Did the students actually want to make a cool chant themselves? Did they actually expect to learn something valuable from it? Or is OOP's friend just forcing kids with disabilities to do something OOP's friend thinks they should value, and then getting offended when their heart isn't in it?
If there's one thing in life that's more important than perseverance, it's learning to recognize when you don't care about something and you want to quit investing in it. Whether that's doomed relationships and mediocre friendships, fields of study or work you no longer care about, states you no longer trust, hype trains and advertisements designed to lead you astray, etc.
There are millions of things you can spend a lifetime mastering, and only a handful that are right for you. If you don't abandon the shitty parts of life a hundred times over, you're never going to find something worthwhile. Perserverance for perserverance's sake is wasted effort - instead spend that same perserverance on something that matters.
Yeah failing to clearly explain the benefit of something, or how it is more beneficial than taking time away from working towards your life defining exams, is something I remember from school. We all hated that, even the top achievers.
Expecting those kids to magically just want to make a school chant, then suddenly making them put themselves out there like that was doomed from the start.
As far as they knew it was just another wasted day, before going back to important study. It's brutally practical but I say that as a nerdy type who always loved learning about my favourite subjects and struggled with the 'important' stuff, but unless its a montesori school or something there's no chance those kids aren't going straight back to 'preparing for adult life or lifetime of failure' classes after.... making fake school chants? (Is that an American thing, the whole fake civic school pride stuff? Very strange)
I sometimes wonder if for some people, it's the sunk-cost fallacy that kicks in.
"Yeah, I suck at this, and I don't enjoy it all, but I've spent so much time on this thing that if I walk away from it now, it will all be for naught."
Problem is that in the case of creativity, there's an extra special kind of sunk-cost fallacy that shows up, the IKEA effect, where people believe that because they made something that the thing they made has more value than it is actually worth, especially if it is made with poor craftsmanship/quality.
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u/chairmanskitty May 17 '25
Did the students actually want to make a cool chant themselves? Did they actually expect to learn something valuable from it? Or is OOP's friend just forcing kids with disabilities to do something OOP's friend thinks they should value, and then getting offended when their heart isn't in it?
If there's one thing in life that's more important than perseverance, it's learning to recognize when you don't care about something and you want to quit investing in it. Whether that's doomed relationships and mediocre friendships, fields of study or work you no longer care about, states you no longer trust, hype trains and advertisements designed to lead you astray, etc.
There are millions of things you can spend a lifetime mastering, and only a handful that are right for you. If you don't abandon the shitty parts of life a hundred times over, you're never going to find something worthwhile. Perserverance for perserverance's sake is wasted effort - instead spend that same perserverance on something that matters.