I’ve always said that the sport which correlates best with success in school is swimming. I think that when a kid regularly wakes up early and is on a pool deck at 5:30 or 6am, has to look at a board and see a tough workout that will take an hour to do, that builds a mental toughness that most other sports don’t provide.

I’m not saying a football or gymnastics workout can’t be equally as tough, but I am saying that no other sport routinely creates such a tough mental frame for a workout.

You arrive at swim practice and the workout is on the board. You know your warm up, your workout, your cool down. You know it will take an hour. You know it will be hard. You know that you can’t rely on others for anything other than to push you to work even harder. Now get in the pool.

After years of that, pushing yourself through the hoops that schools create are fairly simple. You understand hard work, you understand putting your head down and muscling through what needs to be done.

Forget for a moment that school isn’t just about that, and think about how valuable a skill that is. How useful it will be in the future?

Where in our lives do we train our bodies or our minds to push through and do something hard, for the payoff later? Because ‘work smarter, not harder’ is a wonderful quote, but it doesn’t build grit and perseverance. We don’t become mentally tough through short cuts. Diets don’t work without discipline. Strength doesn’t come without resistance. Effort can’t be sustained without practice. Patience isn’t built without delay of gratification.

Sometime hard work is the reward.

We love the rewards of our hardships but curse the hardships themselves. ~ Seneca