Beginners

The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

Tom Vanderbilt

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781786493118
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786493125
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

'Beginners belongs on the list of books that have changed the way I understand my own limitations.'
Malcolm Gladwell

For many of us, the last time we learned a new skill was during childhood. We live in an age which reveres expertise but looks down on the beginner. Upon entering adulthood and middle age, we begin to shy away from trying new things, instead preferring to stay nestled firmly in our comfort zones.

Beginners asks the question: why are children the only ones allowed to experience the inherent fun of facing daily challenges? And could we benefit from embracing new skills, even if we're initially hopeless? Bestselling author Tom Vanderbilt sets out to find the answer, tasking himself with acquiring several new skills under the tutelage of professionals, including drawing, juggling, surfing and much more. Witty and often surprisingly profound, Beginners is an uplifting exploration of the science of brain plasticity and how we can learn how to learn anew.

CHAPTER ONE

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO BEING A BEGINNER

A man . . . progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.*

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

BEGIN, AGAIN: A MANIFESTO

Beginners is a book for anyone who ever started out, who was unsure, who was afraid to ask a question in a roomful of people who all seemed as if they knew what they were doing. It’s for anyone who had to be shown the ropes, however many times, who didn’t know what they were doing but did it anyway. It’s for anyone who entered a race they weren’t even sure they could finish. It’s a catalog of errors, a celebration of awkwardness. To paraphrase the movie Repo Man, it’s about spending your life not avoiding tense situations but getting into tense situations.

It’s a handbook for the clueless, a first-aid kit for the crushed ego, a survival guide for coping with this most painful, most poignant stage: the awkward, self-conscious, exhilarating dawning of the novice. It’s not a “how to do” book as much as a “why to do” book. It’s less about making you better at something than making you feel better as you try to learn. It’s about small acts of reinvention, at any age, that can make life seem magical. It’s about learning new things, one of which might be you.

*

For me, it had all begun with the chess experiment. Something had been awakened in me, thanks, ultimately, to my daughter.

Becoming a first-time parent is one of the more fundamental experiences of being a beginner. You sail into the process having chatted with friends and maybe read a few books, and on day one you’re on the bunny hill of life.

“Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others,” writes the Yale University professor of philosophy L. A. Paul. “You are wrong.”

It is, she writes, “an epistemically unique” experience. Meaning: You don’t know shit.

You barely know how to hold this breathing, blinking thing. You struggle to interpret its actions. You lie awake grappling with weird decision trees—forward- or rear-facing car seats? You wrestle with strollers. Life becomes a constant process of racing to the internet to watch You-Tube videos (a subject I’ll revisit later in the book). You find yourself talking to strange new people—those heretofore ghostly figures you would pass on the street known as parents—swapping information as you rapidly scramble toward some kind of expertise.

Being a good parent, like any learning process, requires thoughtful practice. Novice parents, to the extent that there’s any research on the subject, can certainly be found wanting. In one study, novice parents shown a sample household environment failed to identify half the child hazards that were present. Even something as basic as the way you speak to your young child can be done in a way that will ultimately make them more verbally proficient.

Beginner parents also become beginner teachers. And because we no longer remember, or have much access to, how we ourselves learned something, we may not be the best instructors. Playing catch with my daughter, I struggled to give more compelling instructions than “Throw the ball to me.” Could I write out instructions? That wouldn’t really do. Step one: Take ball. Step two: Throw ball. Maybe I could use metaphor or imagery, often so effective in sports instruction? Imagine that you’re throwing the ball. To me.

We have to learn how to teach. Sometimes we have to relearn what we are trying to teach. I made the mistake—as I now firmly believe it to be—of having put my daughter, at age three, on a bike with training wheels. She began happily riding around the park, until she took a corner too fast and tipped over.

Rather than teaching the actual skill needed in riding a bicycle, training wheels simply impart misplaced confidence. Such “errorless learning” may make the learner feel better, but it eliminates the huge part of learning that comes from mistakes. Like water wings in swimming, training wheels take away from the actual feeling of riding a bike.

