you need motivation to learn the value of pain

Friends,

I’ve been saving this one for the start of the school year. For those who start after Labor Day like it should be (my kids have been in school for nearly a month already).

I took my boys to Alpha School in Austin during Spring Break this year. School during Spring Break, dad?! Yea, I suck. Tough.

I also have a few friends with multiple kids each in the school. Friends who were quite opinionated about school in ways that resonate with me before they sent their kids to Alpha. They are quite happy with their kids’ experience and pushed me to come see it myself. I never got around to writing about my tour or Max’s shadow day but I was impressed.

I’m not going to write a review because it’s already dominated by today’s Munchies. Scott Alexander’s annual essay contest includes a finalist that is the first-hand account of a reader who moved to Austin just to send his kid to Alpha.

The essay is thorough. Read it:

Review: Alpha School

[author identity withheld as it's Astral Codex essay finalist]

The message today isn’t one that Alpha owns but its methods flow directly from it.

A tiny bit of background first

The Core Claims: Alpha claims students "Learn 2.6X faster" with "Only two hours of academics per day" that's "Powered by AI (not teachers)" but the reality is more nuanced than the marketing suggests.

What Alpha Actually Does:

• Uses a personalized learning platform with third-party tools (iXL, Khan Academy-style content) rather than generative AI
• Maintains a 5:1 teacher-to-student ratio with highly paid "guides" ($60k-$150k salaries)
• The "2-hour learning" actually takes about 3.5 hours (8:30am-noon) with breaks
• Emphasis on becoming “pointy” in at least one area
• Heavy use of incentive systems

Many of the stories in the essay (ie the Poland trip or the dirtbike story in the comments) I heard about first-hand from my visit. The range of reactions to what Alpha is doing spans relief and exuberance to jaded skepticism to outright disgust or grievance. But if you scan the landscape of private schools, top public schools, magnet schools you will form some opinions about what is better or worse but it’s all a bit incremental between your finalists. Plus your finalists are still incremental over the worst school you’d realistically send your kid to.

Alpha does not look incremental. It might not be better for your kid, I don’t know, but it’s definitely very different.

For what it’s worth, both my kids would want to go (especially my younger one, who LOVED his day there) if we had one near us.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Learning

76% of Americans oppose paying kids to learn, Alpha has built its entire system around what the research shows to works. Drawing on Roland Fryer's studies and Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice, Alpha uses "GT bucks" (worth 10 cents each) to reward academic progress. Kids earn money for completing lessons with 80%+ accuracy, creating a gamified learning environment that turns the same iXL content that was "a fight every time" at home into something children beg to do more of at school. The author's middle daughter completed two full grade levels in 20 weeks - powered not by innate love of learning, but by transparent incentives that most educators would recoil from.

Let me pause here for a moment to remind you that my guide The Principles Of Learning Fast distilled from The Math Academy Way is not a controversial reading of the learning literature, or to be more accurate, the literature on “skill development”. The same principles that we use for athletics work in academics. But all of this knowledge is heavily ignored for (waves hand) “reasons”.

If an educator is accustomed to norms that aren’t heavily rooted in skill development literature, that literature can be jarring. It doesn’t love you the way your teachers do. It loves outcomes.

If you’re building muscle, the stimulus to grow starts with discomfort. There are many techniques to get through discomfort. But none that serve your goals include avoiding it.

To think otherwise is to believe in lies.

When it comes to sports, nobody believes otherwise. No pain, no gain is the boring truth. My guess here is that we can be upfront about this because athletes are motivated by winning and “gains” are steps to winning.

Similarly, students are motivated by…by…err….well. Hmm. This is kinda tricky. I mean some kids are motivated by As because they equate that with “winning”. Maybe some see As as a stepping stone to a good college, which is a stepping stone to…umm, well, err again.

The motivation for As slams pretty hard into our tendency to hyperbolically discount and that Marshmallow test thing didn’t replicate, right?

