Steve Magness@stevemagness
Most people fundamentally misunderstand hard work and drive. And our kids suffer because of it.
No, not in the “you need more discipline” way. In the opposite direction.
When Alysa Liu won gold, I wrote a social media post that went viral on the power of joy and autonomy.
fterward I heard the same critique from many, “Sure, fun is great, but if she wasn’t forced (to train) when she was young, she would have lost to someone who was.”
That take reveals everything wrong with how we think about motivation.
We make this fundamental error. We see the hard work of younger performers and think, think, “Hmm, I didn’t practice baseball or math or chess as an 8 year old. Someone would have had to make me do it…” So we assume that there must be an adult behind them forcing them to practice for hours upon hours. After all, it’s not natural for kids to work, they just want to play. And that’s the mistake. For some kids, what adults label work IS play.
This is precisely what psychologist Ellen Winner found when she studied all kinds of prodigies, from math to music to art. Children as young as two weren’t driven by mom or dad, they had innate desire to do the thing religiously. Often, with the parent having to beg and plead to get them to stop. In her book, she described a child who never wanted to stop drawing with markers, for example.
This pull was so universal in prodigies that Winner coined it the Rage to Master. Notice it’s not the rage to WIN. It’s about mastery, a strong intrinsic pull to keep exploring the pursuit. More recent work by Susan Assouline on prodigies came to the same conclusion “Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts, motivated from within.”
Winner’s research went a step further. If the environment was overly controlling by a parent or other adult, it often led to an extinguishing of this rage to master and a lack of later success. Adults were needed to support, but that support should not tip over into some pseudo-authoritarian style. It should be autonomy-supportive. We’ve subsequently found the same thing in sports, where autonomy supportive coaching tends to leave to thriving, while more controlling methods lead to higher rates of burnout.
It’s hard to grasp this unless you’ve witnessed it or experienced it.
When I was 14, he was doing 10+ mile long runs on a regular basis. By 17, I was running 13+ miles a day, every day, for months on end. From the outside looking in, it looked insane. And it kind of was. You may assume there must have been some parent or coach pushing me to do that. But nope…it was just me doing my thing. I was obsessed with running. In fact, my parents and coaches almost certainly would have liked it if he took it a little easier every once in a while. (particularly on family vacations…) But as a phenom who went on to reach number 1 in the nation, I just loved training. Sure, parts of it were hard. But in high school, I found joy in the process. I had the rage to master.
I’ve seen it in other young athletes and performers I’ve worked with through the years. And I’ve witnessed in adults. It’s this inner fire to want to pursue a particular thing that is borderline obsessive.
It’s why when after being asked about his marathon like training as a youth hockey star, Wayne Gretzky said, “No one told me to do it…The only way a kid is going to practice is if it’s total fun for him... and it was for me.” And the poster child for pushing your child early, Tiger Woods, had this to say, “Don’t force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.”
It’s easy to dismiss this as after the fact storytelling, but as someone whose lived it and coached it, it’s real. And once again, it’s exactly what research tells us!
We can see the same thing on a smaller scale in most elementary school classrooms. Go ask a teacher if they have a kid who is obsessed with something.
They’ll light up and tell you about the kid who won’t stop reading, thinking, or talking about Giraffes. Every project, paper, and story time is about Giraffes. They spend inordinate amounts of time learning every fact known to a 2nd grader, often reading well above their grade on this particular subject. You see the same with kids in drawing, coding, reading, writing, and any number of other pursuits. Sure, it’s not always full blown rage to master, but it’s clearly driven by a strong inner desire and curiosity.
What we as adults would call researching, little Johnny or Suzy thinks of as play.
And that’s the point. When you have higher levels of intrinsic motivation, the pursuit is a bit more like play.
In many ways, it’s not that much different from the runner who loves going out and cranking the miles and doing lung searing workouts. From the outside looking in, (and for many novices) it looks miserable. How could someone do that. It’s hard work. But to the runner doing it, it becomes a bit like play. You enjoy the discomfort.
Olympic Champion runner Herb Elliott described training in much the same way, “I ran to explore the frontiers of the human body. It gave me immense satisfaction,” before going on to describe training as “soul-freeing.”
