beginners the curious power of lifelong learning

And I wasn’t letting her win.īut as this was happening, I had the sudden realization that it was incredibly fun to learn some new skill - even if I wasn’t all that great at it - that if felt energizing, in the midst of middle age, to be a beginner again, something a lot of us largely leave behind when we’re young. I thought: What if we learned at the same time? Do kids really have that much of an edge when it comes to learning? As it turned out, we both had our strengths and weaknesses, but when the day finally came I actually had to face her in a tournament, at New York City’s Marshall Club, she was able to beat me. Vanderbilt: It grew out of a curious experiment I did with my daughter, then aged 4, who wanted to learn to play chess - something I’d never managed to do. Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.Ĭillizza: What made you decide to try – in your mid-40s – to take up things like juggling, singing and surfing? The conceit is simple: Vanderbilt decides, in his mid-40s, to try his hand at a lot of things he had always been interested in but never really pursued – from singing in a choir to surfing to making a wedding ring.Ĭompletely enamored with his pluck – and his touting of the power of the so-called “beginner’s mind” – I reached out to Vanderbilt to ask him about his quest and what it all could tell us about our political moment. When I read Tom Vanderbilt’ s “ Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning ,” I found myself underlining and dog-earring stats, notes and quotes on virtually every page.

Beginners the curious power of lifelong learning