Beginners

Beginners Plot Summary

Introduction

I still remember the moment I stepped onto the surfboard for the first time, my knees wobbling like a newborn fawn as the instructor gently pushed me into a small wave. At forty-three years old, I felt simultaneously ridiculous and exhilarated. The teenagers nearby made it look effortless, while I tumbled into the water again and again. Yet with each attempt, something unexpected happened – I found myself laughing, truly laughing, with an abandon I hadn't felt in years. There was a peculiar freedom in being terrible at something new, a liberation that comes only when we surrender our adult expectations of competence. This tension between adult pride and the vulnerable joy of beginning again sits at the heart of what makes learning new skills after childhood so challenging – and potentially so rewarding. As we age, we naturally accumulate expertise in certain domains while simultaneously narrowing our experiences to what feels comfortable and familiar. We forget what it's like to be genuinely bad at something before becoming good. Yet research increasingly suggests that embracing the beginner's mindset throughout life isn't just personally fulfilling; it's essential for maintaining cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, and even neurological health as we age. Through stories of adults learning chess, singing, surfing, drawing and more, we discover that the journey of acquiring new skills offers profound insights not just about how we learn, but about how we might live with greater curiosity, humility, and joy at any age.

Chapter 1: The Courage to Begin Again: Chess and the Adult Ego

The Marshall Chess Club in New York City is an intimidating place for a novice. Sitting across from an eight-year-old boy named Ryan, I tried to look confident while secretly panicking. I had practiced my "chess face" in the mirror that morning – a look of remorseless pity that I hoped would channel the psychic ferocity of world champions. But my opponent seemed completely unfazed. When a woman appeared with chocolate milk for him, kissed his head and wished him good luck, I realized the absurdity of my mental warfare against this child. After about thirty moves, Ryan calmly defeated me. As I went to report the result to the tournament director, I saw him proudly telling his mother about his victory, his ego perfectly intact. Meanwhile, my own daughter – who had also entered this "Rated Beginner Open" tournament – placed near the top and collected an $84 prize, which she immediately converted to Beanie Babies and glitter putty. Later that day, I overheard her gleefully reporting to her grandparents, "My dad finished, like, fortieth." Out of fifty-one. This chess experiment began when my daughter, then almost four, spotted a chess set in a beachfront town library and asked if we could play. I nodded absently, but there was a problem: I didn't really know how. I had learned the basic moves as a kid, but chess had never stuck. This fact had vaguely haunted me through life – seeing idle boards in hotel lobbies or puzzles in newspapers always gave me a pang of regret. So I decided to learn, if only to teach my daughter. Rather than stumbling through it alone, I hired a coach named Simon Rudowski, a Polish émigré with old-world formality, to teach us both simultaneously. What started as a simple father-daughter activity evolved into something more profound. We were two novices at different life stages, starting from the same point but separated by four decades. Would one of us improve faster? Would we learn differently? Through our lessons, I observed how my daughter approached chess with natural curiosity and resilience. When she made mistakes, she simply noted them and moved on. I, however, felt each error as a personal failure, evidence of some fundamental deficiency. My adult ego created barriers that her childlike openness simply bypassed. As adults, we often avoid being beginners because we've forgotten how to separate performance from identity. Children expect to be bad at things before becoming good – it's their default state. But somewhere along the way, we develop the belief that competence is our natural condition and incompetence is shameful. Yet embracing the beginner's mindset – what Zen Buddhists call "shoshin" – opens us to possibilities that expertise can sometimes blind us to. Through chess, I was rediscovering this freedom to fail, to learn openly, to experience the unique joy that comes only when we venture beyond our comfort zones and remember that age isn't the barrier to learning new skills – it's our reluctance to be beginners again.

