The Value of Learning New Skills in Adulthood
Episode Stats
Summary
When you were a kid, you not only went to school where you did academics, art, and PE, but you probably also took extracurricular lessons in music or sports, and likely even taught yourself things like how to do magic tricks. At least that's what I did as a kid. Now that you're an adult, can you think of the last new skill you learned? My guest explains why there's a good chance that you'll struggle to answer that question, and how that's a tragedy you ought to do something about. His name is Tom Vanderbilt, and he's the author of several books, including his latest, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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When you were a kid, you not only went to school where you did academics, art, and PE,
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but you probably also took extracurricular lessons in music or sports, and likely even
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taught yourself things like how to do magic tricks. At least, that's what I did.
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Now that you're an adult, can you think of the last new skill you learned? My guest day
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explains why there's a good chance that you'll struggle to answer that question and how that's
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a tragedy you ought to do something about. His name is Tom Vanderbilt, and he's the author
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of several books, including his latest, Beginners, The Joy, and Transformative Power of Lifelong
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Learning. Tom and I discussed why his daughter's desire to learn chess inspired him to spend
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a year learning the game himself, as well as take on a project of learning other new skills.
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Tom explains the reasons adults give up on learning and why, while it's harder for adults to learn
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things than it is for children, it's still worth becoming a novice all over again. We
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then explore how to harness the beginner's mind using Tom's experiences in learning how
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to sing, surf, juggle, and draw as examples. And we end our conversation with Tom's takeaways
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from his experiment and how becoming a lifelong learner is really all about pushing through
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the mental barriers that hold us back from the many possibilities for growth that remain
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in adulthood. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash lifelong learning.
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So you got a new book out called Beginners, The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning.
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And you do sort of a immersive journalism thing here, like George Plimpton or A.J. Jacobs,
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where you explore this idea of the science and research of what we know about learning
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and the beginner's mind. But you do that by learning new things yourself. And what kickstarted
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this book is you began teaching your daughter, your young daughter, to play chess. And that
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kickstarted this whole exploration of what it means to learn. So tell us about that moment and
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why that started, that made you think about, well, how do we learn? What's going on there?
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Sure. And I should say, you know, trying to teach my daughter chess is a bit of a stretch. I mean,
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I was really learning myself because the whole thing started because we were playing a game of
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checkers once on a vacation. And there was a chessboard nearby in this library. And she looked
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over and saw this chessboard as kind of a cool looking thing to a kid, these great little
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statuesque pieces and said, you know, Daddy, can we play that? And I was like, yeah, that would be
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great. Except I never really learned, which sounds ridiculous. But yeah, I'd probably learned the basic
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moves a long time ago, but they had never stuck. So I thought, well, I'll go to the internet. I'll try to
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figure this out. And I had, you know, had some success with that to some degree. I think, you
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know, one of the great things that's happened, especially in this last year, is that the power
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of the internet as a learning apparatus has really become clear. You can learn to do just about
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anything. So I picked up sort of a basic knowledge of chess. But the thing with chess is, you know,
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you hit a plateau quickly, it gets infinitely more complex all the way up to, you know, of course,
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grandmaster level. So I felt I was in over my head. The strategy and tactics were too much. So
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then I thought, well, I'll hire a coach to teach my daughter properly. Then I thought, you know,
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why should I just pay for this guy to come over? And I'm sitting on the sidelines when I could be
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benefiting from this as well. So I just said from the beginning, can I sit in on these lessons?
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And I thought, you know, here was a funny thing. We had this little nice little sample size group of
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two people. She was four at the time. I was in my 40s. How is that going to work out? And so I found
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the whole experience so striking to me that I really, and what really drove it home was that,
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you know, hey, I'm learning this new thing. What actually is the last new skill I had learned? And
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where has this been during my 20s, 30s, 40s? And then, you know, set out with this goal of trying
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to learn all these things that I had long wanted to learn. And I should just, I'll conclude this
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long answer by saying, when I say learn, I should say, you know, I haven't reached the finished stage
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of any of these things. I'm in the process of learning. But so yeah, that's what kicked it off.
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One of the most incisive moments and the thing that convicted me when I was reading your book at
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the very beginning, you're talking about, so your daughter really got into chess and she started going
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to these chess tournaments. My son's done one of those. And it's, if you're a parent, you take your kid to
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this thing. And it's a lot of waiting around, like they play chess and then you got to wait while
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they play. And that game could last however long. And then they got to play another game.
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And something you observed is that all the parents were there and they're just like on their
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smartphones. They were just, you know, twiddling around on Twitter, reading a book. And you thought,
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why are all these parents just like, why, what happened? Like, why are these parents just
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letting their kids learn and take part in this new skill? And we're just sitting here
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stagnant. Why did that, I think that moment too, also existentially shook you up. Like,
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what, what was it about that? And, and why do you think as adults, we give up on learning new
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things? Yeah, it's a great point. And I, you know, I felt, I guess I felt hypocritical. I, you know,
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here I was day in and day out telling this, you know, telling my daughter, you know, it's so important
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to learn. You have, I want you to learn all these things. I don't want you to think that you can't
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do anything. And, you know, in most cases, a parent is put in this position of authority. I'm going to
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teach you how to ride a bike, how to tie your shoe. If there's something I don't know, well,
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we're just going to stay away from that. So, you know, I wasn't hypocritical. I'm telling her every
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day how important learning is, but what could I point to in my own life? That was the last new
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skill that I learned. And of course, as a journalist, I absorb a lot of information. I'm kind of, you know,
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learning all the time, but I thought, you know, skills were something that I had given up on it.
