I read a news piece recently at our sister site, Hot Air, about grade inflation at Harvard. It said that 60% of all grades are now A’s, meaning that at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, grades no longer distinguish between excellence and mediocrity. The article quoted students who burst into tears or skipped classes at the thought of stricter grading. One said it was “soul-crushing.”
It made me think of two people I’ve known.
One was a friend’s new boyfriend. “He wants to be a writer!” she told me proudly. He was handsome, funny, and charming. But after exchanging a few words with him, I realized something: he didn’t want to be a writer. He wanted to have written. He wanted the aura, not the work, the title, not the task.
The other was a friend whose story I edited. I was honest with her: praised what worked, cut what didn’t, told her the truth. Two years later, she brought me another story. Except it wasn’t another story. It was the same one, completely unchanged and unedited, as if my feedback had been decorative rather than instructive.
Both of them wanted the reward without the struggle.
That, I think, is the deeper sickness that the Harvard story reveals. It isn’t just about schools or grades; it’s about a cultural loss of appetite for mastery. People no longer want to learn, to wrestle, to become. They want the final state of being seen as someone who has arrived.
We have built a culture that celebrates arrival rather than becoming. The titles, the credentials, the followers — all are trophies meant to prove success, even when there is nothing behind them. It’s not enough to work hard and grow; you must look successful while doing it.
The Cult of the Instant Expert
We are obsessed with celebrity. Ask a teenager what they want to be when they grow up, and the most common answer is now “influencer.” It looks so easy: just look pretty online (with a little digital assistance) and boom! Followers hanging on your every word, sponsorships, cash, and a sense of importance untethered from effort or skill.
But celebrity isn’t mastery. It’s a simulation of accomplishment, a mirror world where being seen doing something is more important than actually doing it.
Mastery, by contrast, is invisible most of the time. It lives in repetition, failure, and the quiet discovery that comes after hours of frustration. There is a particular joy that blooms when you finally get it — the lightbulb moment when you suddenly understand deep literary structure, or when (my personal bête noire) the quadratic equation finally makes sense.
That joy is the soul of learning. It’s the pleasure of earning your way into understanding, the moment the mountain reveals its view because you climbed it yourself.
The Perfection Trap
“The perfect is the enemy of the good,” wrote Voltaire, and he was right. I see too many children, including one of my own, paralyzed by the thought of making a mistake. They’d rather not try at all than risk failing publicly or “looking bad.”
That kind of fear doesn’t come from laziness. It comes from a world that rewards the image of effortless brilliance, where the first attempt has to be perfect, the first draft publishable, the first performance viral. If you believe you must already be an expert before you start, why would you ever begin?
Teaching children out of perfectionism is hard. It means teaching them that being wrong is part of the process, that even the best scientists, artists, and inventors live in a constant cycle of trial, error, and discovery. The antidote to perfectionism is permission: permission to experiment, to fail, to start ugly and grow from there.
The Cure: Relearning the Joy of Mastery
We can’t change the culture overnight, but we can rebuild the love of mastery one home, one classroom, and one child at a time.
Model the process, not just the result. Let your children see you struggling to learn something new: a musical instrument, a recipe, a repair. When they watch you fumble, persist, and finally succeed, they learn that effort is normal and joy lives on the other side of frustration.
Pass on your own skills. Teach them how to cook, build, write, draw, or fix things. A child who learns that skill and craft can be inherited also learns that knowledge is generational, something to steward, not just consume.
Celebrate improvement, not perfection. Replace “You’re so smart” with “You worked really hard on that.” Praise persistence, patience, and curiosity. Praise hard work, not intellect. Help them associate pride with the process of getting better rather than the illusion (or even reality) of being naturally gifted. And remember that even the gifted children thrive on challenge.
Normalize mistakes. Share your own. Laugh about them. Ask your child, “What did you learn from that?” instead of “Why did you do that?” The more ordinary error feels, the less power it has to freeze them.
Let them fail safely. Failure is information. Shielding children from it teaches fragility; letting them experience it teaches resilience. Encourage them to try again, differently.
Limit performative validation. Not every accomplishment needs to be shared online. Help them understand the difference between doing something and posting about it.
Expose them to masters. Take them to concerts, galleries, workshops, or even YouTube tutorials that show people who have spent years honing a craft. Let them see the beauty of competence and the serenity of real expertise.
Reward curiosity. When a child asks “why,” don’t rush to Google. Explore the question with them. Learning how to think through a problem is far more valuable than being handed an answer.
When parents, teachers, and mentors model patience, discipline, and wonder, they reignite a fundamental truth: human beings are designed to learn, not just to appear accomplished.
The cure for our cultural malaise isn’t another movement or program. It’s a return to something ancient: the love of doing something well for its own sake. Because the journey, not the title, is where we meet both excellence and ourselves.
