The Benefits of Learning Something Hard ● Aldous Huxley wrote:

In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.

● The move from active participant to passive consumer is particularly troubling when it comes to music. That’s because the Mozart effect—the idea that music can make us smarter—is only true if you actually play Mozart (or any other composer). We don’t benefit, beyond simply being less bored, from just listening to music while we work or study. But actively learning to play a musical instrument, or sing or compose music, can be beneficial in other areas of life, too, from learning how to read and regulate our emotions to mentally rotating abstract shapes.

● In order to reap the benefits of musical training—or any learning, for that matter—we need to be willing to step outside our comfort zone, to try and fail, and to take risks and get frustrated. Technological innovations often make our lives easier, and we become less able to tolerate the challenges inherent in learning something hard.

● Struggling only makes us better when it comes to learning. And learning takes time and direct experience, which our technological innovations are often robbing us of.

157Lesson 18 The Arts in the Digital Era

● Making things easy is not good for learning. The easier something is, the less likely it is to leave a permanent trace in your brain. When learning feels easy, we get illusions of competence. When it’s hard, we induce lasting neuroplastic changes in our brains.

When we get something right on the first try, we think, Wow, I’ve learned that well! But the truth is that performance in the moment is not a good measure of long-term retention.

● Perhaps G. K. Chesterton, who famously coined the phrase “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” had it right when he wrote:

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

● When you love something so much that you’re willing to toil at it without pay, then it will certainly change you. And like so many amateurs throughout history, you might even end up changing it. But this won’t happen if we allow technology to lure us into a world where we no longer pay for art or entertainment and there’s no more incentive for amateurs to toil away, as their flawed performances are perceived to have no value.

From The Great Courses (link to follow). …