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And out of basically, you know, sort of, you know, charitably, I could say lack of time,
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but also cowardice is there also, you know, I, if I didn't learn how to do this when I was young,
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why would I want to plunge into this when I'm 40 or 50? Something like surfing, you know, which is
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not so kind to the aging body, but, you know, I just wanted to like bring home this lesson I was
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imparting to her, to myself. And as to the question of why we give up, yeah, I guess I've sort of answered
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that a little bit already, but we give ourselves lots of excuses. I mean, we, adult life does
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intervene. We have jobs, we have, often have children, we have a lot of responsibilities
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that do take up time. But, you know, if you sort of make it made a time diary of your week,
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I'm not going to implicate anyone here, but, you know, it probably includes a lot of, let's just say,
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consumption of Netflix shows and the like. I mean, I think in anyone's schedule,
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there is this time for learning. We often throw that out there. Well, I'm just too busy
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to learn something like chess. I mean, if you watched The Queen's Gambit on Netflix, like a lot of
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America did, you could have looked, basically picked up the game in the time you spent watching
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that. So just, so I think we give ourselves a lot of reasons not to, and often are afraid to
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embrace all those reasons why it would be actually a great thing for us.
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And I also think too, and you make this point too, there's some sort of like cultural conditioning
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that happens at some point. It's sort of very subtle that, and it's this, it's that, well,
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learning's for kids. Like once you're an adult, like you're done, basically.
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Yeah. I mean, and of course, you know, children's whole lives are set up for learning and they have,
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you know, they have all this time, immense amounts of time to do nothing but learn. Wouldn't that be
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great? And then the supportive cast around them that is applauding their every move and signing
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them for these lessons and thinking they're just the greatest thing since sliced bread, you know, and
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adults don't really get that so much. When I sort of brought up this project to my wife,
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I had kind of a sense of, let's say, polite condescension, like, yeah, you learn to sing,
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that would be great. Just don't do it too much around us, okay? I just think we tend to get to
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that trap of thinking that only children can learn. Children are learning machines. And I should just
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say that, you know, a lot of the learning that even kids do starts to get short-circuited after a
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little while. And I bring this up with things like drawing or singing. Every kid draws and sings up to a
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certain point. And then they're basically encouraged to not to, or it sort of falls out of the
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curriculum. And, you know, that's only for art kids, or that's only for music kids. And, you know,
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by the time you're in college, as some studies have shown, you know, your ability to sing has
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basically fallen off to where you were, you know, you're worse than when you were a kid.
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All right. We'll talk about like what's going on there. So when you decided, okay, I'm going to learn
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stuff. I want to explore this idea of a beginner's mind, what it means to learn, what goes on when we learn.
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You decide, okay, I'm going to learn some skills. How did you decide which ones you take up? Like,
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what were the criteria used for the skills that you would learn?
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I wanted them to be, number one, things I really wanted to do. I didn't want to just sort of pick
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things that might sound good or be noble pursuits. I mean, I would love to learn Mandarin or another
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language, but that would just, I felt like that would sort of dominate the book. And I wasn't actually
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a true beginner in learning a language. So dabbled in Spanish all my life. So there's that.
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And secondly, I want to do things that I could do within reach of my home. And this is sort of
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before COVID, of course, I was taking in-person lessons. So all the things were things I could do
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without going somewhere across the world. Someone suggested learning to make gelato at gelato
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university in Italy, which I would love to have a master's degree in gelato making. But, you know,
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right. So, and then the third thing was, I wanted to sort of cover a broad spectrum,
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almost like a university curriculum of a little bit of arts, a little bit of humanities,
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kind of a physical aspect with surfing and just be broad. And the reason I did five of these things,
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which soon branched into six or seven and continues, is that, you know, I was worried about
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being bored basically, or not liking something that I had decided was going to be my passion.
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I mean, I, I love these books that are out there, you know, uh, word freak, Stefan Fatsis,
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um, moonwalking with Einstein, Maria Konnikova's book about poker in which she becomes, you know,
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basically a poker champion. I mean, those are amazing books, amazing pursuits, but I didn't think
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I was going to have the time or the knack to become great in any of these things. So I want,
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you know, as I, as I described it, I wanted sort of a distributed competence in all these
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things that had long interested me, sort of like a Swiss army knife. I could, I could pull out of my
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pocket and just, you know, pull out that little blade. Was I, you know, amazing at any of these
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things? No, but could I get through something or, or talk to someone who was great in that thing?
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And yeah, so that was, that was sort of the criteria. So as we said, as you, you describe
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you learning these new skills, you also explore the research. You talk to neuroscientists and
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cognitive experts about what goes on when you learn. So let's start off with this. Like what,
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uh, what do we know about the beginner's mind? Like, what does it look like? How is it different
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from an expert or even just a competent mind? Yeah. Beginner's mind. I mean, just in case anyone
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isn't familiar with this as a concept from, from Zen Buddhism, which is, is not really scientific.
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It's just sort of an ethos to try to approach the world as a child, as a novice. And the word
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novice means beginner monk, I should point out. But, and this is something that gets hard when you
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reach your fifth decade of life and have a ton of what's called, what's called crystallized
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knowledge, uh, you know, sort of wisdom and memories. And, you know, it gets, it gets hard
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to disregard that stuff and approach the world in a fresh way. I mean, one great example I mentioned
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in the book is this thing called the candle problem, which psychologists do, which they give
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people a match, a box of tacks and a candle. And the instruction is to, you know, put this, attach
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this candle to the wall. And it turns out that young children actually do better than older
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children and even adults in this experiment, because they're not hung up on these objects as
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the things they are in and of themselves, this functional fixedness it's called. Children just look
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at these things and think, oh, what could I do with that? What could I do with that? And as an adult,
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you've, you know what these things are. Oh, this goes for that. So it just gets harder to
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have that sort of freshness. And, you know, neurologically, I'm not really sure how, what
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that looks like. And I'm not sure it's been actually that well studied, but children really
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are all about beginner's mind. I mean, that's just their whole process. And they have these
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synapses that are, the number of synapses they have are just vast compared to adults. Because we've
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spent our whole life pruning those connections and trying to filter out what is it important.
