It's good to be back. I hope you are all staying safe and healthy during these crazy times.
Hedonistic Motivation and My Cone of Shame!
Let me ask you a question.
If you ordered one hundred street tacos and seventy of them ended up being Lamb Gyros, would you give that restaurant an excellent Yelp review?
If you invested in stock worth $100 per share, and it went to $30 a share, would you consider it a wise investment?
If your school only graduated 30% of its students, would that be a point of pride for the community?
The answer, of course, is NO!
I think we can all agree that a 70% failure rate is abysmal! Sure, if you're Jet's or Giants fan, you would take it, but any other bottom-feeding, under-achieving lackey who achieves such results should be forced to wear the "cone of shame" until they can sufficiently demonstrate a higher level of competency. Right?
Well then, we better order a bunch of cones.
Did you know that between the first day a student picks up an instrument and the day they graduate high school, approximately 70% of students will fall off the music-making wagon?
70%!
(Insert awkward pause and ominous music.)
Listen, I am not throwing shade at anyone, and as the ringmaster for Be Part of the Music, I should be the first to wear the most oversized cone. I just want to talk about this and see what we can figure out.
We all want every child to experience making music. And, we know that there will be some fall off. But, I think we can do better than 70%. But, to stem the tide, we need to understand why kids are leaving music. And, I think one of the why's, is Hedonic motivation.
According to Wikipedia, Hedonic motivation is "a person's pleasure and pain tolerance, and the influence it plays on their willingness to move towards or away from a goal."
In other words, how motivated are we to do what is difficult over that which is easy?
It should come as no surprise that humans are wired to want to do things that make us feel good and away from doing things that make us feel uncomfortable. Our brains perceive hard work as bad because it's hard, and light work as good because it's easy. We can overcome these biases by carefully considering the information and benefits, but if we "go with our gut," we will almost always choose the easier path.
So how do we do hard things when our brains constantly tell us to avoid effort? Provide it with the correct value proposition. It's called expediency bias: get your mind to do what is right by being honest, methodical and adequately considering all the variables. This will allow the brain to bypass what is easy (expedient). for what is right.
So, perhaps part of the problem is not how we teach, but how we recruit. As the primary and premier purveyor of music-related recruitment materials, I am uniquely qualified to make the following statement: WE MIGHT BE RECRUITING WRONG.
Is your recruiting program more Hedonistic or realistic? What impact do you think it has on your enrollment?
We recruit kids based on the Hedonic motivation without providing complete information. This plays right into the hands of Expediency Bias. Think about it, most of us something akin to:
Hey kids, join music; it will be FUN!
That's a lie! Well, at least in part.
Yes, they will have fun, but it will also be more demanding and take longer to learn than they might think or we lead them to believe. In other words – they joined on something of a false premise.
Perhaps we should be a little more honest with the kids and parents. Maybe we should give them the complete story, something like...
Hey kids, join music; it will be FUN! But it will also be hard! REALLY HARD! Like, simultaneously reading a foreign language, while doing Morse code with your fingers, and making raspberry sounds with your lips at the same time type of hard. And, as long as we're being totally honest, we should probably mention that you are not going to be very good for a couple of years.
Doesn't make for a great poster, but that is the truth.
It's hard to be completely honest while also be compelling. It's not easy to have a serious discussion about long-term ramifications with someone who does not have long-term life experience. It's hard to encourage the Hedonistic motivation while placating the Expediency Bias.
So maybe, just maybe, we try both approaches.
Hey kids, join music. It will be FUN!
(Whispering) Ppssttttt... Hey parents, have your kids join music. It will be challenging, but it will also be WORTH IT!
In the end, we as a profession need to be aware that we are recruiting the parents as much if not more so than the student, and that they require different strategies, conversations, and value propositions. Kids join, but parents allow them to quit. So maybe it's time for a conversation among the adults.
Would we start fewer kids? Likely. Would our attrition rate drop? Also likely. And keep in mind, lowering our drop rate by just 10% would mean millions more students making music every day. And that is something to seriously consider.
Also, this cone is getting really uncomfortable.
Have a great week!
-Scott
p.s. Just a friendly reminder. If you would like to continue to receive the weekly edition of this e-zine, you can click here to become a Patron. I hope you understand the need and want to be a part of the community.
Scott Lang Leadership 505 South Camellia Drive Chandler, Arizona 85225 United States