As a culture, we seek to create gentle environments for young children.

We give them thoughtfully designed toys and games and plenty of encouragement. We let them play with paints and make a mess. We tolerate it while they bang around on the piano. We offer them opportunities to help us with tiny tasks around the house, the garden, and in the kitchen.

It’s okay if it takes years for them to learn — we have years.

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How do you know whether your struggle to find success is due to the normal challenges inherent in any endeavor or because you’re not any good?

It’s a question I hear a lot. And it’s based on the assumption that somewhere, an objective assessment of your work can be made.

What would you do differently if you could know for sure?

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Nobody talks about this book anymore, but The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua made a big impression on me when I read it back in 2011.

At the time, I was a full-time music teacher and the director of a music school that I had founded. I read Chua’s accounts of her daughters’ brutal six-hour classical music daily practice regimens with horror.

Horror at how badly she apparently treated them and made music a misery.

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One of the luxuries of adulthood is that you can spend most of your time doing things that you’re already good at.

As you come to have the means to do so, you can regulate your environment so that you have few surprises and everything is where you like it.

Consequently, you don’t have to be uncomfortable unless something happens beyond your control or you choose to do something new.

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In the first stage of learning, we figure out what to do.

The next stage is to be able to do it.

Then comes the ability to do it well, over and over again, over a period of time.

In your profession, projects, and pastimes, you find yourself playing in all three of these stages at once, based on your knowledge, skill, and stamina in different aspects of the work.

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