Effortlessness Is a Myth |
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A mind grows by staying with difficulty long enough for the experience to change it.
When young people bypass struggle too quickly, they lose chances to learn what they can do.
The presence of a steady adult is often what makes hard things survivable.
When Roger Federer gave the commencement address on a rainy Sunday at Dartmouth in 2024, he said something the graduates did not expect from a man whose tennis game was so smooth people frequently called it “effortless.”
“Effortlessness is a myth,” he told them. He had won almost 80 percent of the 1,526 singles matches he played — but across all of them, he had won only 54 percent of the individual points. One of the greatest athletes who ever lived lost nearly half of every point he ever played.
What he had built was a psychological skill: the capacity to lose a point, release it, and walk to the next one with a quiet mind. To fail at the highest possible rate and stay regulated enough to keep going. It is the work of building a self that can tolerate failure.
I think about this a great deal, because we are quietly building the opposite. The conversation about young people and technology has narrowed to a worry: What are screens and chatbots doing to their attention? I want to ask a different question: What happens to a mind that is rarely allowed to struggle?
The Children I Worried About Most
In more than 20 years as a child psychiatrist, some of the young people I worried about most could not bear the feeling of not knowing. The moment something turned hard — a problem they couldn't solve, a page they couldn't follow, a feeling they couldn't name — they reached for relief. They quit, or came apart, or handed the difficulty to someone else.
Effort has a feeling, and it is an uncomfortable one. It is the friction of........