Too often, when students are confused by what they’re trying to learn, they feel like something is wrong with them, like they don’t have what it takes, like they don’t belong. But this is a mistake because confusion is a normal part of the learning process.
Remember the mastery path?
All learning starts in the “I don’t get it” cloud. It’s just that, when you’re young, the time and distance between the “I don’t get it” cloud and the “I get it!” star is very short. Most things are simple enough to understand quite quickly.
What nobody tells students is that, the higher you go, the longer it takes to go from confusion to understanding. Difficult concepts usually don’t make sense the first time you engage with them. It takes repeated effort along with unconscious brain processing to arrive at understanding.
But surely experts don’t struggle like this?
You might think that this would cease to be true if you became an expert in your field. But once you reach the upper echelons of an academic domain, confusion actually becomes even more common. If you’re exploring the limits of our knowledge, then by definition, you’re working on problems that no one understands yet. Confusion is your daily life.
In David Yeager’s great book 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, he shares this story:
“A few years ago I talked to a friend who was completing a PhD in mathematics. She told me a story about slinking into her adviser’s office to apologize for having ‘a bad math week,’ which meant that despite lots of effort, she hadn’t solved a certain proof because she made a logical error way up at the top. The adviser laughed knowingly and said, ‘That’s it? Talk to me after you’ve had a bad math year.’ My friend went on to explain that 99 percent of the daily experience of professional mathematicians working at the top of their fields is getting problems wrong.”1
99 percent?!
Yep.
Yeager continues:
“Most people have been socialized from a young age to think that the top math people can get every problem right without difficulty. In fact, struggle and confusion aren’t just a common experience for the world’s top mathematicians – they’re almost all the experience. Most professional mathematicians are working on previously unsolved problems. Of course they struggle if millennia of talented math people couldn’t solve them. The tenacity to persist through struggle is a key skill for professional mathematicians to master.”1
Odds are, you have no intention of becoming a professional mathematician, but whatever you do, you’ll be solving hard problems. Problems other people have so far failed to solve. Problems that don’t have simple or easy solutions. By forcing you to learn confusing topics, school is preparing your brain to handle that kind of confusion.
It’s not supposed to all make sense.
Renowned college professor Uri Treisman “asks students to skim reports coming out of the National Academy of Sciences. ‘Browse the reports, find two or three things that are stunning, and write a one-to-two-page essay,’ he says. Treisman tells the students that they’re future scientists, and scientists like to browse the edges of their disciplines and get an impression of what’s new. Of course, most of the technical reports are inscrutable to college freshmen. Treisman assures them that when he looks at these reports he only understands about 25 percent. Therefore, if the students feel confused, they’re becoming more like professionals in their field because he feels the same way.”1
Experts, it turns out, are confused quite often.
Life isn’t full of easy problems.
I’m reminded of something President Obama said about his time in office:
“One of the first things I discovered as President of the United States was that no decision that landed on my desk had an easy, tidy answer. The black-and-white questions never made it to me — somebody else on my staff would have already answered them.”2
Odds are, you’ll never be the president of the United States, but as you advance in your career or become the head of a household, you’ll be faced with many questions that don’t have easy answers – decisions that require deep thinking and difficult trade-offs. By forcing you to wrestle with difficult topics, school is preparing you to handle these challenges.
We need to teach resilience.
Unfortunately, that’s where schools typically stop. They give you challenges, but they don’t teach you how to handle them without feeling disheartened. Worse, they tend to make you feel inadequate if difficult topics don’t come easily to you.
“School often teaches that correct answers are obvious. Reality is the opposite.
We drill kids on facts that seem obvious once known, never mentioning that almost all of them were buried behind a door of ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ Gravity baffled us for millennia. We didn’t think hand washing mattered, even the idea of germs causing sickness sounded insane.
Every breakthrough started as heresy. But we teach kids to flee from the very feeling that precedes discovery.” –Shane Parrish3
The classes you take at school aren’t supposed to be easy. The problems you’re trying to solve aren’t supposed to be easy either. They’re supposed to be hard.
The difficulty, the confusion, and the struggle are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that you’re moving forward, that you’re growing stronger.
If we can teach students that, then we’ll really be setting them up for long-term success.
1Yeager, David, PhD. 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Avid Reader Press. 2024.
2Obama, Barack. “How I Approach the Toughest Decisions.” Medium. December 9, 2020.
3Parrish, Shane. “Effort Requires No Talent.” Farnam Street. August 31, 2025.
Chris Loper has been working as a tutor and academic coach since 2014, racking up over 13,000 hours of experience supporting students.
Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the co-creator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families.
Chris writes the popular self-improvement blog Becoming Better, where he also offers habit coaching, helping busy adults with habit formation and productivity.
Chris’s most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more.
In 2021, he published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons.
He lives in Issaquah, WA, where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.