So I took off the training wheels, stripped the pedals, and, presto, it was a “balance bike.” She had some wobbles, but those wobbles were more instructive than her seemingly steadier performance on the training wheels. A few weeks later, with a starting push from me, she was off.

Like any parent, I suddenly found myself surrounded, in a way I could scarcely remember, by the process of learning. It wasn’t just the chess. There was piano. Soccer. Tae kwon do. Choir. Skateboarding. Intro to Coding. Track and field. Indoor climbing. Not all of these things would “stick,” but it scarcely seemed to matter. They’re kids. They’re exploring. We should let them try as many things as possible. It’s good for them.

But something began to gnaw at me. As I became the full-time supervisor of my daughter’s learning career, as I sat in any number of waiting areas while she improved, I wondered, what new skills had I learned?

Each of us, of course, is constantly learning new things, in endless, small ways. “As adults,” write the authors of The Scientist in the Crib, “we at least sometimes retain our childlike ability to learn.” You just rented a car at the airport? Take a minute to learn the new cockpit configuration. You’re walking on a sidewalk that’s not usually covered in ice, or going down an unfamiliar set of wooden stairs in your socks? You’ve just subtly recalibrated your proprioception—that “sixth sense” of your body in the world—or you fell. Just switched from Android to iPhone? You’re going to have to retrain your fingers.

Had I, though, acquired any more substantial skills? In my job as a journalist, I am constantly learning new information. I am a “perpetual novice,” constantly helicoptering into some world I barely know of (nuclear waste, watchmaking) and meeting the key players, soaking up the terminology, reading the weird trade magazines—did you know the world of shipping pallets has two leading journals?—and otherwise geeking out. I still puff with pride when someone says, “You’ve really done your homework.” And then it’s on to the next thing.

I am brimming with declarative knowledge, or what is called “knowing that.” I have a lot of “knowing that”; hell, I was on Jeopardy! (I lost, to someone who knew more of “that.”)

But what about procedural knowledge, or “knowing how”? I was a quick study when it came to facts, but what had I actually learned to do lately? Compared with my daughter, I seemed to be coasting along on my professional plateau, fixed firmly in my comfort zone of competence.

This was brought home to me when, one day, her school featured a “Talent Day,” in which parents were asked to demonstrate some skill in front of a room of twenty-five first graders. I racked my brain. What talent did I have? I didn’t think the kids would be dazzled by the grace of my prose under deadline. I am, on the other hand, a pretty mean whistler. Or should I take them outside for a crack parallel-parking demonstration?

A thought began to emerge: I would try to learn, along with chess, a number of skills at once. Rather than just sitting on the sidelines while my daughter learned, I would join her—sometimes, as with chess, in the very same pursuit. This is a strangely novel notion. Type “learn with your child” into Google, and you get a lot of results on how to improve their learning. You are a foregone conclusion.

But what did I want to try to learn? Seeking inspiration, I posted an inquiry online: “What new tricks should this old dog learn?”

The first response came quickly: “Have you tried writing classes?”

Was the universe trying to tell me something?

*

In my quest to acquire skills, I had some rough criteria mapped out. First, I had to be a beginner in the activity. There were things I had done a bit of, and certainly wouldn’t mind getting better in (making pizza, fixing my bike), but I wanted real novelty.

Second, they had to be things I could learn in New York City. That semester at “gelato university” in Italy, suggested by a friend, was out (a decision not made easily), as was the mountain climbing course in Alaska.* Luckily, in a city of nine million, if you can imagine it, someone is teaching it.

The skills, furthermore, should not be too difficult or time-consuming. Learning Mandarin or how to fly a plane was out. Last, they should be things I actually really wanted to learn—not things that I felt I should learn.

The suggestion came several times to take coding classes. Coding is a fine enterprise, but I wanted to spend less, not more, time in front of a screen. I wasn’t necessarily looking for skills that represented some kind of professional development, as worthy as that endeavor is. I had a job; I wasn’t looking for another, or anything that much felt like work. More than looking to make myself more marketable to employers, I wanted to make myself more marketable to me.

