let it be their own idea. I keep thinking that if I'd been made to want to learn, I would have mastered things a lot earlier. Now that I know a bit better how I tick, it's easier to motivate myself to learn. I have nobody offering resistance or making me learn things. It's all self-directed now that I'm an adult, but that gives me a lot of freedom. I can learn anything I want to learn, I just have to make up my mind what it is I want to learn. I'm working on saving up for a used electronic keyboard so I can teach myself piano again, this time for real. It's harder now finding the self-discipline to practice, but maybe this time it'll be easier because I want to do something.