Hobby time

Any one thing that children can engage in, apart from their schoolwork, can teach them all the success principles of life. It may be learning music, playing a sport or any other hobby like painting or dance. 

The important thing is to choose something that firstly they love to do, secondly they are good at doing to some extent and thirdly is possible for us as parents to commit our time and money resources to, for the longer term. For Adi, those 3 conditions were in place for learning the keyboard and now graduating to the piano. 

As he started taking extra classes for learning, it meant extra time commitment and discipline because other children are playing outside during that time. 

For the first 1-2 days he was a little uncomfortable because the teacher was not familiar, and was a bit strict too for his liking. But then he figured out that good teachers are strict about doing things right. Also, soon he was working harder at home to just get that approval from his teacher. 

Since his classes are affiliated to a music board examination, there were mock tests before the exam. He had no exposure to exams till now and went totally unprepared for the first mock exam. He scored a 40 on a 100 and just couldn’t believe that he was capable of doing that bad at anything. That same night, out of shame and disgust, he made a decision to practise for 30 minutes each day and wanted to score a 100. Success will require hard work and commitment. 

The second mock exam he scored a 65 and realised that his best was not good enough and increased the practise time to 45 minutes finally leading to a decent 81 in the final exam. He could clearly see the connection between practise and results.

There are times he doesn’t practise and all I have to tell him is that if he doesn’t want to do it, I can just simply stop his classes right away. But he wants to learn and chooses to work hard at it. That’s what success in life is all about...doing what you love and choosing to work hard to become good at it....to be able to love it even more...