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In Beginners, Tom Vanderbilt argues that you’re never too old to learn something new – and enjoy it
Beginnersby Tom VanderbiltKnopf
Malcolm Gladwell popularised, and oversimplified, the notion that 10,000 hours constitutes the magic number of greatness . That investment of time and effort, he argued in his 2008 bestseller Outliers, is imperative for anyone hoping to master anything from a sport to computing to music. The message? That success is far from arbitrary; it requires work.
But that s assuming you want to make sacrifices and be an expert. What if you cannot afford the equivalent of 416 24-hour days of deliberate practice to achieve prowess? What if you re content simply to dabble? Tom Vanderbilt asks those questions in Beginners, which should motivate especially the middle-aged to learn for the joy of it and gain from its transformative power - tempting rewards promised in the subtitle.
Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic gets under the hood of the everyday activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological, and technical factors that explain how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving says about us.
He examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He shows how roundabouts, which can feel dangerous and chaotic, actually make roads safer and reduce traffic in the bargain. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in parking lots.
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How to Finally Start Learning a New Skill
As we age, it gets harder to finally take the leap into something
new. I’m not talking about a professional certificate course; I’m talking about a skill that you’re learning from scratch.
In
Beginners, Tom Vanderbilt mastered five new skills (with increasingly little practical use for them), just to see the advantages of learning new things. As Vanderbilt points out, there are advantages just in learning itself.
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So what’s stopping us from taking the time to develop a new skill? Many people feel that they are just too old, or too inherently bad at something to actually put in the time to pick it up. But Vanderbilt says to get over that hump, and you’ll discover that you’re not as bad as you think. (Vanderbilt does point out, however, that he gave up on a welding class rather quickly.)