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I mean, because it's an efficiency thing. We can't go around like children all the time,
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gazing in wonder at every little moment of our lives and wondering what's behind that,
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because we'll go crazy. You know, so, I mean, that, and that's just one of the things that,
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you know, neurologically, if you look at expert performers, they sort of begin to describe this,
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you know, their brain is sort of winnowed in a way. There's been some work on chess grandmasters
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and, you know, rather than their brain expanding, it sort of gets smaller. And I'm sort of butchering
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the neuroscience here. But the point is that they learn to do more with less. They've made automatic
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a good percentage of that behavior. Whereas children are just soaking it all in and that nothing's
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automatic for kids, except a few skills like walking.
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So kids have like more fluid intelligence as opposed to crystal. That makes it learning easier
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Yeah, yes, for in some ways. I mean, for the game, just to take the game of chess, for example,
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my daughter is really great at things like puzzles, at spotting opportunities on the board.
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In a given moment, she's great at blitz chess, which is five minute games per side, or even bullet
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chess, which is one minute games per side. I, at least in the beginning was, it was sort of better
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at that, at that wisdom side, that crystallized side. I had this, you know, decades and decades of just
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experience at playing games, which is sort of a meta knowledge of strategy and how to play and how
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to be patient and how to do things like consider, for example, what, why did my opponent just make
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that move they just made? My daughter would just sort of play her games from her own point of view
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with her own end game in mind and kind of disregard what the other person was doing. Not always, but
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sometimes. And this was why she would lose and her coach would yell at her. But, you know,
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adults just might have a little bit more of that, you know, kind of penchant for strategy,
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And then this idea that as you get older, learning gets harder because your crystallized
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intelligence goes up and your fluid intelligence goes down. You saw this in your family. I guess
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you got your dad, I think it was your dad, playing games as well. And it would be like,
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your daughter was the best, you were the next best, and then your dad wouldn't be, he'd be like last.
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Yeah. And this is just, it's just age. And I wish it could be different. And of course,
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my dad wasn't playing chess all his life. So this is something to point out. If he had been,
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the decline is less pronounced. The one thing that's to point out here is that it does get
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harder to be a novice as you get older. It takes longer to learn that new thing. So he had the
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greatest challenge. I had the next greatest challenge. My daughter had the smallest challenge,
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which is not to say it's all about just that sort of cognitive ability. There's motivation,
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there's the sheer amount of practice. I mean, my daughter did start getting a lot better than me,
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but she was also putting a lot more time into it and doing things like analyze your game. So
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I don't want to say it's all just some inherent brain thing. If my dad started playing 10 hours a
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day and studying, he would make a lot more progress. But if you just start everyone from that
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same clean slate, more or less, yeah, that that's going to happen. I mean, there is that age
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progression. So that's just something that does not say you can't make great progress. It's just
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you're going to have to work a little harder. Right. So I think that's a big point is that
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it's going to be harder, but learning new things is not impossible even as you get older. And you
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highlight people in their 70s, 80s who are still learning new things.
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Yeah, that plasticity, which is the key thing here, the ability of the brain to reshape itself
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as you pick up this new knowledge. And it happens really quickly. I was sort of amazed by this. I
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mean, they did these juggling studies where they try to teach people to juggle three balls, which is
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sort of the baseline for juggling. And within a week, sometimes even less, they had seen
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substantial evidence of plasticity. And that is much less dependent on age. That falls off a lot less.
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So that ability to learn is still there. Again, it's just going to be harder for a few reasons that
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involve what I was talking about before. Just as adults, we've absorbed a lot of things. I use
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the analogy of my brain is like a teeming hard drive, like the thing that your parents have that
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they've had for 20 years. And you have ancient files on there. The hard drive is slow. You go to
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look for some memory and it's making that clacking sound and it's taking forever. Whereas my daughter
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was like, you know, a flash drive. She could just pluck that out because she doesn't, she hasn't met
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thousands of people I have. She can, she can, she doesn't forget names or faces. And so adults have
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that additional challenge. I think another problem you talk about in the book that holds adults back
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from learning is that as you become an adult, you become very instrumental in your approach to
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life. It's like, well, I'm only going to do something if it's useful. And a lot of the skills
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that you learned, people are like, well, that's not like, why, why learn how to sing? Like, how's
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that going to help me with my job? How's that going to help me? Yeah. Basically, how would it help me
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with my job? What's your response to like, why, why learn? What is the benefit of learning a skill
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Yeah. Very good question. I think we've already talked about, you know, a lot of the cognitive
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benefits, but there, it goes way beyond that. I mean, just into sort of the social, the emotional,
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just to take one example, singing. I mean, just, just singing is immediate uplift. If you're singing
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a blues song, it just makes you feel better. And it, you know, it sort of taps into all sorts of
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mechanisms. The vagus nerve, which is associated with countering depression, helps you sort of work
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on your breathing. And breathing, of course, has been sort of in the news and literature a lot lately.
