A Taste For Effort

Hey

Busy week, eh? I feel ya, but it’s not all bad…

Big idea 🍉

Effort is the basis of growth. It's how we build strength, skill and confidence. However, the modern world has stripped out much of the effort of living, particularly for young people. Effort (and all its benefits) has become optional... we have to choose it.

The problem is, we tend not to, because:

1. We've evolved to avoid effort. Which made sense when food was scarce and every bit of energy counted.

2. The rewards that come with effort are further away than they used to be. Our ancestors ate the night they hunted. When we study today, the real payoff can often be years away.

3. We tend to underestimate how good effort will make us feel. For example, we expect exercise to feel worse than it really does.

All this impacts children most of all, because they haven't yet had the chance to feel effort pay off.

Fortunately, effort can become an acquired taste. Few of us want to go to the gym, practise an instrument or revise at first. But when we keep at it, and feel the payoff enough times, our desire for effort begins to grow.

And so, as a society, not only do we need to reintroduce effort… we also have to help young people push through it: the presentation they're dreading, the cross-country they'd rather skip, the second draft they swear they don't need. Again and again, until they acquire the taste (see also: Type-2 fun).

Now, most schools already do a great job of this. We just need to not let up (harder than it sounds, because it's an effort for us too).

🎓 For more, check out this study on how we learn to value effort.

Summary

• Effort is the basis of growth, but modern life has stripped much of it out, so now we have to choose it.

• We tend not to: we evolved to avoid effort, its rewards are distant, and we underestimate how good it feels.

• But effort can become an acquired taste, so we must reintroduce it and help young people push through it.

Little updates 🥕

• Research on effort & self-concept → suggests that students’ ability self-concepts are shaped by both achievement & the effort required to achieve it.

• Article on hybrid human-AI tutoring → discusses how hybrid tutoring could combine AI’s scalability human tutors’ motivational & relational support.

• Paper on retrieval of low-quality explanations → suggests that retrieval practice can strengthen long-term learning when initial understanding is weak.

• Article on phonics instruction → finds that systematic phonics outperforms mixed approaches combining phonics with other reading strategies.

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