The Norwegians Figured Something Out That We Keep Getting Wrong
By not keeping score we could teach the world about joy, creativity and the damage we do when we judge too early.
There is a document in Norway called Bestemmelser for barneidrett which loosely translates to Children’s Rights in Sport, and it contains an idea so straightforward that it is almost embarrassing we haven’t all copied it. The idea is that until the age of thirteen, children should not compete in national competitions, results should not be recorded, and the entire purpose of organised sport should be the joy of participation rather than the production of winners.
They even have a word for it, idrettsglede, the joy of sport, and the precision of that framing matters more than it might first appear, because it isn’t the triumph of sport, or the reward of sport, or the career of sport that they’re protecting, it’s the joy. They built an entire national policy around the idea that joy is the thing worth preserving above everything else — absolute genius.
What this looks like in practice is that youth sports in Norway operate without scoreboards, without league tables, without the infrastructure of ranking and comparison that most of us grew up inside, so a child plays football or skis or swims and nobody is officially keeping score until they are old enough to have already formed a genuine relationship with the activity itself, and by the time competition enters the picture it enters on top of something already built rather than underneath something still fragile.
The results are not what you might expect if you believe, as most of us have been conditioned to believe, that competition is the primary engine of excellence because Norway (a country of five million people) is now one of the most decorated Winter Olympic nations in history, and more than seventy percent of Norwegian adults remain physically active across their lifetime, not just in their youth, not just in their peak years, but across their whole lives. This is the part that rarely gets mentioned when people talk about elite sport but which is arguably the more important achievement of the two.
The reason is simple, even if we consistently refuse to internalise it; If you make a child feel like a loser at eight they probably won’t want to go for a run at thirty-eight, and the shame of early comparison doesn’t fade the way we tell ourselves it does, it calcifies, it becomes part of how a person understands themselves in relation to an activity, and for most people that understanding settles into something like “I’m not one of those people”, a verdict they carry quietly for the rest of their lives without ever really questioning where it came from or whether it was ever true.
What the Norwegian model understands is that intrinsic motivation is not robust in its early stages, that the love of a thing, the genuine unperformed private love of doing something because it feels good to do it, is extraordinarily vulnerable to the wrong kind of external pressure at the wrong moment, and that if you introduce a ranking or a scorecard or a public comparison before that love has had time to root, you don’t sharpen a child’s drive so much as replace it with something else entirely, something more like anxiety, or performance, or the exhausting management of other people’s perceptions, and some children find a way to thrive inside that pressure but most don’t, and the ones who don’t quietly disappear from the activity and nobody really asks where they went.
This is not an argument against excellence, because the Norwegians are not against excellence, they are against arriving at excellence through the systematic discouragement of the majority, and there is a phrase from the research around this model that has stayed with me, which is that if you take care of the fun the fast will take care of themselves, meaning excellence is downstream of joy, competition is a tool you reach for once someone has already decided they want to be in the room, not a mechanism for deciding who deserves to be there in the first place.
Now I want to push the frame further than sport, because I think the Norwegian insight is not really about sport at all, it’s about creativity, about what happens to a young person’s instinct to make and try and explore and produce something and see what it is, when that instinct encounters judgment before it has fully formed, and the answer is roughly the same as what happens to the child who loses their first match and never goes back, which is that they conclude the activity isn’t for them before they’ve had any real chance to find out whether it might be.
We do to young creative people exactly what the rest of the world does to young athletes, introducing the scorecard too early, putting grades on drawings and marks on stories and rankings on performances before the person doing the drawing or writing or performing has had any genuine chance to understand why they’re doing it or what it means to them, wrapping creative education in the language of assessment before the more important question has even been asked, which is whether they love this, and why, and what it does to them when they’re inside it.
The result is that most people decide early they are not creative people, not because the instinct isn’t there, and the instinct is close to universal in childhood, but because the infrastructure around their early attempts told them they weren’t performing well enough to belong in the category, and they internalised that verdict and stopped drawing, stopped writing, stopped making things, stopped following the strange sideways thoughts that might have gone somewhere interesting, and they did all of that not because creativity failed them but because the system around creativity failed them at exactly the moment when they were too young and too unformed to push back against it.
What would it look like to build the Norwegian model for creative development, to say explicitly and structurally that art, music, writing and design shouldn’t be graded the way maths and science are graded, that slapping a C minus on a thirteen year old’s first attempt at a short story or a painting is a categorically different act to marking a wrong answer in a chemistry test, because the chemistry answer is either correct or it isn’t but the story is an act of courage and interiority that deserves protection rather than ranking, and that for the first years of a young person’s engagement with making things the point is not quality or comparison or output but the experience of making itself, actively protected from the weight of formal judgment until the love of the thing is established enough to survive contact with criticism?
I don’t think that’s a utopian question, I think it’s a design question, the same way the Norwegian sports model is a design question, because they looked at what they actually wanted, which was a nation of people who love being active, and they built the conditions for that to happen rather than leaving it to survive whatever conditions already existed, and we could do exactly the same for creativity if we were willing to accept the same starting premise, which is that joy is the foundation, not the reward you get once you’ve proven you deserve it.