Why You Should Do Hard Things

When a teenager asks why they should bother with calculus, you can feel the eye roll waiting in the wings. And to be honest, they’ve got a point. Most adults don’t use calculus. You don’t need it to grocery shop or file your taxes.

You could try the classic “It’ll help you get into college,” but that just leads to more questions. Why does college care about calculus? “It’ll help you get a good job,” you might say next. But unless that job involves physics or engineering, how is that supposed to make sense?

I remember asking the same questions. I didn’t see the point. I wasn’t a bad student — just a selective one. I knew I could pass when I cared enough to try. But most of the time, I didn’t. I thought I’d figured out the system. Do just enough to skate by and save your energy for something more interesting.

What I wish someone had told me back then is that the real reason to take calculus isn’t the math itself. It’s to prove you can handle something hard.

That proof is useful in ways no one explains. Every hard thing you push through adds a tiny bit of evidence that you’re capable. It’s not about building confidence in some abstract sense. It’s about showing yourself — through actual experience — that you can stick with difficult things. It’s proof that when something feels overwhelming, you’ll find a way to figure it out.

And once you start collecting that proof, it sticks with you. If you’ve made it through calculus — or organic chemistry, or training for a half-marathon — you don’t feel quite as thrown when life throws you something new. You have a history of figuring things out. That’s what you lean on.

But if you avoid hard things? Every bump in the road feels like a mountain. You have no reason to believe you’ll make it to the other side because you’ve never done it before.

That’s why calculus matters. Not because you’ll ever need to solve differential equations at a dinner party, but because it’s a built-in opportunity to practice doing something hard. If calculus isn’t your thing, fine — find something else. But it has to be real. No shortcuts, no half-assing.

If you’re not doing well in school because you’re spending all your time building a video game from scratch, cool. You’re still in the game. But if you’re coasting because TikTok is more fun than homework, that’s different.

For my kids, I care a lot less about their grades than whether they’re building this kind of proof for themselves. If calculus is how they do it, great. If it’s learning guitar, training for a race, or writing a book, even better. What matters is that they leave the experience knowing they can handle something difficult.

If you don’t have that kind of proof yet, find it. You don’t need to do anything monumental. Just pick something a little out of your depth. Stick with it long enough to feel like you’re in over your head. Then keep going. That’s where the proof lives.

And once you have it, you’ll carry it into everything else. The next hard thing won’t feel as hard. You’ll know exactly how to approach it, because you’ve already done it before.