Or consider the aforementioned ALysa Liu, who said “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.”
The gap between how outsiders perceive the work and how the person doing it experiences the work is enormous. It’s the same with a young prodigy. We could use the same for any number of hobbies or interest. We all know someone who loves to work on their car, spend hours writing, or all sorts of pursuits. And we also know the wisdom of the old adage that tells us about being careful making your interest your job. Because once you do, you lose a bit of that spark.
It’s not to say that working hard comes easy or that every child is going to want to practice hours every day. Many won’t. That’s normal.
But when we see the crazy hard work, the teens running 15 miles a day, or skaters practicing hours a day, and think it must be the parent or coach…it sets us up for forcing and control. The exact opposite of what allowed Liu to thrive.
Sure, some kids may survive the onslaught of external pressure for a while, but the research is pretty clear on the consequences. A slew of studies on parenting and coaching and youth performers shows:
-The most common cause of young people dropping out of sport is their basic psychological needs not being met.
-Parental autonomy support is significantly correlated with the Self-Determined Motivation Index. Autonomy-supportive coaching negatively predicts burnout and positively predicts coach-athlete relati
-Controlling coaching positively predict athlete burnout, psychological needs thwarting, and perfectionism.
-Controlling parenting style is associated with “feelings of depression, anger, diminished motivation, and even the breakdown of relationships.
-Athletes who perceived higher frequency of pressuring parental behaviors reported higher burnout, controlled motivation, motivation, and lower autonomous motivation.
The above is part of the reason why the early performer to adult performer pipeline is so broken. A massive 2025 study in Science analyzed 34,839 elite performers found that only about 10% of world-class adults were top performers as kids. The forced, early-specialized kids disproportionately fell off. Adult world-class performers had more diverse practice and gradual early progress.
When some here intrinsic motivation, they think it means that it’s all joy and curiosity driven. That’s not what it means. We always have a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We aren’t the Buddha or Jesus. But what the above research points to is we need mostly intrinsic. And the world pulls us towards the other direction. Especially when we have a coach, parent, or system that makes us think we must be forced to practice if we want the gold.
Others, hear autonomy-supportive and think permissive or completely hands off. That’s not what it means. You are still there to support. You are still there to set expectations and standards on things that matter. But the kid is driving the motivation ship. It’s their choice. And as they grow from child to tween to tween, you give them more and more. As I outlined in Do Hard Things, it’s coupling expectations with support.
And that’s what you realize when you coach kids with this drive: your job isn’t to push them harder. It’s to hold them back. Because if you ask, they’ll do something crazy. They’ll run 15 miles on a Tuesday. They’ll skate for 4 hours straight. Your job is to be the governor, not the gas pedal.
The fire within supports doing the crazy stuff. If it predominately comes from the external, or we suck the joy out of it, we might be able to survive for a while, but eventually it catches up. We burnout.
So what?
Don’t apply your lack of desire to run, skate, read, write, or whatever to every other child. Sometimes a kid gets captured by a pursuit. It often happens when skill, curiosity, interest, and opportunity align. It’s why diverse sampling as a kid is so important. You allow your kid to find that match. Yes, they have to spend enough time doing the thing to see if it’s an interest. But…too often when we force too early, we miss the thing that will develop into a passion. Not all of us will have a rage to master. But chances are we all have experienced a variation of this in our own lives. Our goal is to cultivate that, especially with kids.
It’s why one of the most established theories in all of psychology, Self Determination Theory, tells us we need to develop autonomy, competency, and belonging to stoke that intrinsic fire. In other words, we find that drive in pursuits that allow us to make progress in something that’s meaningful to us, and let’s us be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
It might seem like you can shortcut this process and just do your best imitation of a controlling parent to force your kid to practice more. You might even justify it in your head by saying, “they’ll thank me later…” But the truth is we almost lost the magic of an Olympic performer because she burned out because that joy, that rage to master, was squashed.
Hold on to that magic. Create the environment and space for it. But be careful in trying to force it. It’ll almost always guarantees that the light will go out, or just never ignite.
-Steve