Even then, we are setting the goal as an “A”. What’s an “A” a surrogate for? If it’s money, then it’s about as loose as the Dave & Buster ticket/prize exchange rate. Is it popularity or style or honor or hotness? Have you even been to high school? I suspect the “A” works on the “academic athlete”. A competitive person who can’t resist a gold star who can memorize stuff without too much effort. That’s who As work on.

Now actually learning, that’s all too often, another matter altogether.

• being creative
• having an ill-defined definition of what’s excellent but knowing it when you see it and not stopping until you are proud of what you did but also not needing it to be perfect. (I mean really — what percentage of A work actually looks like excellence. I remember shredding my 6th grader’s A+ essay last year because the work was trash and he knew it. He didn’t push back. Bruh, you’re better than this, don’t confuse their standards with good standards.)
• drilling a concept that hurts your head until you’ve knocked the intimidation out of it with exposure and practice and pattern recognition. The wax-on, wax-off antecedents to authentic understanding

But if your not an “playing the sport of As”, how can anyone motivate you to do these hard things. We can’t say “no pain, no gain” because you don’t see the point of the pain.

When you are 12-years-old, nobody gives you a satisfying answer for why the pain is worth it.

Pause for a moment on that. It’s a big deal. Without a good reason to endure pain, the reality that pain is a prerequisite for growth is a highly inconvenient truth. Why bring it up? You have given a kid no justification for the pain, so you are forced into a sin of omission — to act as if it’s not true. You don’t need to say it’s not true, you just never really say that it is.

And just as water takes the path of least resistance lower, so does one’s perception of “what it takes” to succeed. They expect comfort or at least the absence of discomfort.

This is the result of not being able to justify the cost of growing. A failure to motivate via inspiration.

Why do we fail at this?

Because.

Because motivation and actually giving a hoot is scarce and mysterious. We’ve been wrestling with this since, heck when wrestling was invented. The Greeks spoke of “thymos”. Maybe you need to be touched by a god to care, I don’t know.

So I’m giving a giant hall pass to “education” and really society at large — this motivation thing, it’s ok if you don’t know where it comes from or how to inspire it.

But if you don’t have intrinsic motivation as a tool to teach people that growth requires discomfort, that doesn’t mean you let them believe you can grow without struggle. This lesson alone — that you shouldn’t expect to be good at anything without pushing — is more important than any fact you’ve ever learned in school.

So you need to motivate somehow if only to get someone to internalize this reality. To get them to actually push.

I’ve given you a glimpse into my beliefs because it explains why I agree with Alpha on the use of incentives. I turn now to the essay:

Self-actualization is where we want all our kids to reach (or at least "become a strong enough reader that they enjoy reading books and will do it for pleasure"). The question is how to get there. Ericsson has mapped out that path:

• Start with adult-generated incentives
• Surround the children with peers who will raise their status for being "learners"
• Hope at some point they self-actualize

Clearly not every kid will get to stage three (and no one will get to stage three in every endeavor), but Ericsson's point is that EVERYONE who gets to stage three starts at stage one. And we know how to motivate kids in stage one – or at least Roland Fryer does.

Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:

Incentives → Motivation

Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice

Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery

Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn't "follow the data" on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.

I am less interested in the philosophy of "what is right" and more interested in "what works". If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough "n" to distinguish different types of kids).

Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect. Tell a kid to read a book or show up on time and they know what they need to do to get the money. Tell them to get higher scores on tests and, while they have a rough idea how to do that (pay more attention in class, study longer and more efficiently), the actual things they need to do are not entirely clear and the inputs they put in (studying) are not directly tied to the outputs (test scores) – and the incentives have no impact.

I’m back again.

When I was a kid, I wanted As because of the competitive gold star thing plus parental sticks (there were carrots of praise sure, but the stick loomed larger). I played the school game all the way through college. What’s the most efficient route to As? If I learn something in the process, fine, but that’s not the goal.

I regret my approach.

But this is a convoluted proof of Ericsson and Fryer!

Why?

Because regretting my approach reveals what I’ve become — someone who cares about learning, not gold stars. If you’re an adult reading this right now, how many times have you thought to yourself ‘College is wasted on the young’? You understand exactly what I mean. Regardless of how long it took you to get here, you’re here now.

