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In the book, Beginners, Tom Vanderbilt espouses the benefits of learning a new skill. Photo: Shutterstock

In Beginners, Tom Vanderbilt argues that you’re never too old to learn something new – and enjoy it

  • The book highlights the pluses of being a dilettante, encouraging especially the middle-aged to dabble in hobbies and learn new skills to keep mind and body young and efficient
  • Vanderbilt’s impetus for adding to his abilities arose from escorting his young daughter to her various classes and realising he could join her in certain activities

Beginners
by Tom Vanderbilt
Knopf

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.

“Being a beginner can be hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older,” writes Vanderbilt (whose previous book, 2008’s Traffic, about the way we drive, made it to Gladwell’s must-read list). Besides, who among the harried feels entitled to hobbies with little or no connection to work?

The New York-based tiger dad’s impetus for adding to his abilities arose from escorting his young daughter to her various classes – piano, soccer, tae kwon do, choir, skateboarding, coding, athletics, indoor climbing, chess – and realising he could join her in certain activities instead of remaining on the sidelines. That they were beginners separated by four decades promised interesting results.

One advantage of being a perpetual beginner, Vanderbilt argues, is you’re training your brain to be more efficient every time you begin to pick up a new skill. And learning several skills at the same time taps into the brain’s plasticity – its ability to change to adapt to new challenges.

For Vanderbilt, the experiments also lent themselves to a book in that “one year of” category so popular among self-help titles. Its timing could not have been more fortuitous, with the increase of “me time” during stay-at-home Covid-19 edicts pushing many to seek diversions of varying levels of commitment.

Thoughtful and well-researched, Beginners succeeds in stimulating rather than goading, although it’s the kind of book you pick up only if you’re already itching to try something new. And despite being linear in format, its chapters reflecting the skills the author was grappling with at the time, the volume allows readers to skip forwards and backwards, according to their predilections: not everyone will be interested in cycling or surfing (although the millions of people in Asia who cannot swim just might be persuaded to overcome their disadvantage).

Indeed, being taught more than how not to drown was one of Vanderbilt’s goals, which led to lessons with an instructor to hone the efficiency of his freestyle stroke and breathing. Practice ultimately resulted in exhilarating ocean-swimming family holidays in Greece and the Bahamas that also underscored the advantages of learning together.

Among others, classes in juggling, welding and drawing (“how to draw” was Google’s fifth most popular “how to” search in 2017, behind knotting a tie, at No 1) figure in the author’s period of self-improvement.

Author Tom Vanderbilt. Photo: Knopf

The staying-young goal behind many of the exercises is clear, and although Vanderbilt appears broadly competent at everything he chooses to learn, a couple of activities resonate more readily than others. One is singing – possibly the subject of his next book, he reveals in a Zoom call.

Training your pipes can apparently boost your immune function and endorphins while improving respiratory function and reducing the risk of heart attack, among many other pluses. And for those who use tone deafness as an excuse not to partake, the reality is that congenital amusia is “exceedingly rare”, he says.

Chess is another. Learning the board game awakened something in him, even though competing against his daughter highlighted that her brain was a “lightning-fast CPU” compared to his “garage-sale hard drive teeming with decades of old files”. He adds: “But I’ve become convinced that whenever something is touted as being good for children, it’s even better for adults, in part because we assume we no longer need all those benefits an activity is said to provide.”

Long before hit television series The Queen’s Gambit – based on Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel of the same name – sent sales of chess sets skyrocketing, Vanderbilt was already competing as a beginner, and realising that the game is one in which 12-year-olds can “skin you alive”. He also discovered the vast library of chess literature. Indeed, considering the focus of a whole book can be on a single move, time may be a factor.

But, he says to anyone thinking, “I’d love to, but I’m too busy,” consider this: in the time it took to watch the entire series on Netflix, you could have learned to play chess.

Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt. Photo: Handout
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