On “Hitting a Wall”

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I received the following question:

“Do you find that kids ‘hit a wall’ at any particular age/level? Any guidance on what might be pushing them too much by age?”

In my experience closely following hundreds of students on Math Academy (and working with 50+ in-person, longitudinally for years), the only time that I’ve seen students “hit a wall” is when they’re no longer mentally aligned with the skill development process.

This is general to all hierarchical skill domains. At the beginning, it’s fairly easy to make progress, but as the student develops their skills further, the intrinsic level of complexity in the skills increases, and further progress gradually begins to feel more and more challenging.

There’s usually no moment where the student “hits a wall” and is flat-out unable to make progress. What happens instead is the student continually re-evaluates how much “reward” they’re getting per unit time of work that they put into further practice.

The “reward” can be anything they like: personal satisfaction, social recognition from peers, feeling prepared to accomplish a future goal (e.g., getting a desired job or getting into a desired college), getting praise from parents, etc. Often a combination of these things.

But once that level of reward dips below the amount of reward they could be getting from other things in life with the same amount of effort, they “clock out” and significantly reduce the intensity of their practice, opting instead to spend their time and effort in other areas where they feel they get more reward per unit time and effort.

I think that’s one of the reasons why you hear so many world-class performers (musicians, athletes, whatever) talk about a formative experience in their youth where they saw some incredible skill performance and decided that it was what they wanted out of life. Like, they often see the end goal and just decide they want to do whatever it takes to get there.

And even then, they often still need other sources of reward like public performances to help balance the reward equation and keep them going even when further skill development becomes progressively more challenging and reward per unit time & effort would otherwise start to wane.

Regarding “how much pushing is too much,” I think it depends highly on the specifics of the kid, their interest, their “reward equation” (i.e. what is their reward per unit time & effort from the thing they’re being pushed to do, and how does that compare to the same metric in other areas of life), and where they are within the talent development process. I don’t know that there’s a simple answer (or if there is, I’m not yet aware of it).

But if you’re really curious about this stuff and you want to be armed with as much information as possible, I would highly recommend to read Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom. This book describes the striking commonalities Bloom discovered when studying the backgrounds of extremely successful individuals across a wide variety of fields.

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