I wanted the skills to be substantial. There are plenty of micro-skills out there—building a fire, driving a manual transmission—that are totally worthwhile and we’re all constantly tackling. I am all in favor of this “micro-mastery,” as it’s been called: Learning little things can embolden you to learn bigger things. But most of these skills are easily achievable. I wanted things that you never finished learning.

And I wanted to stick to a small number of skills. There were all sorts of people on the internet who had embarked on self-reported quests to pick up one new skill every month, or every week, or every day; one guy had the beginner’s hubris to play Magnus Carlsen after a month of learning chess. This is the Magnus who routinely defeats people who have been playing chess every day of their lives since age five. Not surprisingly,* the would-be challenger was handily dispatched.

I applauded the bravado spirit of such endeavors, and thought there were things I could certainly learn from them, but I wasn’t looking for bucket-list items to tick off. I wasn’t interested in rapidly “hacking” skills, Silicon Valley–style, so I could boast about them on social media and move on to the next one. I wanted things I could grow into slowly, taking time to appreciate the skill and how it is learned, to measure its impact upon my life. Why not just one skill? you might be asking. I worried about picking something I would not like. Because I was interested in the starting stages of things, tackling more skills simply meant I would be a beginner more often.

I eventually settled on a group of pursuits I’d long wanted to learn. In addition to chess, I chose singing, surfing, drawing, and making (in this case, a wedding ring to replace the ones I’d lose surfing). Oh, and juggling—as much for the thing itself as for the brain research that’s been done around it, which offers a fascinating window onto learning. There were all sorts of tempting things—free diving, improv theater—I put on a possible to-do list for the future.

I didn’t think I was going to master any of these things. I didn’t have a spare ten thousand hours—the suggested baseline of deliberate practice required to achieve mastery in a field—for anything; I’d be lucky to have a hundred hours for any one skill. In place of mastery, I was hoping for distributed competence.

In trying to bolster my “life résumé,” I was, in some ways, trying to reach back into the past, to try to learn things that had eluded me. We often use our children as proxies for this. Under what’s called “symbolic self-completion theory,” parents are often suspected of trying to vanquish their own failed ambitions via their children’s accomplishments.

But I was trying to use my own accomplishments to “compensate,” as Jung put it, for what was unfulfilled in my past life. Sometimes, these just happened to coincide with my daughter’s accomplishments. I was wary, and perhaps guilty, of trying to create my own “mini-me”—a process psychologists call enmeshment—at the expense of my daughter’s own self. I wanted us to have some shared learning experiences, but not wholly overlapping ones. She urged me to learn the popular game Magic: The Gathering, for instance—as a former Dungeons & Dragons nerd, I thought it looked pretty fun—but I invented excuses. I wanted her to have her own domains in which I was the clueless adult.

I also sensed I was preparing for the future. As a somewhat older father, I wanted to make sure I would be in fighting trim—physically and mentally—for what I hoped would be many years of shared adventures with my daughter. Climbing life’s little learning curves together would, I hoped, not only bring us closer but keep me feeling younger.

I knew that I would struggle. That I would fall. But I felt it would be good for me. I would have beginner’s mind; I would have beginner’s body. My brain and muscles would forge new paths.

And I had a feeling it would be good for my daughter, too. In one fascinating experiment, researchers demonstrated, to different infant subjects, the act of retrieving a toy from a container. One adult model struggled with the process, while another adult did it quickly. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: The Opening Gambit
• Chapter One: A Beginner’s Guide to Being a Beginner
• Chapter Two: Learning How To Learn
• Chapter Three: Unlearning To Sing
• Chapter Four: I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, But I’m Doing It Anyway
• Chapter Five: Surfing The U-Shaped Wave
• Chapter Six: How We Learn To Do Things
• Chapter Seven: Meditation With Benefits
• Chapter Eight: The Apprentice
• Acknowledgments
• Notes