Where Does Super Self-Drive Come From?

During the holidays, I chatted with an old friend who had previously been driven crazy by his underachieving child. It wasn't that the child's poor grades bothered him, but rather that his wife was constantly having breakdowns over it. Unsurprisingly, their family dynamics became a mess, the child grew increasingly rebellious and wouldn't listen to a word they said, and he ended up suffering alongside them.

After a few arguments, coupled with the fact that his work pressure dropped significantly after leaving a big tech company and moving to a Tier-2 city, he decided to take charge of his child's education. After about a year or two of transformation, there's been a noticeable improvement.

It's not that the child has become a top student, but rather that they are no longer at the bottom of the class, have steadily climbed to the upper-middle ranks, and are even starting to push for the top five.

Many of the points he mentioned have also been discussed in my previous articles, so I'll take this opportunity to talk about them again.

First things first: where does self-drive come from?

My old friend carefully thought about why he, as a veteran "small-town test-taker," was so good at studying and loved reading since he was a child. Where did these habits come from? As a top student from a county-level school, trying to figure this out is actually quite difficult. If you ask anyone about their experiences regarding what they do best, they might not know either, because these things feel like innate, taken-for-granted attributes. It's hard for us to clearly understand the things we take for granted.

It just so happened that he had been practicing his spoken English, which gave him some inspiration. If you want to practice speaking or listening and you look for advice, nine out of ten times, those muddled folks will suggest listening to American radio or TED talks. Isn't that ridiculous? If we could understand that stuff, why would we need to practice?

My friend saw through this completely. He started with enlightenment cartoons for three-year-old American kids, watching one episode a day, following the growth path of American children, all the way up to age-neutral movies like Zootopia. Throughout this process, the difficulty felt very low, so he was highly disciplined, doing one episode a day (short ones five minutes, long ones twenty minutes), checking in daily and shadowing the audio for over a thousand days. Now, his speaking and listening skills are incredibly solid.

This served as a breakthrough, making him realize something in his late thirties: the essence of self-drive is actually simplicity and painlessness.

The main reason he loved studying as a child was that the competition for kids in small towns was not fierce at all. If you put in just a little effort, you could stand out. Then, by doing his homework seriously every day and never falling behind, it felt easy. There was no major resistance on a daily basis, and a habit and sense of identity gradually formed. On one hand, he felt homework wasn't difficult and could be finished quickly; on the other hand, he believed that was just the kind of person he was.

So, throughout his ten-plus years of schooling, eventually getting into a prestigious university, many people thought he was very hardworking. Only he knew that the entire process was completely painless, even a bit enjoyable—anyway, it was much easier than the hustle and bustle of his post-graduation years.

Later, he read a book on self-drive, which put it this way:

Ease is the engine of self-drive;

Consistency is the compound interest of advantage;

Difficulty is something that naturally emerges later.

In other words, for an individual, the hardest part isn't challenging difficult problems, but maintaining consistent output. As long as you can consistently output, your strength will gradually show non-linear growth. That is, you might seem to be making slow, unremarkable progress, but given enough time, suddenly one day, you'll be able to pull off incredibly difficult operations. Friends with driving experience know that as long as you've been driving long enough, your feel for the car gets better and better. Even if you don't deliberately practice complex skills, you can naturally navigate through extremely narrow and complicated road sections.

It's just that most people find this too slow and always want to take shortcuts to tackle higher difficulties, quickly going from starting to giving up in one breath.

He also reflected on why he was such a bookworm. It was mainly because in those early years, he only read storybooks. He read them because they were interesting, not for the sake of learning and growing, let alone to challenge himself. But reading itself has a compound interest effect; after reading for a long time, depth of thought grows, and you become able to digest complex content.

Following this line of thought, he began to restructure his child's learning process—for example, focusing heavily on simple things, ensuring the simple stuff is mastered first, and ignoring the complex stuff for now.

He even told the teacher this when they called to inquire, saying that with the child's brain, they really just couldn't handle it, and there was nothing he could do. He also actively comforted the child, saying that he couldn't figure out those overly complex problems when he was young either, and look, he still got into a top university. What's the rush? As long as you understand the simple stuff, that's enough.