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And, and, you know, that, that sort of brings about a stress reduction, all these positive
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benefits. When I shifted to singing with people, this is where, this was sort of the special sauce
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here, where it really began to feel good because you were, you were working with a group of like-minded
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people. Not, not that they all became my close friends, but you really had to sort of do this
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thing in, in this social group. And I sort of note that the choir was about 35 to 50 people ranging
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and, and that coincidentally or not is, is sort of the, the size that's been identified by
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anthropologists as these original kind of hunter gatherer groups. So not to get too deep in the
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woods with that, but I think, you know, just this kind of core group of humans in this kind of ideal
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size cluster, literally working in harmony just brings out such a positive feeling. And our rehearsals
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were on Monday night and I would leave in like, it was the weekend, you know, after, after I had started the
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week, you know, sort of a Monday. So in terms of job, you know, yeah, I mean, it's a bit, okay. I have
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to admit, you know, I'm writing a book about learning these things. So there actually is a benefit to my
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job about learning skills, but most people, you know, they're not, their job is not going to be
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improved by learning surf on the surface. But I quote the study that, that David Epstein in his great
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book range talks about, which notes Nobel prize scientists are 22 more times likely, according to
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the study to have participated in some kind of amateur pursuit, like music, performing arts,
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even being a magician, than the non Nobel prize winning scientists, which is not to say there's a
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one-on-one correlation with learning ballroom dancing and, you know, getting some amazing
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breakthrough in physics, but something about, you know, maybe that willingness to, to branch out,
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to be open to these new experiences, to talk to people you might not be talking to in your normal
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job, get out of that sort of silo. Maybe that, you know, sparked some creativity, some that they
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were able to bring back into their job. And, you know, a lot of people think of, well, these are
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things you do if you don't like your job or to bring joy to your life because you're sort of weighed
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down by your job. And that, that might be true, but I think it's even more true as, as Winston
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Churchill pointed out in this, who was by the way, a great amateur painter, wrote this sort of great
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small book on painting said, you know, if the people that love their job, they, they need this
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stuff even more because there's just that tendency to never let go of your job. How are you ever going
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to step outside of your job if you're so passionate about it? And I do love my job yet. I also found
00:20:39.460
such benefit from, from doing all these things. And it just continues to pay dividends and, in
00:20:44.940
to, to my life, let's say, uh, Jesse Itzler, who's written, uh, you know, about living with
00:20:52.240
monks and living with a seal and all these other things, uh, you know, he has this phrase life
00:20:55.620
resume. And I, I, I really sort of liked that idea as, as the living in the kind of culture we do,
00:21:02.300
which is a very sort of LinkedIn productivity driven society. What, you know, how is this going
00:21:07.280
to be good for your job? Just, just the idea that there's more to your job that what does your life
00:21:11.640
resume look like? So I sort of borrowed a phrase from him. Right. Yeah. Learning, he's talking,
00:21:16.020
it's self expansive. It just feels good. Like that, that's, that's, that's fine. That can just
00:21:20.820
be good enough itself. Yeah. Just, just even to talk to yourself and have this sense of self
00:21:26.780
expansion, you know, suddenly, Hey, I'm, I'm a surfer, I'm a singer, I'm a drawer. I'm not, I'm not,
00:21:31.300
I wouldn't call myself an artist, but you know, I have something of that skill. I am moving toward
00:21:37.040
getting better at that. It's just, yeah, suddenly I'm more sort of interesting
00:21:40.940
to myself, at least. I don't, like I said, my, my wife isn't clamoring, you know, for example,
00:21:46.980
to hear me sing all the time, but it just, to know that there's more to yourself than you thought
00:21:53.580
there was, you know, a year ago or last week. We're going to take a quick break for your words
00:21:58.380
from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let's dig into these skills a little bit more.
00:22:04.820
So even talking about singing, you took voice lessons, you joined a choir and I've, I've also,
00:22:10.500
I've thought about when I read this, when I read your book before that, I was like, I'd like to
00:22:13.840
take singing lessons because singing is something that humans have done for a long time. And, you
00:22:20.340
know, when we were kids, we sang all the time. We don't, you don't think singing would be hard.
00:22:24.660
I mean, I think I remember I watched Buddy, I watched Elf this Christmas and I remember that
00:22:28.740
famous live Buddy the Elf said, singing is just like talking except louder and longer and you have
00:22:33.760
to move your voice up and down. But nonetheless, like singing is really hard. Like why is,
00:22:40.000
what makes singing so hard? Like why are people bad at it? Right. And, or think they're bad at it.
00:22:46.060
Sometimes they actually are bad at it and, and, you know, but the reason they're bad at it is not
00:22:50.140
because they're, they're tone deaf in 99% of cases, let's say, or that they just don't have a
00:22:56.740
good voice. It's that they haven't been practicing it. And what, you know, one of the things I really
00:23:00.580
try to drill home with a lot of these things I was working on, I mean, obviously surfing is a motor
00:23:06.200
skill, but so is singing. So is drawing. I mean, people aren't generally, you know, born to sing
00:23:11.500
or, you know, you don't, you don't hear someone say, oh, you know, he's just, he has a God given
00:23:15.320
talent for, for welding or, or baking. And it's not to denigrate those, those are great things, but
00:23:21.020
we're saying we somehow with these other pursuits, we get it in our head that it's just something that
00:23:26.280
people have an innate talent. Whereas, you know, a lot of work, you know, sort of has to go into that.
00:23:33.160
Okay. So what did you see as you were learning how to sing? Like what was holding you back?
00:23:37.160
Yeah. I mean, number one, just that, that feeling that you're, you're not good, that sort of lack
00:23:41.280
of mastery and, you know, it doesn't. And number two is that we're out of practice. I mean, as
00:23:47.040
individuals and as a society, I sort of talking a little bit in the book about how public singing as,
00:23:53.080
as a forum for, you know, society and entertainment has, has been declining and by all sorts of measures,
00:23:59.180
we just don't sing in, in group settings the way we used to. I mean, the third thing too,
00:24:04.180
is that singing is a very emotionally resonant act that, that your, your throat has, you know,
00:24:11.920
there's just a lot of sort of nerve brain connection going on there. And to sort of open yourself up in
00:24:18.360
that way is a very, very vulnerable proposition. And it's, it's no surprise. Great study I saw was,
00:24:26.040
was trying to, a group of university researchers were trying to study embarrassment, like what it
00:24:32.040
means to be embarrassed. And I thought, well, how do you, how do you create embarrassment?
00:24:37.120
They had people sing in to the researchers, you know, that's just, it's just hard. You know,
00:24:41.580
probably even people that are good at it, excellent performers still have that moment of,
00:24:47.700
you know, I have to get up and do this in front of someone to just quell whatever,
00:24:50.920
you know, a little bit of stage fright there. But I would just like to put the message out there that
00:24:55.100
you can sing, you know, people can make a lot of progress. I have an app on my phone
00:25:01.200
called pitch perfect, which you can sing into and do scales. And it will give you a one through a
00:25:06.380
hundred quantitative rating on, on how well you were hitting those notes. And I was starting
00:25:11.560
in the sixties, which is, you know, I was feeling pretty bad about that, but I just kept hammering away
00:25:17.420
at it and doing some of these practices. And I can do, you know, a hundred now, a hundred percent.