Chapter 2: Learning from Infants: How Babies Master Complex Skills

One spring morning, I visited the Infant Action Lab at New York University's Center for Neural Science to observe a fifteen-month-old named Lily. She was wearing a modified snowsuit with weights added, increasing her body weight by 15 percent. With determination on her tiny face, she steadfastly plodded across an instrumented pressure-sensitive mat toward her mother, who offered Cheerios as motivation. This wasn't baby boot camp – it was science in action, studying how infants respond when a "cost" is added to walking. The lab, directed by Karen Adolph, looks like a daycare center nestled in academia – padded walls, stain-resistant carpeting, toys scattered about. Here, infants clamber down steep ramps, wobble toward drop-offs, and stagger across adjustable walkways while researchers carefully monitor their movements. What they've discovered is remarkable: The average toddler travels the length of eight football fields each day, taking some 2,400 steps. That's more than the average American adult. They fall an average of seventeen times per hour, with novice walkers tumbling up to thirty times. One unlucky research subject hit the deck almost seventy times in sixty minutes. Yet infants persist. They get up and try again, seemingly undeterred by failure. "They have everything going for them," Adolph explained. "They're highly motivated to learn things and be part of the world. There's almost nothing to dissuade them." Unlike adults, they receive no negative feedback for errors – their mistakes often generate more parental attention – and they rarely get hurt. Their ability to be bad, and have everyone be okay with that, is crucial to how they get good. What's particularly fascinating is how infants approach new challenges. When learning to crawl, babies develop a keen sense of what slopes are too steep to navigate safely. But when they begin walking, they lose this knowledge entirely – novice walkers will blithely plunge down slopes or toddle off cliffs. They haven't transferred their crawling knowledge to walking because it's an entirely different "problem space" with different muscles, different balance requirements, and even a different vantage point. As Adolph explained, "You learn to move with the body you have." And since babies grow in astonishing bursts, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Watching these tiny scientists at work reveals profound truths about effective learning. Infants don't follow rigid programs or structured curricula – they experiment constantly, in varied environments, never taking the same walk twice. They operate at the edge of their abilities, in what educators call the "zone of proximal development" – the sweet spot between what they can currently do and what they're trying to accomplish. Most importantly, they don't judge themselves for falling; each tumble is simply data, not failure. As adults relearning how to learn, we would do well to remember this infant wisdom: learning isn't about avoiding failure – it's about embracing it as essential information. We don't need to master fixed rules but develop flexible strategies that can adapt to changing conditions. And perhaps most importantly, we need to practice constantly, in varied ways, without the harsh self-judgment that so often derails adult learning. If you don't learn to fail, you'll fail to learn – a lesson our youngest teachers demonstrate with every wobbly step forward.

