When was the last time you watched a child learn something completely outside of their skill set? I mean really sat down and watched the whole process from start to finish.
My middle child learned how to ride a pedal bike recently, at a pretty young age. It’s crazy and impressive to see a little guy his size cruising around like he owns the neighborhood.
A lot of people see him and think, either internally or out loud, “Wow, he’s so young” or “He must have picked that up so fast.”
What they don’t see is the full story.
It took him a year to learn how to crawl, or decide to, depending on who you ask. His older brother walked at ten months. It took him months to do more than walk his strider bike, with plenty of tears along the way. They don’t know that he cried every time we put him on a pedal bike because he couldn’t figure out how to pedal. They don’t know that he spent a full hour on his own, riding a trike around his Opa’s house, just working out the mechanics of pedaling.
The day he “learned” to ride his bike, all you would have seen was about twenty minutes of me guiding his handlebars until he figured out he could go it alone. You would have thought it was crazy fast.
But here’s the number that puts it in perspective. From strider to trike to pedal bike, the whole learning process took about a year. That sounds manageable until you realize that one year is over 33% of his entire life. He spent one third of his time on this earth learning a skill that most people take for granted.
What a Toddler and a Ring Muscle Up Have in Common
This morning we did Ring Muscle Ups in class at CrossFit Winnebago.
For those unfamiliar, it’s a complex gymnastics movement that demands upper body pulling and pressing strength, coordination, and serious motor recruitment. Almost no one in the gym did them as prescribed today, and that’s completely fine.
But Caleb did.
He knocked out the prescribed version of the workout and made it look easy. What most people in that room didn’t know is that Caleb has spent years working on that movement. He’s had to scale the volume in muscle up workouts more times than he can count. He’s put in the reps, dealt with the frustration, stepped away, and come back. Today, once the confidence rebuilt, the movement came back with it.
Nobody saw those years. They just saw Caleb making it look easy.
Anything Worth Learning Is Hard
Anything worth learning is hard. And anything that’s hard is worth trying.
The smile on my little guy’s face when he realized he was riding on his own was worth more than any dollar amount you could put on it. Accomplishment. Pride. Confidence in himself.
It just took a third of his life to get there.
Whatever you’re working on in the gym right now, whether it’s a movement you’ve been chasing for months or a skill you haven’t even attempted yet, the process is longer than you want it to be. That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.
As it turns out, it’s a lot like riding a bike.
