Austin Scholar #222: The three things that actually make a kid love learning

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Austin Scholar #222: The three things that actually make a kid love learning<br>& a summer playbook for building all three

Austin Scholar<br>Jun 21, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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This week from Austin Scholar...<br>The three things that actually make a kid love learning

A summer playbook for building all three

Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

This last Thursday was the final day of Alpha NYC’s first year, and the final day of my internship there. I left the end-of-year party with a tote bag of photos with the kids and a kind of grief I wasn’t expecting. I went in thinking I’d make some workshops and teach a few life skills. What actually happened is I watched two ten-year-olds pitch a business to an investor, a middle schooler design a curriculum for the younger kids and then teach it, and a fourth grader corner me to explain why everyone should love quantum physics. I left believing in kids more than I did in September. They are capable of so much more than the adults around them usually let them try, and I am going to miss them a lot.<br>I’ve also been thinking about them all week because two weeks ago I wrote about motivation, and the inbox response was basically one question, asked twenty different ways: okay, but how do I get my kid to actually love learning?<br>So that’s what this week is about.

The three things that actually make a kid love learning

The story most parents have been sold is that loving learning is a personality trait. Some kids have it, some kids don’t.<br>I don’t buy it. After watching hundreds of kids at Alpha (including my younger sister, who just graduated and is one of the most well-read teenagers I know) and after going through it myself, I think a love of learning is three things stacked on top of each other.<br>Here are the three:<br>Kids love things they’re good at.

Kids love things their friends respect.

Kids come out of the womb curious.

1. Kids love things they’re good at<br>I am a math major at Stanford. I would have bet you a thousand dollars at 12 years old that this sentence would never be true.<br>I struggled through math for a long time. I felt like I was spending ten times longer on it than the rest of my peers, and I always just felt like there was something missing, like everyone else had been handed a key that I had not. I was getting through it, but I wasn’t enjoying it, and I definitely wasn’t in love with it.<br>The thing that flipped it was a book, and I am only a little embarrassed about why I picked the book up. I was at a bookstore in Oxford (long story), and I wanted to seem smart, so instead of grabbing the romance novel I actually wanted, I walked over to the math section and pulled down Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. I thought I was going to skim three pages and put it back. I ended up reading it cover to cover.<br>Strogatz doesn’t open with the chain rule. He opens with the idea that calculus is what happens when you take any curved, complicated, continuous thing in the universe and slice it into infinitely many simple pieces, analyze those, and add them back together. That’s the whole game. Once I actually understood what calculus was, I had this overwhelming reaction of oh my god, this is the most beautiful thing humans have ever invented. And then, the very next semester, I was good at it. A year later, I’m a math major and genuinely love it.<br>Competence first, love second. Pretty much every time.<br>The research is consistent on this. A 2023 longitudinal review in Annual Review of Psychology by Eccles and Wigfield found that whether a kid feels competent at a subject right now is a stronger predictor of whether she’ll value it five years from now than basically anything else — including how fun the subject is or how good her teacher was. Ryan and Deci’s whole self-determination framework names the same thing: competence is one of the three psychological needs without which intrinsic motivation never really gets off the ground.<br>The parent move here is the one that feels backwards: stop trying to make the subject fun, and start making sure your kid is actually getting good at it. A kid who is two grade levels behind in math will never love math. A kid who hits mastery on their multiplication facts in second grade starts to enjoy math, because every problem they meet from then on feels solvable instead of humiliating.<br>2. Kids love things their friends respect<br>You all know I love David Yeager’s 10 to 25. I have brought it up in essentially every other newsletter for the last six months, and I’m going to keep doing it, because it really is the best book on adolescent motivation I have ever read and it is applicable to almost everything I write about.<br>Yeager’s whole argument is that from roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and...