00:25:22.480
So, and I was, I have no musical background except for singing in the shower and the car,
00:25:28.920
like we all do. But so just to put out, you know, you, you can do it.
00:25:32.580
And a thing that you, you talked about too, in the book, I thought was interesting was that you
00:25:35.200
took voice lessons, but then you also joined a choir and that learning in a group, like you were
00:25:40.280
basically learning in a group kind of in a way supercharged your learning. Like what was different
00:25:45.100
about singing with just one-on-one with a coach compared to singing with a larger choir,
00:25:50.720
like in learning in a group. Right. I mean, and they both definitely have their, their place,
00:25:54.860
you know, singing with a coach. And I had a great coach who, you know, you, you, number one,
00:25:59.680
it just, it feels good. You feel like you have this, this hour that someone's just there
00:26:03.660
listening to you. And like I said, sort of, you're doing these breathing exercises and it's just sort
00:26:08.320
of a very restorative kind of thing. So I would recommend it just on that front, but you're really
00:26:14.480
getting that one-on-one feedback. You know, my coach was, was looking at my mouth and my, my throat
00:26:21.200
and my tongue as I was singing. And really, you know, I felt like I was at the dentist sometimes
00:26:24.820
because, you know, but this is what's sort of required because, you know, there, there's a whole
00:26:29.320
infrastructure in your body going on there that has to be activated the right way to really get the
00:26:35.000
best result for what you're doing. But, you know, sort of, so we were doing just a lot of drills,
00:26:39.660
drilling, drilling, drilling. And then to think about, you know, if you're trying to learn how
00:26:44.060
to play soccer, I think if you do a lot of one-on-one drilling with a coach, well, that's
00:26:48.060
great. And you can get pretty good at it, but then the time comes when you have to play in a game. You
00:26:52.500
have to see what, if you can apply what you've learned into a very dynamic, changing situation
00:26:59.520
in which people are, you know, also, you know, trying to defeat you. So that's kind of what I thought
00:27:04.140
with choir, you know, I want to get out and try to put the skill into the real world. And of course,
00:27:09.500
no one's trying to defeat you in choir. I mean, maybe the altos are a little loud sometimes for
00:27:14.480
basses, but sorry, that's just a choir joke. But, but no, you know, like it was just very
00:27:21.120
important and productive to be, I found among a range of people, people that were much better than
00:27:28.180
me. And then after I was there a little while, people that were also coming in new, suddenly I had
00:27:34.160
a little bit of experience, a little bit of knowledge I could try to teach them. And that's,
00:27:38.160
you know, one of the things that also struck home here is that teaching is just one of the
00:27:43.140
learning tools. This is kind of a thing that people know about, but I hadn't really experienced
00:27:47.240
it that much personally. So yeah, it just seemed like I was getting, there's something about just
00:27:53.100
going through that in a group process, learning from other people as it's happening. It just,
00:27:59.300
yeah, like you said, it supercharged it. And also just felt, I felt a certain greater sense of
00:28:04.420
responsibility. If it was just me and my teacher, I could slack off a little bit because, well,
00:28:08.360
it's just, she's, she might yell at me that I didn't do my scales, but if I don't learn this
00:28:11.920
part, well, the whole choir is going to be let down. So that's where it's the group setting can,
00:28:17.980
can really help kind of bring home that sense of responsibility a little bit.
00:28:22.160
So you're able to, like, as you said, learning, we, most, most of our learning is done
00:28:25.300
observationally. That's where we get most of our learning. Like, I mean, yeah, you can read a how-to
00:28:29.220
book with, like, steps. And I think there was, they've done studies on that. I think it was with
00:28:33.640
the juggling, right? So, like, they took some people and they said, here, here's some step-by-steps
00:28:38.400
on how to juggle. And they couldn't do it. And they took another group and they just said, just
00:28:42.360
watch this person juggle. And they were able to figure out. So learning in a group allows you to
00:28:46.680
get that observational benefit. Also, you get feedback in real time. You're able to see, okay,
00:28:52.260
I'm doing this wrong, or I'm out of pitch to that guy next to me. And so you can correct on the fly.
00:28:57.620
So you get observation and feedback right away when you're learning in a group.
00:29:02.960
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. As you mentioned, you know, as anyone who's bought a piece of furniture,
00:29:07.360
let's say, from Ikea or some kind of electronic device that has this insane manual, you know,
00:29:12.720
no one wants to read through the manual. I'm not even sure why they're written at this point.
00:29:16.460
People nowadays, they go to YouTube and watch someone who's bought that same thing.
00:29:20.860
They unpack it. They've figured out a way to put it together. So they share that knowledge.
00:29:25.040
And that's such a much more effective way. Humans are mimicking creatures. You know,
00:29:32.140
we share that with primates, you know, monkeys see, monkey do. And it's a very powerful to learn.
00:29:38.040
And often in choir, like you said, I was basically just trying to echo what my, you know, the leader
00:29:44.540
of the bass section was doing, or just to look at Charlie, who's the choir leader, and sort of really
00:29:49.780
see what she was doing. And I almost felt like sometimes we were looking at each other in the
00:29:54.280
mirror. She would kind of come, come right up to me and like, okay, now do what I'm doing.
