Exercise the Passion Muscle

the tip in one minute — the full article is this page · clip in Spanish for now

There’s a muscle almost no educational plan mentions and that decides more than almost all of them: the muscle of getting passionate. The capacity for something to matter to you so much that the whole brain lines up behind it — memory, attention, purpose, emotion, all pulling in the same direction. That muscle, like any other, develops with exercise.

And here’s the uncomfortable question: in your daughter’s or your son’s life, who decides what it gets exercised on? Because someone decides. If it isn’t you with a menu of options, it will be the megacorporations, the influencers, the toy store, the seasonal ad campaign. The algorithm has a plan for your child’s attention. The question is whether you have a better one.

The practice: expose, observe, water

The proposal is simple to state and takes a lifetime to execute:

Lay out options. Deliberately varied, in small samples: the library, a sport, an instrument, the comic book, the science kit, the museum, the cousin’s fandom. You set the menu; the choice isn’t yours.
Watch which one they respond to. The measuring instrument is your attention: what do they come back to on their own? What do they talk about in the car without anyone asking? That’s the signal — not what you dreamed for them, nor what the screen advertises.
Water where it sprouted. When something catches, the support goes there: the classes for that, the books about that, the conversations about that, your genuine interest in that.

Allow — and enable — them to get passionate: about soccer, about baseball, about the Marvel cinematic universe. Because that’s what passion is: the brain wired up with intention, purpose and emotion. There is no cognitive state more expensive to manufacture or cheaper to waste.

Fandom is a gym in disguise

Think about it for a moment. Any eight-year-old can name and describe dozens of spells from the Harry Potter books. Any Percy Jackson fan can list the entire Greek pantheon — with each god’s entanglements and the adventures and misfortunes of their offspring. That may not look like a path to top marks in math or science.

It may be one. And it may be more effective than any technique we try to get their brains working: memorizing, associating concepts, structuring ideas, flows, consequences — building knowledge. Listen to two kids of any age argue for hours over the minutest details of Iron Man or Death Note, of Messi, Mbappé, Yamal or Haaland, of Bobby Witt Jr. or Elly De la Cruz, or of their K-Pop stars. What sounds like recess is high-performance training: taxonomies, chronologies, comparative statistics, evidence-based argument. The muscle doesn’t know whether it’s training on Greek gods or the periodic table — but it only shows up to practice when there’s passion in the room.

The practical consequence for a parent is liberating: you don’t need them to love what you chose. You need them to love something — and to be nearby when they find it.

Grandma’s objection (and the thirteen-year answer)

Here I have to speak in the first person, because I’ve lived this practice — and it comes with its classic objection at home.

My son’s grandmother used to tell me: “you’re going to spoil him with so many toys and books.” I disagreed: it wasn’t abundance for abundance’s sake — they were options, alternative sources of stimulation to explore. I suppose Montessori would have agreed with me; the grandmother, never entirely.

Thirteen years later, what I see at home — and I tell it as testimony, not as formula — is this: my son tells me “dad, we don’t need more games, we don’t need more books — I still have a couple in the queue.” He has never asked me for a toy he saw in an ad. He doesn’t live with a sense of lack, but with a clear notion — conscious and unconscious — of what he likes, what satisfies him and what gives him joy.

The path was this practice’s cycle, turn after turn. When he discovered Minecraft, we painted his room like a Minecraft world. When the passion was Ducktales, all the comics and the vintage Picsou collections appeared — my sister Nani helped with that from Switzerland. When he went all-in on Harry Potter, there were the books and the props. When Percy Jackson arrived, the whole house went Greek and mythological — and then Egyptian, and Norse, as Rick Riordan expanded his literary empire. When he discovered Portal, there were the board game, the t-shirts and the stickers. And with Gravity Falls we reached the summit of the trade: we dressed up as Dipper and Grunkle Stan. We exercised the passion muscle. Today it’s Hollow Knight, Silksong, Deltarune and Undertale. Tomorrow it will be cardiac surgery or nuclear fusion. The muscle is the same.

And the counterweight, which is half the lesson: my son has perfect musical ear — he replicates a melody after hearing it once — and the electric piano, which wasn’t cheap, gathers dust in his room. And I am at peace with that. Because the practice isn’t “everything I buy must pay off”: it’s expose, observe, water — and accept the dust on what didn’t catch. The piano isn’t a failure. It’s information. Passion doesn’t get invoiced.

The three traps

So the advice doesn’t get warped along the way:

The catalog trap. Giving options is not buying everything. The public library, the loan, the trial class explore just as well as the expensive collection — and teach better. The menu is built from samples, not from receipts.
The project trap. Observing your child’s response is not measuring him, nor turning his passion into a résumé, nor into an investment with expected returns. The fandom is his. You are the props supplier and the informed audience — not the portfolio manager.
The badly-carried-dust trap. If the abandoned instrument becomes a recurring reproach, the whole practice is poisoned: the child learns that exploring carries a fine — and stops exploring. What gathers dust gets left in peace.

Start this week

One new sample on the menu: a book on a subject he’s never touched, a different outing, the comic someone lent you.
Observe for three days: what did he come back to on his own?
Water one single thing: one more book of that, one conversation about that, your real interest in that.
And make peace with one pending patch of dust: that instrument, that kit, that class that didn’t catch — it gets archived without a speech.

The card to take with you: Exercise the passion muscle.

Anchor line: The muscle doesn’t know whether it trains on Greek gods or the periodic table — but it only shows up when there’s passion in the room. Your job isn’t to choose the passion: it’s to set the menu, truly watch, and water where it sprouted.

Comments from the house

Note from Carlos — the author

Of all the practices in this house, this is the one longest in execution and the one I defend with the fewest doubts. I’ll only add the operating secret: the cycle works because the parent’s interest is real. I read the Picsou comics too. [INTERVIEW: expand if I want — which passion of mine fed which of his, or the full story of the cosplay]

Sancho — the Squire

The official props supplier of every campaign — that’s me and that’s this article! When the knight changes quests, the squire doesn’t bill him for the old armor: he fetches the new one. From the castle to Olympus, from Olympus to the portal, from the portal to the mystery shack — the luggage changes, the companion doesn’t. And I note the text’s finest point: watering where it sprouted is not the same as sowing by force. Even a squire knows the donkey won’t gallop no matter how many spurs you put on it.

Marina Haddad — the voice of evidence

Good news from my chair: here there is a real field behind it. Interest development is studied seriously — there are models of how a situational interest becomes a sustained one, and a whole area on what fans learn in their communities. This article’s research prompt will say what can be cited and what stays as reasoning. My one nuance: the “may be more effective than any other technique” part is the author’s voice, not a measured result — and I like that the text presents it as lived conviction, not as data. That’s how it’s done.

Nonna Lucia — the grandmother’s gaze

Let me defend the grandmother in the text for a second, because I have said that phrase — “you’re going to spoil him” — and I know where it comes from: from generations where the toys were three and the books, a luxury. It isn’t stinginess: it’s a different arithmetic. But I’ve seen the difference between the child full of things and the child full of options, and it isn’t the quantity — it’s whether there’s an adult truly watching what he responds to. With that, even this old woman is convinced. Without it, the grandmother was right.

Polo — the caretaker closes

The relatives of this muscle in the library: Collecting seriously for when the passion calls for an archive, Today you teach me so the fandom flows in your direction, The library on Fridays as a zero-cost buffet, and Be their sparring partner for when the passion calls for a court. The card to take with you: Exercise the passion muscle. And a caretaker’s secret: new passions almost always come in through the service entrance — nobody announces them.