Somewhere in your house this week, there is probably a child at a kitchen table.
A book is open. Maybe a past paper. And a feeling in the room — you know the one — that the next few weeks really matter. That this is the moment that counts. That they mustn’t get it wrong.
It’s exam season. And hanging over the whole of it is one small, heavy word.
Perfect.
Do your best. Don’t make mistakes. Get it right.
I want to say something I believe with everything I have — and I’ll back it up properly before you finish reading. There is no such thing as perfect. There never has been. And the sooner our children understand that — really understand it — the stronger they’ll be, in their exams, on the mat, and in the long life that comes after both.
Let me show you why.
The pressure is real — and some of it is good
I’m not going to tell you pressure is the enemy. It isn’t. A little pressure is the very thing that turns good into great. It builds resilience. It sharpens focus. Sport is built on it, and so is achievement of any kind.
But there’s a difference between pressure that says give me everything you’ve got and pressure that whispers don’t you dare get it wrong. The first one builds children. The second one quietly breaks them.
And here’s something most parents never see. Your child’s teacher is under enormous pressure, too. Pass marks. Targets. League tables. Inspections. Most teachers I’ve met care deeply about their pupils and are being squeezed from above to hit a number, and that pressure has to go somewhere. It flows downhill until it lands on a ten-year-old who’s decided a wrong answer makes them a failure.
The pressure on your child often isn’t really about your child at all. It’s pressure passed down a chain. I don’t say that to blame teachers; I say it so you can see the bigger picture your child can’t see yet.
The greats already worked this out
Nobody truly world-class is afraid of making a mistake.
Michael Jordan — arguably the greatest ever to play his sport — said it plainly. He missed more than nine thousand shots. He lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times he was trusted with the shot to win the match, and he missed. That, he said, is exactly why he succeeded.
The Greeks understood it two thousand years ago. Aristotle taught that excellence isn’t a single perfect act — it’s a habit, built slowly through repetition, through getting it wrong and going again. The Stoics went further. Don’t waste yourself on the outcome you can’t control, they said; pour everything into the effort you can. Marcus Aurelius wrote that the obstacle in the path becomes the path.
And Samuel Beckett gave us the whole of it in four words: “Fail again. Fail better.”
The danger nobody warns you about
Here’s where it matters most for our young ones.
There’s a pattern in sport that the research backs up again and again. The early prodigy — the child who wins everything at eleven or twelve — very often disappears by their mid-teens. Why? Because they built their entire identity on a single word: winner. They never had to learn how to lose. So when their bodies stop being ahead of the curve, and everyone else catches up, they have no idea how to cope. Losing doesn’t just feel like losing. It feels like losing themselves.
The children who last — the ones who actually become great — are almost never the ones who looked perfect early. They’re the ones who learned to fail, recover, and enjoy the climb.
The Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck showed exactly this. Children praised for being clever started avoiding anything hard, in case they got found out. Children praised for their effort chose the harder problems, stuck at them, and improved. Same children. One word’s difference. Two completely different futures. As Dweck herself puts it, the history books are full of child geniuses who quietly lost their edge — because being gifted was never the thing that lasted.
There is more than one path — let me prove it
I can tell you all this with some confidence, because I’m living proof of it.
I left school at sixteen with a handful of GCSEs. People assume that means I struggled. I didn’t — I was in top set for every subject. I just couldn’t see the point of it. I was going to do judo, and as far as I was concerned, everything else was a detour. They say youth is wasted on the young; I’d say the problem with education is that it’s wasted on the young. I had no passion for school because I couldn’t yet see what it was for.
So I went and lived a bit first. I left home at seventeen to live at my judo club. I competed until I was twenty-four. And then — at the age most people are finishing university — I started a master’s degree, earned it at twenty-seven, and later found myself standing at the front of a university, lecturing. The boy who left at sixteen with a handful of GCSEs got there. He just didn’t take the route everyone assumed he had to.
I didn’t take the path. I took a path.
And here is the part exam season never tells our children: they will most likely live a long life with the chance to have several careers, not one. My competitive career was over by twenty-four. Coaching and building this club is my second, twelve years and counting. There will be more roads than the one in front of them this June — and more than one way to reach wherever they’re going.
The one thing I’ve learned that I’d hand to any young person is this: say yes, give it a go, and work out the process along the way. Richard Branson put it best — if someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you’re not sure you can do it, say yes, then learn how to do it later. That is the exact opposite of perfectionism. Perfectionism waits until it feels ready. It never does. The people who get somewhere are the ones who start before they feel ready and figure it out as they go.
This is exactly what judo teaches
People assume the first thing we teach a child in our judo classes is how to throw someone. It isn’t.
The very first thing we teach is how to fall — and get back up, unhurt. Before any technique, any competition, any belt, a child learns that hitting the ground is normal, survivable, and nothing to be afraid of.
I can’t think of a better lesson to walk into an exam hall carrying.
So here’s my honest advice for the weeks ahead
Don’t take your child off the mat during exam season. I know the instinct — they need to revise, clear the diary. But it’s backwards.
Exercise is one of the most powerful study tools there is. It floods the brain with exactly the chemistry it needs to learn and remember — a Harvard psychiatrist who studies this calls it “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” It sharpens focus, lifts mood, burns off stress and helps them sleep. An hour on the mat will do more for tomorrow’s exam than a tense, tearful extra hour at the desk.
And the lesson underneath all of it — that effort beats being perfect, that falling is part of rising, that the journey is the point — is the one that will outlast every grade they’re about to be handed.
I’ve said it many times. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the journey. The results take care of themselves.
Keep training. Keep falling. Keep getting up.
Vince Skillcorn Fighting Fitness Judo
If your child isn’t training with us yet — or you know a family feeling the squeeze of exam season — this is the perfect time to start. We give every new starter a 14-day VIP pass for just £1, so they can come and learn the very first thing we teach: how to fall, get back up, and not be afraid of it. We coach families across Woking and Knaphill and Merrow — come and see what it’s about.
