Tonight my 5-year-old son and I played a couple of games of Memory. You know, it’s the game where you have a number of cards with images matching up in pairs of two cards. Their face illustrations are turned down towards the table top and each player is allowed to turn two cards at a time with an aim of course to find a matching pair.

Find a matching pair and you are allowed to go again. If you don’t find a matching pair it becomes the next player’s turn. Whoever has the most matched up pairs at the time when all cards have been picked, wins.

Well, it’s a game that stimulates your brain a bit and challenges your memory with the position of each card and what’s on the card.

The first many times we played this game, it would invariably end up in total frustration for my son, who would eventually throw a minor fit and say something to the effect of “I hate this game” (did I tell you he has a short fuse and a bit of temper?).

Tonight it was different. He’s definitely getting the hang of it and actually sometimes shows remarkable recollection of the different cards and their individual position. He has actually always shown us a remarkable memory (scary in fact at times), but our particular memory card game has a bit of very similarly looking cards and thus they easily mix up at least in my memory as a bit of a blur and I’m actually usually quite good at memory games.

The great part now is that my son is getting so good at this game and that he is even enjoying it a bit now. He usually wins, and I probably don’t even have to let him anymore – he can do that all by himself.

The lesson here is an obvious reminder to us all of how most beginnings are difficult and often entail a bit of frustration for us. But by not giving up and showing a bit of tenacity we can end up being quite good at it and eventually actually even end up enjoying it.

We often expect of new things that we should fare well and see quick results. And when this doesn’t happen we find it unfair and terribly annoying.

Perhaps we need to remember to accept that there’s a learning curve and a time of repetition that you need to go through until such a time that you have built up a competence.

Build up the competence and of course your confidence also increases.

It’s that never ending cycle of the competence – confidence loop that all psychologists will talk about that we all go through with practically anything we face in life.

Drawings by 5-year-old Gabriel