00:29:57.780
And that also makes it a lot easier in a sense, because, and this is another important thing to
00:30:02.920
point out about skill learning is often overthinking basically gets in the way of being able to learn
00:30:08.640
something. And when it, when it just got reduced to that level of Tom, you know, can you do just sing
00:30:14.740
this the way I'm singing it right now, just make this basic sound that was much more effective than,
00:30:20.160
you know, I could get out of my head and just stop thinking about it and just basically follow
00:30:24.940
the simple instruction. Because, you know, going back to why we feel bad about singing, another
00:30:29.820
thing that happens is that, you know, when we're learning, when it hasn't become automatic yet,
00:30:34.180
like I said, we try to tend to overthink it. So I was having trouble with high notes, for example,
00:30:38.400
I've, you know, sort of a lower voice. And, but these were, these were notes that I could use in
00:30:44.160
speech. These, these weren't notes that were physically impossible for me. But as, as the
00:30:49.420
note would be coming up in a song, I would start to freak out. My throat would clench. I would,
00:30:54.500
my whole body would tense up. I would, my teacher told me I was literally reaching my head upward to
00:31:00.840
try to hit this quote unquote high note. But all that stuff was just throwing off my body to, to produce
00:31:07.180
this note. So, you know, my teacher gave me a great instruction, which was as that high note
00:31:12.100
approaches, bend your knees down and sort of do this little dip down as just sort of a little
00:31:16.800
trick to forget what you're trying to do. And just, just sing the note, worry about bending your
00:31:23.480
knees to kind of very counterintuitive sort of notion, like, but it actually, it actually worked
00:31:27.880
amazingly well. All right. So takeaways there, don't overthink things. And then if you're learning a new
00:31:33.260
skill, consider joining a group or trying to do it with someone else as well. That can help a lot.
00:31:39.320
Another skill you learned was surfing. You've mentioned that before. And surfing is one of
00:31:43.120
those skills I think you talk about in the book. Surfers have this sort of idea that if you don't
00:31:46.880
pick up surfing before you're 14, basically, you're never going to be a surfer.
00:31:51.840
That was from William Finnegan's book, Barbarian Days, but go on.
00:31:56.300
Yeah. So, I mean, what, what, what was it like learning how to surf as an adult and like what
00:32:00.260
insights about learning new skills that you get from that experience?
00:32:03.620
One nice thing is that the message has gotten out to some extent already on this. And there are a lot
00:32:10.840
of adults out there trying to learn to surf, at least at Rockaway beach in New York city,
00:32:15.600
which is not to say, you know, it's the same everywhere, but I was heartened by that. I mean,
00:32:21.240
if you go, obviously if you go in like in the summer, for example, there are a lot of kids
00:32:24.800
camps and it tends to be sort of dominated by children learning, but the rest of the year,
00:32:28.600
there were always adults out there, some of whom were not always so good. So you didn't feel,
00:32:35.600
maybe that's because of Rockaway is not, and I was going on days when the waves weren't so huge.
00:32:41.780
So it sort of weeds out some of the experts anyway. So if anyone's, you know, feeling that
00:32:46.980
intimidation, I would just say, you know, don't believe the hype on that surfing is so exclusionary.
00:32:52.560
There are places you can go where there's, you know, a lot of people just like you. But
00:32:55.660
one of the challenges here though, is that I talk in the book about kids learning to walk,
00:33:00.140
infants learning to walk and how they can take up to 70 falls per hour. It's been documented by
00:33:05.520
studies at NYU and usually without much harm. I mean, infants are built to fail as a means to learn.
00:33:15.820
Adults don't have that same luxury. So I have taken my fair share of beatings out there and,
00:33:22.620
you know, someone with questionable freelance health insurance, this was always a little bit
00:33:26.800
scary to me, but, you know, one, the worst case was one day I, you know, sort of got tipped up upside
00:33:32.500
down and had my head planted into the ocean floor and had some compression on my spine that, which was,
00:33:40.200
you know, very concerning and could have led to a much worse result. So that, I mean, that,
00:33:45.960
that sort of obviously chess or singing in this regard is, is a safer path. But again, yeah,
00:33:53.440
the benefits I've gotten from surfing were to my mind worth those, those risks, which unfortunately
00:34:00.320
are greater. The older you get, your body's just not as engineered to handle failure as,
00:34:06.760
One idea about learning you explored with your surfing was this idea of the, the U shape, right?
00:34:12.960
So like when you're a beginner, you often make progress really fast and then you reach a point
00:34:18.340
where you actually start getting worse. And that's when a lot of times people give up. And then, but if
00:34:24.020
you keep going through that, you start getting better again. Like what's going on? Why is it that
00:34:28.900
you reach a point with your learning as a beginner that you start getting worse? What's, do we know
00:34:34.040
what's happening there? Yeah. I mean, there could be a couple of things going on. I mean,
00:34:37.900
number one is that, you know, with surfing, for example, you, you begin to want to go on bigger
00:34:44.340
tasks and you want to, you know, in the beginning, you, the instructor is basically pushing you into
00:34:49.340
waves and all you have to do is stand up on the board, which is not that easy. And, and, but once
00:34:53.980
you do that, it feels amazing. After he's pushed you 20 or 30 times and you're starting to get good
00:35:00.720
at it, then you're thinking, okay, I should probably try to catch my own wave. This is about
00:35:06.120
10 times more difficult than simply popping up maybe even more. Yeah. So right away you thought
00:35:12.560
you were doing great. Now you're taking on this bigger challenge. So you have this sense that
00:35:16.540
you've sort of gone backwards a little bit there and it, and it continues. Then the next thing would
00:35:22.140
be, okay, not just catching my own wave, but actually paddling to where there's going to be a good
00:35:26.820
wave. That's another skill that takes time to develop and cultivate. And I'm still not that
00:35:32.020
great at admittedly, but that, but that's 10 times harder even still. So the idea that, you know,
00:35:39.460
we have to push past those moments when we're going to be plateauing. I mean, another thing that happens
00:35:44.320
too, is that, and we do go backwards just even with the same task. The studies from juggling and my
00:35:50.320
own experience show, for example, that learning three ball juggling, people hit 50 or 60 cycles
00:35:56.780
in a row and think they've got it nailed. Suddenly they'll pick it up the next day and
00:36:01.440
they can't get five or six. And there's just, the researchers called a bug, like it's in a computer
00:36:07.220
and who knows what's actually going on. I mean, it could be the brain is still sort of consolidating
00:36:12.340
the information and you just actually need to step away from it a little bit and then come back and
00:36:16.840
have that retrieval where you're pulling it back. Yeah. It's a little knowledge can be a dangerous
00:36:23.240
thing as the cliche goes. And one thing that also happens is that the beginner, there's studies with
00:36:29.560
kids, for example, with grammar, they're speaking great at like age four or five. Say like, I ate that
00:36:35.940
hot dog yesterday. Then they learn, they start to actually learn the rules of grammar and they think
00:36:41.540
they've got it down and they'll try to over-apply what they've learned and thinking, oh, every verb,
00:36:48.380
every pass verb needs to end in ED. So let's say, you know, I ate that hot dog yesterday or something
00:36:52.920
like that. And they thought they were great. Suddenly they've taken on more than they can
00:36:57.600
chew, so to speak. And it kind of bites them. So, you know, if you suddenly think this happened to me
00:37:02.920
surfing, I, the first time outside of the Rockaways, I was in Portugal. I tried to go on a new break. I was
00:37:08.060
very excited. I told the guys, yeah, I just need a little bit of instruction. I already know how to surf.
