Passion Has To Be Discovered, Not Enforced
Tiger Woods began as a golf prodigy at the age of three when he won a putting contest against Bob Hope on TV. Pete Sampras began tennis when he was also three. Bill Gates wrote his first computer program when he was in the eighth grade.
What did they have in common (besides, of course, being highly successful in their fields)? Passion from an early age.
Parents are always looking for passion in their kids. Woods, Sampras, and Gates discovered their passion purely by chance, not because of substantial parental pressure. A new study from the University of Montreal concludes that pressurizing kids into a hobby does more harm than good. Kids might become obsessive about a hobby not because they enjoy it but to avoid disappointing their parents.
The key takeaways from this study are as follows:
• Get them started early. If Tiger Woods had not held a golf club until he was 10, do we really think he'd have been as great a golfer as he is today? Chances are very low. Passion has to be found and nurtured from early on for it to become ingrained as a second nature. People can learn new skills as they grow but the brain grows the fastest at a young age.
• Although pressuring kids is definitely a bad idea, kids need to be nudged to explore all sorts of activities. Find one or two skills by the age of 7 or 8 that can be developed further, but the child needs to find his or her passion. Not every parent has enough time to take kids to multiple classes and expect them to excel in everything. Eventually parents and kids have to pick their battles.
• Take pride, but don't live vicariously through your kids. It’s natural that parents don’t want their children to make the same mistakes that they made when they were young. This doesn’t mean we should micromanage our kids' lives to the extent that we force them to take on hobbies that we as kids missed out on.
Passion has to be found. It cannot be enforced. The message to the parents is to show the way and then back off a bit; watch the kids explore and find their passion themselves. Kids don’t have to become the next Tiger Woods or Bill Gates to be successful. Achieving one’s goals can never be the same for everyone.
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