Have you ever come out of a practice session feeling just useless and totally deflated? Where nothing seemed to feel good, you didn't feel like progress was made at all and to be honest you were probably regressing?
My son's 10, and if you've been reading these emails for a while, you know he's soccer obsessed. He's quite good at it, but a lot of that came naturally. At this age, kids start to play pretty seriously, they play on larger fields, can start doing "headers" and get scouted for travel leagues. The game is more competitive and he's reached the point where he the learning curve starts shallowing out.
So, he comes in from doing his juggling this morning (that drill where you repeatedly kick the ball, without using the hands or arms, in order to keep it in the air) and says, clearly frustrated, "Mom, I only got 23 today". His record is 54. He continues, "I just can't do it anymore. What's the point?! Ughhhh."
Because he's my son (and I like to try out little kid-sized nuggets of wisdom on him), he knows that growth and improvement happens at the point of frustration, and also that foundational skills should be practiced every day. Yet there are days when we all just feel … yeah, incompetent.
So I told him about the stonecutter:
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Written by a Danish social reformer named Jacob Riis, this quote hangs famously in the San Antonio Spurs locker room as the team's core mission and philosophy. (So much so that the head coach, Gregg Popovich has a wine label called, aptly, Rock and Hammer.
Check out this video to appreciate what it takes to split a rock in half!