00:37:13.000
And it was a completely different break, different waves. I was on a different board
00:37:17.320
and I sucked, to put it bluntly. I could not catch a wave. And they basically had to resort
00:37:24.420
to pushing me into these waves. So I was actually back to square one, which is very humiliating.
00:37:29.540
All right. So whenever you're a beginner, like oftentimes I feel like you can rely a lot on like
00:37:33.000
procedural information, like do this, do this, do this. But then you reach a point, well, that gets
00:37:37.720
you, that can get you so far. You think, well, I'm, I'm awesome now. And then you get thrown into
00:37:41.620
situations where the procedures no longer work. I experienced this with foreign language. Like
00:37:47.140
I took an immersive foreign language class for Spanish and I, in six weeks, I thought, man,
00:37:52.240
I know Spanish. And then I get dropped in Mexico and I had to have like my first like real conversation
00:37:58.140
and I had no clue what was going on. Like I didn't, it sounded like they were speaking Russian
00:38:03.180
basically. Yeah. And then I had to learn again on the, okay, well, that's not going to work.
00:38:07.720
The procedures I learned is not going to, I had to learn this new school, how to speak Spanish on
00:38:12.200
the fly. Yeah. And that's a great point, you know, about how much of learning is just sheer
00:38:17.760
experimentation that, you know, going back to those infants that they were studying at NYU,
00:38:25.160
infants are just there. We don't give drills to teach children how to walk. We just let them roam
00:38:30.580
about in a room for an hour and fall 30, 40, 70 times an hour. And then, you know, we don't really
00:38:36.740
give them feedback about why they fell either. We just sort of let them do it and work it out on
00:38:41.960
themselves. So to go back to your point, experimentation, you just have to get out there
00:38:47.260
and have some halting conversations with native Spanish speakers who are going to, you know,
00:38:52.740
be polite or maybe, you know, laugh at you, but you can drill all you want, but at some point,
00:38:59.020
yeah, you just have to get out in the real world and it's going to feel different.
00:39:02.120
So one final skill I want to talk about, because this, I've wanted to do this too,
00:39:06.240
is take, take up drawing, learn how to draw. Because you point, you point out that most people,
00:39:11.460
like when they're kids, they draw all the time and kids are actually for a while, you know,
00:39:15.820
their drawings aren't, they're not great, but they can convey things pretty well. But then we reach
00:39:20.540
a point where we no longer progress. And you made this point that like, we all still draw like we're
00:39:25.700
nine year old, nine year olds. And I find that true. Like for me, it's like 12. Like I still draw
00:39:31.460
the same little face that I could at 12 years old and it hasn't gotten any better. So what's going on
00:39:36.860
there? What, why'd you take on drawing? And like, why do people find drawing so hard to do?
00:39:43.440
Yeah. I guess I've always just, I wanted to get back, as you say, to that, that initial pleasure I
00:39:50.420
seem to take out of it as a child, not to say that it would be the same kind of pleasure, but you know,
00:39:53.960
I was, I was wondering why did, why did I lose that? Where did it go? And could I get it back?
