Suffering and Independence...

Suffering vs Independence. I'm wondering if it's a tradeoff. Is it a trade-off? I don't think it is.

What's the context? At a bad point in life, things aren't going your way. The world is against you. The situations just don't line up. Being specific:

Jack Smith works hard at school. He wants to succeed, to do something that matters in the world, to help people, to find his passion. He loves math. Walking into math class to hear about trigonometry, he grins at Mr. X on the way in the door. Jack does his homework rigorously. At 3 o'clock, he makes a brisk walk from the school across the street to the town library, where he settles into the back left corner at a clear desk between a couple convenient bookshelves and he puts his nose in a book. With a sheet of lined paper at his side, he neatly does out exercises, writes up notes, and finishes Spanish translations.

Jack is the model of success. His life is so well ordered, he's on a path, and yet his heart aches a little. One day he'll find love to ease this ache; he'll do great things to ease the ache. Maybe the ache is a hunger, and maybe it's perfectionism. Perfectionism is a winning strategy, as Tom Brady has so aptly demonstrated.

Jack goes to college. The work is challenging, but he is given a lot of unstructured time to deal with it. He has fabulous successes, and traumatic failures. It's the failures that get you... "I'm not a C student!" The thought is ringing in his head. It takes one 'C' to ring that bell, and no number of A's to silence it. Honestly, even an A can represent less than perfection.

Aaaannnd there's a collapse. He's in a slump. He failed a class, he's taking a break. He was running his own life, and the suffering was great. Maybe he just didn't have a chance to think about "how" he ran his life.

----END

What?!? He didn't have a chance to think how? What else was he worrying about? He was thinking about "why", and he knew the answer to that since high school, maybe earlier. He wanted to do the best job for his "why", he wanted to work efficiently. When you want to maximize your own productivity, I'd imagine you think about the "how".

So what was missing? Where did we fail him? Unfair expectations? Independence?

I want to say his confidence did not align with reality. In his reality, he couldn't stay confident. It's too hard to believe in yourself, when you find yourself failing your own requirements. Even if your requirements are "average pace" for yourself, it doesn't sound wonderful to fail them 50% of the time.

On a different tack, easing requirements, setting low expectations, can lead to a worse result. Nurturing confidence while building expectations feels complicated.

What do we do at the bottom of the valley? Confidence is non-existent. We can hardly set an expectation, failing feels dangerous. Does this guy get freedom? Independence? To fail again? Where will he find a direction, and diagnose a root cause of failure. Will it help if we, the audience, tell him where he's gone astray? What will it take for him to acknowledge our claim? To believe it?

Should we tell him what to do? Are we taking away his confidence now? Or building it? We are definitely undermining independence, and yet we are creating a rhythm, a routine. We are developing expectations, and an understanding of the procedure to achieve them.

You can help someone understand how to do something by driving them through the process repeatedly, although it feels like you are unlikely to make them want to do it. I think the ideal is to guide them through the process, interacting frequently with a big ear while letting them hold the reigns.