Read some storybooks every day to cultivate the habit of reading. Because he remembered that when he started reading, he didn't read great literature; he started with Doraemon. As for TV and video games, they weren't forbidden either—as long as homework was finished first, they could watch or play for a while.

After sticking to this for a year or two, his child is now very optimistic and confident, proactively starting homework every day after school. Later, they found they could also solve some complex problems, which often surprised him.

By now, he doesn't even need to supervise much. The child firmly believes that as long as they can do all the simple things, they will also be able to get into a good university in the future, so they study very earnestly.

To be honest, he's not entirely sure about this himself. He doesn't see any particular talent in his child, nor does he know if this model will actually lead to good test scores, or how to explain it to the child if things don't work out in the future. He himself became exceptionally strong after the second year of middle school; he used to think it was a talent, but now he's not sure if it's talent or the accumulation of long-term habits. He'll just have to wait and see.

Right now, his child has rushed to around 6th or 7th place in the class, but moving further up is quite a struggle. He reflected that the kids below this ranking generally lack self-drive, so with a slight advantage, his child surpassed them. Moving forward, the competition consists of those who have both high IQ and high self-drive, so the difficulty will definitely surge.

This actually reminds me of what a teacher-reader once told me: in a class, the top three or top five students have a gap-level lead over the rest; their level might be more than a grade ahead. Looking at it now, it's probably because both their intelligence and self-drive are online, and these kids don't even realize this advantage themselves.

As of now, he doesn't necessarily expect his child to replicate his academic success. On one hand, education itself is a filtering process; on the other hand, the devaluation of degrees is obvious. However, he doesn't want his child's entire schooling process to become a continuous torment. That would be a constant blow to their willpower and confidence. By the time the college entrance exam is over and they haven't gotten into a university, the child would be entirely defeated, unable to face life afterward.

There's another question: why did the mother's tutoring process turn into a disaster at first?

Mainly because the mother was also a top student back in the day, so she held the child to the standards of a true top student. She set high standards from the start: getting the easy stuff right was considered normal, but getting it wrong meant getting scolded. She also increased the intensity every day, and it didn't take long to completely crush the child. Lacking confidence and motivation, isn't it natural for the child to constantly fidget and zone out? This made the mother even more breakdown-prone, yelling and screaming, until both mother and child collapsed.

The mother also had a strange notion, believing that the world is harsh and treacherous, so you can't be too lenient with the child, otherwise they won't be able to survive in society later.

But he disagreed. He had a perspective: why do people on the internet say that winter in Northeast China isn't actually that hard to endure? Because it's minus thirty degrees outside, but twenty-six degrees inside the house. With a safe harbor, winter doesn't seem so unbearable.

Suffering is more of a filter; experts will stand out in suffering, but fragile people will be completely destroyed. Their child is clearly not an expert—sensitive, low-energy, with average intelligence and memory—obviously a fragile type. Torturing them vigorously won't make them stronger; it just makes them more fragile.

Speaking of this, it's very clear: why do people have self-drive?

Perhaps a portion of it is innate, but for most, it might be this cycle:

I started.

I finished.

I got feedback.

I can see progress.

I'm willing to come back next time.

This is a continuous positive cycle. Or to take it a step further, self-drive might not be innate, but rather "fed" through continuous tasks. Most people are too impatient with this issue, causing them to assign themselves tasks that are too complex, which crushes their emotions and makes them unwilling to try a second time. Even if they are forced to do it, they lack the motivation and identity. Think about it—can any of us stick to doing things we don't identify with?

Therefore, the problem becomes: don't pursue intensity at the beginning; first pursue painless repetition.

After a long time of painless repetition, momentum is generated. After a long time of momentum, identity is formed. Once identity is stable, difficulty can naturally increase.

At this point, you've probably realized that this article isn't meant to be a parenting guide—though, of course, if you have kids at home, it might offer some inspiration.

But I think what's more important is to be a bit more forgiving of yourself. If you want to cultivate self-drive and long-term habits, proactively lower the difficulty, extend the duration, and pursue painless repetition. Aside from this, there might not be a better way.

Source: Jiubian PRO