00:39:58.460
And, you know, I, I was interested in, in art. I didn't think I was good. Didn't really set out
00:40:03.580
to become an artist or anything, or, or even really to be quote unquote creative. I just wanted to,
00:40:09.300
I just wanted to try this manual sort of motor skill of being a draftsman. So, and of course,
00:40:15.440
and I should say that, you know, there's a lot of cool stuff you can buy. And this is one of the
00:40:20.100
pleasures of being a beginner, I think is that whatever you're plunging into is just plunging
00:40:24.400
into that whole world of stuff. You can, you just, just the, the books to read, the stuff to buy,
00:40:31.020
the, the, you know, and someone who works at a computer all day, just typing, pushing electrons
00:40:36.280
around it, just owning these, these pencils and a needed eraser and, and, and, and sharpening a pencil
00:40:42.500
with a razor blade, the way artists do, was to me just very sort of intoxicating, you know,
00:40:47.460
but just to describe really quickly, a episode I had that I described in the book that, that was
00:40:52.100
really to me pretty life-changing. And it was this week-long class I took with Brian Bo Meisler,
00:40:58.780
who's the son of Betty Edwards, who's the author of a very famous book called Drawing on the Right
00:41:03.380
Side of the Brain. And the whole point of that book is that the problem we have with drawing
00:41:07.880
is a problem we have with, with seeing and with thinking is that, you know, if you're,
00:41:13.180
if you're trying to draw a self-portrait, which is what everyone who takes this week-long
00:41:16.520
class does as the very first thing. It, like you, like you said about your own 12-year-old work,
00:41:23.020
you know, it, it looks really kind of crude and a little bit like a mugshot and it looks almost
00:41:27.400
like cartoonish. And after a week of this class, we all, that entire class turned in these self-portraits
00:41:37.300
at the end that to my mind looked very impressive and, you know, not that far off from, you know,
00:41:44.180
quote unquote, artistic people. And, you know, it's, what happened was we had just been taught
00:41:50.240
new ways to think and to see and to stop thinking of things, for example, like a face as a face or a
00:41:57.340
nose as a nose, because that's where it all starts to go wrong. We have all these preconceptions of what
00:42:01.840
the human face looks like in our head, about the size of the forehead or the size of the eyes or
00:42:06.420
the relationship between those body parts, which actually don't correspond to reality. So the minute
00:42:12.500
you try to break that stuff down and focus on, I'm just going to draw this weird shape that is the
00:42:18.760
inner part of your ear and not think of it as an ear, that's where the success comes in. And that just
00:42:24.140
makes me think of one other thing, which is with all these skills is that, that, that breaking down
00:42:29.500
and sort of not getting overwhelmed by the, the whole thing, the end goal is just a very important
00:42:36.020
thing to both to not get discouraged as an easier thing to sort of conquer and achieve, but also to,
00:42:42.660
as a more effective learning procedure, you know, don't, don't worry about, you know, making it to
00:42:48.240
the end of that wave, just focus on putting your foot in the right place on that surfboard, you know,
00:42:52.460
just, just chunking, I think it's called is, is just such an effective approach. So, so yeah,
00:42:58.420
I would urge everyone to, as I said, with singing, to not think that you're not born to draw, that you
00:43:04.760
couldn't unlock this very satisfying ability. And no matter what age you are, you know, as Brian, the
00:43:12.880
teacher said, he had, he had a person who was a quadriplegic in the class, you know, basically used his
00:43:17.180
mouth and a pencil and, and achieved great results. So there's really hardly any, you know, physical
00:43:22.740
limitation here. It's, it's really all mental. So what have been your big takeaways from this
00:43:28.000
experience of learning all these new skills? Like what would be some of the practical takeaways
00:43:31.780
that you can apply across whatever school it is, you think? I guess, you know, getting over that,
00:43:37.420
that fear thing, number one, I mean, and the mental barriers, all, I think all of the barriers largely
00:43:43.460
in my entire process were mental. I had, you know, some one or two physical things with surfing,
00:43:49.780
but, you know, that, again, that's something that a lot of people have access to. It's just,
00:43:54.280
you know, getting over that sort of fear of, of looking bad and, and being willing to accept
00:44:00.060
failure as part, an essential part of the learning process. And I should say, you know, not that you're
00:44:05.480
always going to learn from failure, but you just have to, you just have to build in an allotment for
00:44:11.160
failure. If we failed 70 times an hour, the way infants do, most of us would give up. We wouldn't
00:44:17.100
push on, but infants push on and they become expert walkers after their 10,000 hours of practice. So,
00:44:23.460
you know, as a 50 year old, that, that gets, it's hard to put yourself out there and look
00:44:28.500
stupid. And you're sort of asking your question, why would I even do this? The world doesn't need
00:44:33.340
another amateur singer. You know, my job doesn't need this, but I would just say that you can really
00:44:39.100
unlock parts of yourself that you may not have had access to in other ways that,
00:44:45.560
and sort of surprise yourself and challenge yourself in ways that might not be as possible
00:44:52.460
in your career, say, because you've already hit so many plateaus. And yeah, I could, I could go on,
00:44:59.020
but I would just encourage everyone out there to take something up. I mean, this, this, this past year
00:45:05.660
has been the golden age of learning new things because of many of us are on lockdown and not just
00:45:13.440
because we're on lockdown. We have free time. I should notice, I should note, but that our habits
00:45:18.360
were disrupted. I think this is a major part too, that, you know, our normal life got disrupted and
00:45:24.100
we were able to, you know, suddenly think about things in new ways. And one of these new habits
00:45:30.200
would be to try to learn something new. And I think a lot of people have taken that to heart.
00:45:34.340
It sounds like you have, and you know, I say, just, just go for it.
00:45:38.060
No. Yeah. Because of you, I'm learning piano this year. I've decided in 2021 and I have very modest
00:45:42.960
goals. I don't expect to play like some fancy piece at the end of the year. I just, my goal is
00:45:49.000
15 minutes a day, practice 15 minutes a day, and I'm getting a little bit better.
00:45:54.620
That sounds like a perfectly sound, you know, bit of advice there. And it reminds me of one last thing
00:46:02.240
to point out here is that, you know, I would go into these things with small expectations and small
00:46:07.440
goals. There's some research that shows, you know, when people say, let's say you said, I want to learn
00:46:14.240
piano. This is going to be my new thing. This is going to be my passion. That minute when you try to
00:46:19.460
put such a heavy weight on something, you might then think the passion, that burning passion is going
00:46:25.760
to do the work for you. It's going to sort of absolve you of some of the hard work that has to happen.
00:46:29.540
And number two, once it does start to get hard, as it will pretty quickly, it's going to backfire
00:46:35.600
on you. You're going to feel a bit betrayed by this supposed passion. So just kind of go in with
00:46:39.980
very few expectations. It's like just biting off small songs here or there a few minutes every day.
00:46:47.060
Right. When the saints go marching in, I can do that, but that's about it. Well,
00:46:52.120
hey Tom, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your
00:46:55.080
work? www.tomvanderbilt.com would be the best place. Well, Tom Vanderbilt, thanks for your time.
00:47:03.060
It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Brett. It's been great. Thank you. My guest today was Tom Vanderbilt.
00:47:06.880
He's the author of the book, Beginners, The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. It's
00:47:10.860
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about Tom's work
00:47:14.720
at his website, tomvanderbilt.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash lifelong learning.
00:47:20.240
We can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:47:30.320
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:47:33.980
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00:47:37.960
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