Chapter 3: Finding Your Voice: The Journey of Unlearning to Sing

When was the last time you sang? If you're like most people, probably not that long ago – perhaps in the shower, humming while walking, or belting out a favorite song in the car. Singing is deeply embedded in our human experience. It boosts our immune function, increases endorphins and oxytocin, improves respiratory function, and may even counter depression. Yet despite these benefits and our natural inclination to sing, many adults have developed a curious vocal insecurity. This insecurity wasn't always there. As children, we sang freely and frequently. Preschools ring with song; households with young children are filled with music. But somewhere along the way, a shift occurs. Children begin to acquire a "musical self-concept" – they start to think they either "have it" or they don't. Research by Steven Demorest and others has found there's not a strong relationship between children's perception of their singing ability and their actual skill. Yet self-perception strongly influences future participation. "Disbelief in one's capabilities," writes psychologist Albert Bandura, "creates its own behavioral validation." Seeking to reclaim this lost voice, I found Danielle Amedeo, a voice teacher whose website bore the magic words "Beginners Welcome." During our first lesson in her Brooklyn Heights studio, she asked me to perform a song. I chose "Time After Time," a jazz standard recorded by Chet Baker. As I began to sing, I immediately started coughing – anxiety often manifests in the throat. When I finally managed to get through the song, I was bathed in sweat, my voice trailing upward in a dying screech on the high notes. There's something deeply transformative about sending your voice, as music, unaccompanied by recorded music, into a room. You're not only hearing the song as you've never quite heard it; you're hearing your voice as you've never quite heard it. Rather than having me continue struggling with songs, Danielle began breaking me down to build me back up. We made childlike sounds – lip trills, las, das, and mas. In one exercise, I let my tongue hang over my front lip, released my jaw, and just said, "Blah blah blah." We focused on vowels, which flow freely down the open vocal tract without the speed bumps of consonants. "The vowel is the voice," as one vocal pedagogue writes, "and the consonant is the interruption of the voice." Lyrics were avoided; they harbored bad habits. When I thought less about singing and more about simply communicating – like when Danielle had me shout "No NOT now!" with increasing intensity – I found I could comfortably reach notes that had previously seemed impossible. The journey back to singing revealed something profound about adult learning: sometimes we need to unlearn before we can learn. The barriers to singing weren't physical limitations but accumulated mental and emotional constraints – self-consciousness, perfectionism, and years of telling myself "I can't sing." By returning to childlike vocalizations, by focusing on process rather than performance, I was gradually reconnecting with a natural capacity that had been there all along. William James wisely noted, "I don't sing because I'm happy, I'm happy because I sing." The act itself generates the emotion, not the other way around. By embracing the beginner's mindset in singing, I was finding my way back to a voice I'd forgotten I had – and in the process, discovering that joy often follows action rather than preceding it.

Chapter 4: The Power of Community: Learning Through Shared Experience

Every Monday evening, I travel to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a hulking nineteenth-century neo-Gothic building that houses the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. There, in room 203, I join the Britpop Choir, a group of about fifty people who gather to sing popular music from England. People arrive after work, shoulders sagging, faces drawn. But within minutes of starting our warm-ups – stretches, lip trills, scales – something magical begins to happen. The energy in the room transforms completely, and by the end of our ninety-minute rehearsal, the space is positively charged with excitement and connection. What makes this experience so powerful isn't just the music but the phenomenon known as the "chorus effect." As we sing, our individual voices blend to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Interestingly, this effect comes not from perfect unison but from the inevitable human tendency to stray slightly from perfect pitch. These tiny variations create an enchanting, quasi-random sound that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. "In a cognitive sense," writes acoustic researcher Sten Ternström, "the chorus effect can magically dissociate the sound from its sources and endow it with an independent, almost ethereal existence of its own." I never saw myself as a "choir person" before joining, but Monday quickly became my favorite day of the week. The choir provided something I hadn't realized I was missing: the experience of learning alongside others. If we learn largely by observation, I now had dozens of people to observe. If learning is helped by feedback, I could tell via the voices around me if my singing was off. If learning is prompted by motivation, I was spurred by being part of something bigger than myself. Research confirms these benefits: compared to other social leisure activities, newly formed singing groups experience much faster social bonding – what researchers call the "ice-breaker effect." As I got to know my fellow singers, I discovered many were, like me, in periods of transition. Roger, my bass section companion, had returned to singing after a breakup. Laurence, a Frenchwoman with an infectious laugh, had joined as her twenty-year marriage was dissolving. Adrian, a soccer coach from London, had been encouraged by his speech therapist to join after suffering a brain tumor that left him with aphasia. Though he couldn't speak, he could sing – a bridge to recovery. We had all come from different places with different stories, but we were all beginners trying to start something new, trying to start over. The choir became a microcosm of what a functioning participatory community looks like. Everyone had to pitch in to make it work. We had to show up, memorize lyrics, hone our parts. We worked with people, anticipated their actions. If someone was weak on a part, others would help; they might return the favor on the next song. The variety of voices wasn't a hindrance but the very strength of the sound. People of different ages, races, and backgrounds came together to create something they were an integral part of yet was greater than any individual. In a world increasingly characterized by isolation and digital connection, the choir offered something profoundly human – the joy of creating beauty together, of belonging to something larger than ourselves while still being valued for our unique contribution.

