The other week I finished reading Tom Vanderbilt’s book Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning. It’s a fairly easy read, but if you’re strapped for time there’s an article in The Guardian which is a really helpful distillation of the book. The story starts with an anecdote about learning to play chess as an adult (very topical since we’ve all just binge-watched The Queen’s Gambit!), but it goes onto explore the broader benefits of learning something new, and continuing to keep learning new things.
The central idea here is that the beginner phase has value in itself and we shouldn’t think of it as something that just has to be ‘got through’ on the way to competence. There is the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known concept that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ and the idea that once you progress beyond the absolute beginner you start to develop habits (sometimes bad habits) and perhaps you’re not even aware of them. The mind of the beginner is open to wider possibilities and this has knock-on effects in your wider life, it makes you more open-minded generally and a more creative thinker. There’s a lovely Zen quote from Shunryu Suzuki: “In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in expert’s mind there are few.”
But there are obviously difficulties in trying to learn something new as an adult:
1) There’s an assumption that by the time we are adults we ought to be competent at things. But I think we need to give ourselves permission to be bad at something and enjoy it anyway. It’s okay to make mistakes, as Carl Jung said: “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon errors also.” Young kids don’t put pressure on themselves to be ‘achieving’ something in their hobbies, they just do things they enjoy.
2) There’s our fear of looking silly, a four-year old making their first tottering moves on roller-skates is cute, a forty-four year old in lycra and kneepads, trying to learn to roller-blade is perceived as ridiculous! But there’s real joy in being able to laugh at ourselves. Maybe one of the secrets of happiness is not giving a damn what other people think!
3) And then there’s our old enemy, time! It’s easier to learn to play piano when you practice for an hour every day and when you’re a kid, and you don’t have to do a full-time job, fold the laundry, empty the dishwasher, and re-grout the bathroom you just have more time on your hands. But as an adult maybe we appreciate how valuable our spare time is, and therefore we’re able to be more focused and efficient when we do find five minutes to practice a card trick, or half an hour at lunchtime to read about renaissance art, or an hour in the evening to write Python code.
Nevertheless, learning new things is hard, and if you have the disadvantage of not being an eight-year-old, then why bother? But here is where it gets interesting.
No education is ever wasted
First there’s the idea that education of any kind is never (or unlikely to be) wasted, you never know when a skill or piece of knowledge will be applicable to a new situation and the more tools you have at your disposal, the better able you are to respond to different situations. Vanderbilt gives the example of (polymath) Claude Shannon, an early proponent of information theory, who would plunge into all kinds of pursuits such as juggling or poetry; who knows how his brain worked, but making connections is key, and somewhere in the mix of juggling patterns and poetic structure he found something new. Most things we learn have some transferable skills, so the dexterity learned from solving a Rubik’s cube might be beneficial when playing piano, or chess may help concentration. There are lots of good examples of how you can transfer your learning from one area and apply it to another. There’s a great story about how Jon Tannahill took the dedication and rigorous approach he was familiar with from training for rowing and applied it to Space Invaders. Vera Wang was a figure-skater before she turned to fashion. Or how about chess prodigy Demis Hassabis who moved onto creating award winning computer games, founded DeepMind, and developed the AI programme AlphaGo which defeated a Go grandmaster. (DeepMind is basically about understanding how solving one problem can leapfrog to solutions to other problems; creating AI to solve general problems rather than specific ones, essentially an AI with transferable skills!)
Learning to learn, unlearn and re-learn
But also just the act of learning something new makes us practiced at learning, in the book, Vanderbilt starts with learning chess, but moves onto trying to pick up a number of different skills, effectively keeping himself at the learner stage. As Ravi Kumar (president of Infosys) puts it: “You have to learn to learn, learn to unlearn, and learn to re-learn.” These all seem like critical skills in an ever-changing world! It seems to be important to learn across a range of different domains and this reminded me of a brilliant TED talk by Emeilie Wapnick about not having one true calling, but embracing a number of different things and seeing where the combination of disciplines takes you. Emilie calls people with multiple interests and multiple skills multipotentialites, and she’s a big fan of the idea that having broad interests brings a range of benefits such as: generating ideas, being adaptable, and of course being able to learn rapidly because you are practiced at the art of learning.
Fluid dynamics
Learning new things opens us up to wider possibilities and, as mentioned in this blog, it gives us options. Being a beginner helps to develop, what Raymond B. Cattell and John Horn refer to as ‘fluid intelligence‘ the ability to respond to novel situations and solve novel problems, as opposed to ‘crystallised intelligence’ which is using what experience and knowledge we already have. Niels Bohr said: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” this is crystallised intelligence, an expert has built up a wide catalogue of mistakes which they have made and know to avoid in future; this helps in repeating the same problem or responding to the same situation (or very similar ones at least), but it is the initial phase of the beginner where we are continually solving the problem from first principles, not relying on past experience, that we develop an understanding of how to solve problems generally, this is fluid intelligence.
Wonderstuff
There’s the idea that learning things helps us to maintain a sense of wonder, to discover new things and perhaps to see the world with new eyes. As Vanderbilt puts it: “Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world. Learning to sing changes the way you listen to music, while learning to draw is a striking tutorial on the human visual system.” Or as Picasso said: “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Maintaining that childlike sense of wonder is something that becomes more and more difficult as we get older and more cynical, but perhaps by exposing ourselves to new experiences we can in some way maintain the capacity to surprise ourselves. This reminds me of neuroscientist Beau Lotto’s TED talk on experiencing awe; in the talk he uses an aerial performance by Cirque Soleil to explain how experiencing awe can make us more comfortable with uncertainty, lead us to strive less for closure, and gives us a greater appetite for risk (which sounds just like my kids!). This can allow us to develop and learn and be more creative ourselves. He quotes Joseph Campbell: “Awe is what enables us to move forward.” or as Lotto himself puts it: “Your brain only learns if you move. Life is movement.”
Machines for learning
Finally there’s a lovely thought that learning things is just what we are meant to do. Perhaps one of the most important things about learning new things, is that it reassures us that we are still capable of learning new things. And that we still have the capacity to grow, to change, and perhaps even occasionally surprise ourselves!
Our ability to learn and adapt has certainly contributed to humans’ success as a species. The idea that our brains are ‘novelty-seeking machines’ is wonderful, that “humans seem to crave novelty, and novelty helps us learn” and that learning “equip[s] us to better handle future novelty” and therefore to deal with uncertainty and change. It seems there’s never been a more perfect time to learn something new!