Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.

As you plunge into learning some art or skill, the world around you appears new and bursting with infinite horizons. Each day brims with new discoveries as you take your tentative first steps, slowly pushing the bounds of exploration. You make mistakes, but even these are empowering, because they are mistakes you have never made before.

What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “rather than the quality of experience.” But what if we don’t want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?

Everything must be for something. I tell someone I'm going on an eighty-mile bike ride, and they ask, "What are you training for?" I want to answer, "I don't know... life?" "What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," write the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience." But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them? The idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance.

That word, which has an almost entirely pejorative meaning today as a hopelessly superficial dabbler, is derived from the Italian dilettare, which means “to delight.” As the art historian Bruce Redford notes, “dilettante”—one who exhibits delight—entered English with the formation of the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century group of Englishmen who had returned from the grand tour brimming with enthusiasm for Continental art and culture. As the process of acquiring knowledge gradually became more specialized, Redford notes, the meaning of the word shifted. By the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, the word had become an insult.

Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresher eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are more likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant. Because they’re less concerned with being wrong or looking foolish, children often ask questions that adults won’t ask.

cultivation, of that spirit of the novice: the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions—the unencumbered beginner’s mind.

Take the most notes on the first day. That’s when you see the most.

steep learning curve means you’re climbing faster. And the steepest learning curves come right away.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” writes Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.

A man…progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.*1

If you want to improve in chess,” wrote Ericsson, “you don’t do it by playing chess. You do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.

Our confidence has been so shaken by this cult of expertise and performance that when we don't perceive ourselves to be experts at something, we're almost expected to outsource the task who someone who does.

Letting someone else's ideas about performance stop you from trying something means relinquishing your freedom.

We "overvalue performance," as one psychologist put it, "and undervalue the self." We're afraid of being just okay at things. This is a trap. "For to permit yourself to do only that which you're good at," writes the legal scholar Tim Wu, "is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.

We live in an age of high performance, in which everyone is supposed to be constantly maximizing their potential, living their "best life." Social media has made everything from marriage proposals to this morning's breakfast into exquisitely choreographed, unsubtly competitive rituals. The ethos of work—"the long arm of the job," as one scholar put it—pervades our leisure, to the extent that we even have any.

A gulf was opening. Unless you were a professional, you were a mere dilettante or an "amateur." And what did this loaded word originally signify? "To love," derived from the French aimer. With the increasing specialization of knowledge and professionalization of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable.

We often interrupt people at the beginner stage, forgetting that talent can take time.