Chapter 5: Riding the U-Curve: Surfing and the Science of Skill Acquisition

Surfing has cost me two wedding rings, many thousands of dollars, and a few millimeters of intervertebral space in my spine. And I'm still not that good at it. I was drawn to surfing the way most middle-aged novices are: it was an object of long fascination that I wanted to try before it was too late. Growing up in the Midwest, surfing had trickled into my consciousness through television clips and movies. For decades, I maintained a secret crush on the sport, but it seemed wrapped in mystique and ultimately unattainable. My journey began on a cold November afternoon at Rockaway Beach in New York, where I met Dillon O'Toole, an instructor with Locals Surf School. After practicing the "pop-up" – the swift transition from prone paddling to standing – on the beach, we moved into the ocean. "This isn't so bad," I told Dillon, nestled in my thick winter neoprene. Then an unexpectedly large wave broke on me, and it felt like a thousand tiny needles had been shot into my face. Leading me through the waves, Dillon spotted one he liked and pushed me into it. "POP!" he shouted. I clumsily clambered to my feet, my hand still clutching the board's rail. As I toppled over, frigid water blasted up my nasal cavity. After several lessons and some modest success, I began to feel confident enough to alternate lessons with solo sessions. I even bought my own board – a shorter, less stable one than the beginner-friendly foam board I'd been learning on. This is when I discovered the U-shaped learning curve. Initially, as a complete novice, I had made rapid progress. With an instructor cherry-picking waves and pushing me into them, all I had to do was stand up and ride. But now I faced new challenges: spotting my own waves, paddling into them with enough power, timing my pop-up correctly, angling my takeoff. I'd not only plateaued; I felt I'd gotten worse. What had actually happened was my metacognitive window had been thrown open. Before, I didn't know what I didn't know. Now I was getting a sense of what surfing really was. According to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, novices live in a world of rigid, context-free rules. To move to the "advanced beginner" stage requires applying those rules in context – knowing when to follow them and when to adapt. This isn't easy, especially in surfing where conditions constantly change. One cold December day, after a wipeout that sent me face-first into the sandy bottom, I ended up in an MRI tube with a neck injury. The diagnosis: "2–3 mm anterolisthesis of C2 on C3 and of C3 on C4" with "mild degenerative end-plate changes." Despite this setback, I continued my journey, eventually attending a week-long intensive surf camp in Costa Rica. There, under expert coaching, I began to climb back up the U-shaped curve. I learned to read waves better, to time my pop-ups, to position myself correctly. I surfed alongside others at similar skill levels, drawing inspiration and motivation from their progress. One fellow surfer, Kathy, told me she'd started surfing after having children and considered it "the best thing I had ever done." Though she lamented starting later in life, she found a profound benefit: "It makes me appreciate every second I have out there so much more." The U-shaped learning curve reveals something profound about the nature of skill acquisition. The initial rapid progress of beginners often gives way to a period of apparent regression as we become aware of the true complexity of what we're learning. This dip isn't failure but a necessary part of deeper learning – the moment when we move beyond simple rules to develop true understanding. And while starting later in life may mean we have less time to master a skill, it often means we approach it with greater appreciation, awareness, and joy in the journey itself. The satisfaction comes not from achieving perfection but from the continuous process of growth and discovery that keeps us feeling alive at any age.

Chapter 6: Seeing with New Eyes: How Drawing Transforms Perception

In a small art studio in Brooklyn, I stood before an easel, pencil in hand, staring at a simple still life arrangement – a white mug, a small potted plant, and a folded cloth. The instructor, Amy, had asked us to draw what we saw, not what we thought we saw. This seemingly simple instruction proved remarkably difficult. My hand kept wanting to draw the cup as a perfect circle with a handle attached, even though from my angle it appeared as an ellipse. I was drawing my mental symbol for "cup," not the actual cup before me. Drawing, I discovered, isn't primarily about hand-eye coordination or technical skill – it's about learning to see differently. Betty Edwards, author of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," argues that drawing is really about shifting from our dominant "left-brain" mode (verbal, analytical, symbolic) to our "right-brain" mode (visual, perceptual, present). When we truly observe something to draw it, we enter a different state of consciousness – time seems to slow, verbal thinking quiets, and we become intensely aware of shapes, spaces, and relationships that normally go unnoticed. To help facilitate this shift, Amy had us try several exercises. In one, we had to draw an object without looking at our paper – a technique called "blind contour drawing." In another, we drew a chair upside down, working from a photograph turned 180 degrees. These exercises forced us to abandon our symbolic thinking and simply trace what our eyes perceived. The results were surprisingly effective. My upside-down chair looked far more accurate than my right-side-up attempts because I was drawing pure shapes rather than my idea of "chair." As the weeks progressed, I found myself noticing things I'd never seen before – the precise angle where a wall meets the ceiling, the negative spaces between objects, the subtle gradations of shadow on a plain white surface. Walking through the city, I began to see buildings not as labeled entities ("that's the library") but as fascinating compositions of shape, line, and value. A fire escape became an intricate geometric pattern; a crowd of people transformed into a study of proportions and spatial relationships. This shift in perception extended beyond the studio. I found myself more present in everyday moments, more attuned to the visual richness of ordinary scenes. As the artist Frederick Franck wrote, "When I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle." Drawing wasn't teaching me to create impressive artwork; it was teaching me to see the world as it actually is, rather than through the filter of my habitual categorizations and assumptions. The experience of learning to draw reveals something profound about adult learning in general: often, the greatest barrier to acquiring a new skill isn't physical limitation but perceptual habit. We see what we expect to see, do what we've always done, think in familiar patterns. True learning requires breaking these habits – not just adding new knowledge but transforming how we perceive and interact with the world. When we embrace this deeper form of learning, we don't just acquire skills; we expand our consciousness. The beginner's mind isn't just open to new information; it's open to new ways of being, seeing, and experiencing life itself.

Chapter 7: The Neuroscience of Novelty: How New Skills Reshape Our Brains

"After a week's juggling, I was a changed person," I realized one morning. "I don't just mean I suddenly brimmed with confidence or that my outlook on life was a bit sunnier. I mean that I'd actually been changed." This wasn't metaphorical – learning to juggle had physically altered my brain. Researchers have found that just seven days of juggling practice increases gray matter in areas related to visual motion processing. Even more remarkably, these changes occur regardless of how well you learn to juggle. The attempt itself, not the mastery, is what transforms the brain. My juggling journey began with instructor Heather Wolf, who explained that the key wasn't tracking individual balls but throwing to a pattern – "like tossing to a little algorithm in the sky." The most counterintuitive advice she gave was to stop thinking. When I tried to consciously control each toss and catch, I inevitably failed. Success came only when I relaxed into the pattern and allowed my brain to develop implicit motor programs that operated below conscious awareness. This principle extends across all skill domains. As Pablo Celnik, director of Johns Hopkins University's Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Lab, explained to me, our brain constantly makes predictions to compensate for an inherent time lag in our sensory system. "Your brain receives feedback about what you're doing, and that takes time – about eighty to one hundred milliseconds," Celnik said. "We live in the past. Whatever we see now is actually about a hundred milliseconds ago for the motor domain." When we become skilled at something, it becomes automatic because our brain's predictions become increasingly accurate. The research on brain plasticity revealed another fascinating insight: the changes that occur when learning something new happen regardless of age. A study of older subjects (mean age sixty) learning to juggle found similar brain plasticity to that seen in twenty-year-olds. "Even if there's little chance you'll become an expert," as researcher Tobias Schmidt-Wilcke told me, "you should try to learn something new." The brain responds most powerfully not to repetition of familiar skills but to the challenge of novel ones. I met Steve Schrader, an eighty-one-year-old who had taken up juggling at age eighty after physical problems left him feeling "very down." Despite initial struggles, Schrader persisted, working toward his goal of mastering five-ball juggling. "The older you get," Schrader observed, "the harder you have to work." Yet research suggests that the more learning older adults take on, the faster they seem to learn – the more they become like younger adults. Learning to learn, it seems, is a lifetime sport. The neuroscience of skill acquisition offers profound implications for how we approach aging. Rather than seeing later life as a time of inevitable decline, we might view it as an opportunity for continued neural development through new challenges. Each novel skill we attempt – whether juggling, drawing, singing, or surfing – creates new neural pathways, maintains cognitive flexibility, and keeps the brain efficient and adaptive. The science confirms what many adult beginners intuitively discover: the journey of learning isn't just emotionally rewarding but physically transformative, keeping our most complex organ vibrant and resilient throughout our lives.

Summary

The journey of learning new skills in adulthood offers profound rewards that extend far beyond the skills themselves. When we embrace the beginner's mindset – that state of openness, curiosity, and freedom from expectation – we unlock not just new abilities but new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. Like infants learning to walk, we must be willing to fall repeatedly, to experiment widely, and to operate at the edge of our abilities. The U-shaped learning curve reminds us that apparent regression is often a sign of deeper understanding developing, as we move from rigid rule-following to flexible, contextual application of knowledge. The most valuable insights from this exploration of adult skill acquisition aren't about achievement but transformation. Learning to sing reconnects us with our authentic voice. Drawing teaches us to see reality as it is, not as we symbolize it. Chess develops strategic thinking. Surfing attunes us to natural rhythms. Juggling reveals how our minds and bodies coordinate. And perhaps most importantly, joining communities of fellow learners – like a choir – reminds us that we're not alone in our struggles and triumphs. The greatest skill we can develop isn't mastery of any particular domain but the ability to approach life itself with the curious, resilient, joyful spirit of a perpetual beginner. As we age, this capacity becomes not just enriching but essential – a way to stay mentally flexible, emotionally engaged, and open to the wonder that surrounds us every day.

About Author

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Tom Vanderbilt

Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, Outside, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wilson Quarterly, Artforum, The Wilson Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, and Popular Science. He is contributing editor to Artforum and the design magazine Print and I.D., contributing writer of the popular blog Design Observer, and columnist for Slate magazine.His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Traffic:Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K. and territories, and by publishers in 18 other countries. He is also the author of two previous books: Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002; published in PB by the University of Chicago Press in 2010), an offbeat architectural travelogue of the nation’s secret Cold War past; and The Sneaker Book (The New Press, 1998), a cultural history of the athletic shoe (published in Italian and Swedish editions). His early writings for The Baffler have been collected in two anthologies, Commodify Your Dissent and Boob Jubilee (W.W. Norton, eds. Thomas Frank and Matthew Weiland), and he has also contributed essays to a number of books, including New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (New York University Press); Supercade: The Visual History of the Video Game Age (The MIT Press), Else/Where: Mapping (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006),Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), The World and the Wild (The University of Arizona Press), and The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (Harper Perennial, 2006).He has consulted for a variety of companies, from ad agencies to Fortune 500 corporations, and has given lectures at a variety of institutions around the world, from the Eero Saarinen Lecture at Yale University’s School of Architecture to the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Canberra. He has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television programs around the world, including NBC’s Today Show, ABC News’ Nightline, NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air with Teri Gross, the BBC’s World Service and The One Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Fox Business, and CNN’s Business Today, among many others. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, and has received fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visiting Arts, the Design Trust for Public Space, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. He is also a member of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Cold War Advisory Committee, a group studying the identification of sites and resources significant to the Cold War. Courtsey : http://www.tomvanderbilt.com/bio/

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