I needed some external motivation. I needed some type of payoff to not feel scarcity breathing down my neck, discouraging the indulgence of knowledge for its own sake. As its own reward. As a means to discovery about the world and myself. As a pattern that connects beauty to chaos or design to function. Or the gift of receiving new 10 questions for each old one answered.

Would it have been better to have curiosity and motivation paired when I was 12? Of course. But if bootstrapping motivation via external rewards can work over the course of 25 years, AND if rewards can be tightly coupled to milestones such that we move faster at a young age (and provably so), then this is a good trade.

Especially since the status quo is not being motivated, building competence too slowly, finding no point in discomfort. And all of this while staying obliviously vain, celebrated for being yet unaccountable and even less aware. Playing video games in the waiting room until the nurse announces, “Dr. Disappointment will see you now.”

Screw that. Get uncomfortable, get some candy. Welcome to life. Self-actualize later.

[If there is a more enlightened path, we’d do that, but since there isn’t, take one that leads to actual results and hope the results become addicting on their own merit. Nobody is going to suffer for growth in the name of pure scholarship. Acting like they should is preaching abstinence in a dark room when slow jams are playing. Good luck.]

Back to the essay:

The future elite soloists of the music world all hated practicing.

And so did everyone else.

All of the musicians at the school did not like the process of practicing. They enjoyed playing. They enjoyed being good musicians. They just hated the process of practicing to get good.

So why did they do it?

Because they wanted to be great musicians and they knew that they needed to practice to become great musicians.

According to Ericsson, the key to being great is deliberate practice. The key to deliberate practice is motivation.

Ericsson dug further to figure out where the motivation came from and he found it grew over three stages:

1. Parental and authority approval: Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don't. He gives examples of mom saying "if you don't practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor".
2. Peer approval: At some point the young musicians begin to care less about what their parents think, and more about their relative status among their peers. Part of this is that they can perform music for their classmates, which is very impressive, but a bigger motivation is that their skills are recognized by other young musicians – their true peers.
3. Self Actualization: Eventually the best musicians stop caring about their peers and start internalizing the desire to be great. They see themselves as musicians, and they do the hard, uncomfortable work of practicing because "that is what a great musician does".

You get the point. A toddler learns to walk because the point of walking is natural and intrinsically attractive. Most tasks in the painful “zone of proximal development” are not as motivating as walking. Grease the rails.

Related:

🎙️Alpha School Founder, software billionaire and school principal, Joe Leimandt tells the Alpha story on Invest Like The Best just last week (Spotify)

✍🏽Zvi Mowshowitz’ post Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning

It opens:

In honor of the latest (always deeply, deeply unpopular) attempts to destroy tracking and gifted and talented programs, and other attempts to get children to actually learn things, I thought it a good time to compile a number of related items.

• Finally, if you’d like to learn more about Alpha directly they hold weekly info sessions online (link)

Stay groovy

☮️

Advertise at the Moontower

Refer a friend

Need help analyzing a business, investment or career decision?

Book a call with me.

It's $500 for 60 minutes. Let's work through your problem together. If you're not satisfied, you get a refund.

Let me know what you want to discuss and I’ll give you a straight answer on whether I can be helpful before we chat.

I started doing these in early 2022 by accident via inbound inquiries from readers. So I hung out a shingle through the Substack Meetings beta. You can see how I’ve helped others:

📲Book A Meeting

Moontower On The Web

📡All Moontower Meta Blog Posts 👤About Me

Specific Moontower Projects 🧀MoontowerMoney 👽MoontowerQuant 🌟Affirmations and North Stars 🧠Moontower Brain-Plug In

Curations ✒️Moontower’s Favorite Posts By Others 🔖Guides To Reading I Enjoyed 🛋️Investment Blogs I Read 📚Book Ideas for Kids

Fun

🎙️Moontower Music 🍸Moontower Cocktails 🎲Moontower Boardgaming

Upgrades

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription