Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: We're here today with Tom Vanderbilt talking about how we can inspire our teams to be more confident in trying new things and learning new things by being lifelong learners ourselves. Tom went on an expedition. Tom noticed that as a parent, he was spending so much time on the sidelines watching his daughter practice things and learn things and get better at things, and that he, as an adult, wasn't spending much time doing that himself.

As parents, it's really easy to get into ruts of only really doing things in our lives that we're already pretty good at or things that we've been doing for quite some time, but it's great role modeling to take on some things that we're not so good at yet, and to show our kids that it's okay to struggle with things, and that if you persevere hard enough at learning something, you can get better.

Tom wrote about all of this in his book, The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. He has written for many publications, including the New York Times magazine, the Wall Street Journal magazine, Popular Science and The Smithsonian. He's also the author of Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do, and two other books. Really excited to speak with Tom today about becoming a beginner again.
Talk to me a little bit about this book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. You went on a quest to become a beginner again. What inspired that and what did that lead to?

Tom: Sure. I think probably the main catalyst here was the idea that I became a parent. My daughter is now officially a teenager, but when this book began, she was much, much younger. I think, and any parent becomes a beginner whether they want to or not. You can try to do research ahead of time and you know a little bit about the whole process, but it really just threw me into a tailspin. There were a lot of things I just didn't know, didn't anticipate as much as I could be prepared. The amount of hours I spent researching you kind of like dumb stuff in retrospect, what stroller to buy.

I was essentially middle-aged. I was an older parent, and being a beginner was a very new process to me. You hit middle-aged, you think you have it all pretty much figured out. You've mastered some stuff maybe, and you're in the mid-career and you've got that part set. That's just upended my world. That was sort of the beginning thing.

Then, as she started growing, kids want to do stuff and try stuff sort of endlessly, and they also need to be taught. I mean, some things they can figure out on their own. I found myself in this position of trying to teach these skills. I mean, when I couldn't teach a certain skill or that well, I would send my daughter to a class. I was one of those over-involved New York City parents and a lot of classes, a lot of running around.

During these classes, I would find myself sitting on the sidelines just waiting, usually sort of scrolling through my phone. At some point, I think it was during a swimming class or something, I thought, "What? All these classes, all these things I'm having her learn. What was the last time I learned a new skill? When was the last time I was a beginner? Instead of just being the kind of coach parent figure who already knew everything."

That was the precipitating thing. I wanted to get back to that stage of being a beginner, both for my own sake, and also I thought there could be some interesting lessons to apply to parenting. What would it be? Instead of my daughter only seeing me as this authority figure who knew everything to see me struggling along with her as we tried to do some new things. Sorry, long story, but that was the beginning of Beginners.

Andy: I think it's so easy to fall into that role of being the parent who's like, "Hey, I just take you around from thing to thing and you should definitely be trying lots of new stuff and learning lots of new things," but there's also this extent to which we start to see ourselves as a fully formed person or something, and we stop just trying to stretch ourselves in new directions.

Then, also like you're saying, I think that then also sends this message or creates this idea for our kids. That's where they're going to go too, is like, "Oh," and then, "Now, I'm a kid, so I can maybe try some new things," but pretty soon I'm going to start getting older. That's when I start to get set in my ways and say, "Okay, here's who I am," and there's something really liberating about just changing your mindset on that.

Tom: I think there is, and this is something that, and one thing I also noticed going to all these classes or sports or what have you, is that there were just a lot of parents sitting around. I actually did an article once about, it's a long story, but the parent was telling me about they would go to their kids' football games or whatever and parents would just sit around for three hours in these lawn chairs. This one woman said, "Well, at least let's get a little exercise group going, make that time a bit productive."

It's like parents just take themselves out of the equation, make themselves the spectator only perhaps there's a thought that's sacrificing themselves for their kids, but I don't think you have to do it that way. I think in terms of one of the takeaways for learning and children is that there's interesting study that they had these kids in a lab and some psychologists did these experiments. They showed a kid a task and then tried to have the kid replicate the task, and they had a person who did it really quickly without any issue.

Then, they had someone sort of struggle to figure it out, and the kids who watched the person struggling to figure it out, then took longer to more successfully complete the task. The other kids gave up sooner.

Andy: They're going to persist a lot longer if they've seen modeling that, "Hey, it's going to be hard, but you just keep pushing through," versus-

Tom: Exactly. Yeah. Some of these things, I was trying to teach my daughter like learning to ride a bicycle. I could ride my bicycle very well. She saw no struggle there.

Andy: Already good at it. They look at you and they're like, "Oh, okay," but it's easy then to sort of create that mentality that it's like, "Okay, well, rather good at something or you're not good at something. I guess this is just not my thing, so I shouldn't work hard at this and without really trying to." A lot of times I think we model that idea because we're only doing things that we're good at or we're already good at a lot of times in our adult lives.

Tom: Precisely. This is something that is becoming drilled into kids, I think, at an ever earlier age, this idea of specialization and becoming, finding that thing a lot earlier, the scrapbook by David Epstein called Range, looks at these pro-athletes and there's some pretty compelling cases where the ones who really did the best later on were the ones who had done a bunch of different sports when they were kids, not the one who was kicking a soccer ball only since they were age, since they were age two.

One thing I really took away from this book is that, I undertook a number of skills. I tried to learn or at least sort of have a passing familiarity with certain things. They were a range of things: Surfing, singing, drawing, making something. For the most part, things I'd really wanted to do for a long time and I had prevented myself from ever getting to for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about later, but one of the things that lingered in my mind is, I never became really great at anything because I don't really have the time, is my main excuse.

I became good enough that I thought, in retrospect, I'm not an amazing artist, but I picked it up enough of it fairly quickly that if thinking back, if I had gone back several decades back to when I was a kid or high school, if I had pursued that path in some way, I have no doubt that I could have found myself in some kind of artistic-related career had I just applied myself because we get hung up with this idea that it's all talent and certainly talent does.

Andy: It's like this innate ability and almost that as parents, we're trying to help our kids find what are those things that are like that you have a spark in or that you're pre-wired to just be awesome at and, "Oh, it seems like this one focus on this, those other other things you weren't really good at those. Don't worry about those," but yeah, how helpful is that?

Tom: Well, we do really do it for certain artistic things in particular. I mean, no one says, "Oh, that kid was born to be air traffic controller. He just had that gift at age five." I don't want to say there's anything wrong with identifying an interest of a kid and trying to develop it, but there's a lot of research that shows that a lot of times, it's not known early on that kids will have various paths they may turn down and even some super well known, let's say piano, classical piano artists were not prodigies. They didn't really develop until a later age.

I don't want to get hung up on that because it just feeds in this same cycle that then perpetuates itself even deeper into as you get older, and then particularly the middle age, by which time all those thoughts have hardened. You're like, "If I wasn't an artist then, I'm certainly not going to become an artist now, so why even bother?"

I'm not saying you have to be an artist and in capital letters that it's going to be a mid-career job shift, but that there's a lot of pleasure and other things that are less perhaps tangible that you can take away from these learning experiences and to try to bring it back to parenting again, another thing that I found happened is that I was really able to find a bond and a connection with my daughter through the shared pursuit in particular of some of these tasks. I should say that when I say that I tried to take on a number of these things, I also put my daughter in that role of she was going to try some of those things as well, whether-

Andy: We're doing this together.

Tom: Yeah, exactly.

Andy: Talk about this.

Tom: Yeah, it didn't always work, but some things she was more into than others, but it was great to have that shared growth where we're both starting as beginners separated by all these years, but undergoing the same process of novelty and embarrassment and making mistakes and seeing your world expand by the acquisition of this whole new knowledge base and et cetera, et cetera.
I think to this day, I participated in a chess tournament with her last weekend, and she, of course beat me, but that's a whole other side of the equation that you might not get as good as your kid when you learn something together, but it's a good prompt.

Andy: I thought that was really fascinating when you talked about the trajectory of chess that it seemed like you were picking it up a lot faster than her at first, but then as time went on, she sorts of steadily eclipsed you in chess skills to where now you're asking her like, "Hey, can you help me with this game I'm playing online real quick. You see any good moves here?

Tom: Exactly. Yeah. I think kids are such, their brains are just these sponges and it really is true. They are just learning machines and they're acquiring all this information of forging all these connections. I have a lot of already forged connections. My brain is a little bit slower. What I brought to chess was this knowledge of how to play games in general and patience and a little bit more awareness of how to learn something in a systemic way. She brought this more rapid fire ability to spot weaknesses and patterns on the board.

In the beginning, I was just simply sort of more patient and I could understand, okay, we're learning a game. Here's what to pay attention to, but that quickly, it subsumed under her just sheer analytic and processing power. This is a lesson to the adult beginner. You can make a lot of progress and you can become very good at something, but it's not necessarily going to be as easy as your child who's undertaking that same thing for several reasons that I've just mentioned, but again, not a reason to abandon hope. I have also beat her on a number of occasions. This is not, we have hope, the older set.

Andy: Thought all is lost. I thought this was such an interesting section of the book. You talk about the differences in what's happening in the brain, where the aging brain is compensating for various slower processing abilities by building scaffolds, connecting more wider areas of the brain, but this can cause some interference and you see younger people show more modulation, and I wonder what that means.
Tom: Yeah. I use this analogy of computing. My brain is just an older desktop computer that I've installed a lot of applications. Those programs are trying to connect to each other. There's a lot of lingering stuff in the, is it RAM or-

Andy: You got to defrag.

Tom: Yes. Thank you for that. Whereas my daughter, it's like she just opened this brand new top of the line Intel, whatever, gaming laptop that is incredibly powerful and doesn't have much installed on it. She can just...

Andy: Totally.

Tom: ... really bring the entire focus of her of that mental power onto a problem without much getting in the way, whereas I have, as you mentioned, this interference, in trying to learn a new skill, I may have the memory of some other skill I've learned getting in the way. I may have the memory of that time I fell two decades ago and hurt myself really badly. That's getting in the way.

She's just really more of a blank slate and that in the computing metaphor, it is just a faster, more capable machine, whereas, I'm trying to bridge together that scaffolding metaphor. I can use more stuff. I have wisdom. I have memories. I have experience. I have perhaps a higher emotional intelligence, all these sorts of things, but that's a lot to bring on board and it slows me down. Some of those things you don't need in a game like chess, like emotional intelligence. You're just there to win and to play well.

Another thing that does get in the way of the adult learner is that confidence question. Kids are highly confident. We, as parents, try to make them so. We encourage them constantly for a good reason. You can do anything. You can learn this. Don't worry if you don't get it right away. They grow up in a very supportive learning environment.

Whereas adults, we tend to be pretty hard on ourselves. If we don't get something right away that we're trying, we think, "Oh, that's not for me. I'm useless." We don't have a supportive audience of adoring people necessarily looking at, it's like, "Oh, that's so great. You're trying to learn to sing. Aren't you wonderful?" It's more like, "Honey, can you please not sing in the living room? Can you go upstairs or something," that's sort of more the vibe. Another possible obstacle for the adult learner that the child learner doesn't have to deal with, or even the teen learner as much.

Andy: Also, tying that back to what we were talking about earlier, how cool is that to be modeling that, you know what? Not everything is going to just come easily and like, "Wow, you're picking this up faster than me, but I'm not going to just give up. I'm going to keep working on it." The benefit of pushing through things sometimes, and also just modeling, doing things that we're not necessarily just already great at or that don't come easily to us.

I think, yeah, it's such a cool opportunity the way you frame it in the book of doing things together with your child, learning to play chess with your daughter, going just, "Hey, you're taking her to track practice." You're going to just run while she's running, or you guys will learn how to swim long distances in the ocean together or some of these things. It's like a lot of times, she's picking up faster pace than you are, but that's really cool actually.

Tom: I wish it was something that was a little bit more, I try to get the message out, but for example, when I try, I can't remember what I was looking for, but I was researching classes that you could actually do something at the same time. This is just a market that is not really out there. When I entered into Google learning things with your kid, really just presented a lot of information about how to supervise your child's learning. This notion that you might be part of that equation was just left out and-
Andy: Doesn't even compute. Yeah. What do you mean?

Tom: Yeah, I talked to an interesting woman in the Chicago area who had been one of these, let's say, karate moms just sitting in the dojo. Is it a dojo, I think? While their kid was up there doing all the stuff and one day I think she was sort of talking to a few other mothers, just had the idea that maybe we could give this a try.

The instructor was sympathetic and he didn't actually have a class set up for that, but he said, "If you guys want to come at 4:00 every day, we'll make it happen." This woman really took to it and actually became competitive and ended up at a national tournament with her young son who was also doing quite well. They didn't enter the arena together to go against one another, but they were there together. She said it was one of the most amazing moments of her life, but it sort of took that motivation on her part to find that learning opportunity.

There's often, sometimes you can find adult classes, it's particularly harder for older adults, but then the idea that it's going to be a mixed class is very rare, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to the except for there's the market interest hasn't been there, but-

Andy: Maybe much demand. Yeah.

Tom: Yeah.

Andy: There's a whole chapter in the book on babies and how they learn to walk. Why do you go into this in so much depth? What did you learn about learning from going to these labs that study how babies learn to walk?

Tom: Yeah. I thought, who would be the ultimate beginner? I thought, well, it's just basically an infant. I mean, we are all beginners at some point. I thought, what do we come into the world knowing how to do? I mean, very little really. Some elementary sort of bodily functions like breathing, but so what do we learn to do?

We do become master walkers, for example. It's sounds sort of funny, but we put in those 10,000 hours of practice more than that by the age of six or seven, and then for the rest of our lives, unless we have some difficulty that comes along. We are master walkers. We don't have to think about walking. It's a skill that we have aced. We can do other things while we do it.

It happened that there was, in New York City, there was a great place to, the research was going on at Infant Action Lab, it was called at NYU, where they really watch infants in action and to see how these learning processes happen and walking was just fascinating. I mean, first of all, the number of times that an infant falls while trying to walk per hour is astonishing. It can be upwards of 60 or 70 times. They're built for this.

Their bodies are very not super rigid and they have soft padding. They fall. They don't suddenly look, "Oh geez, I fell again. I'm just not getting this." They fall. They just bounce right back up and just keep going. That was one major takeaway of something that we may have forgotten that to become master walkers, we had to fail an awful lot more so than we would ever imagine as adults.

Then, another thing that was very striking to me was just the sheer amount of walking. I did a piece for the Wall Street Journal that was related to this, and I had a statistic in there about it was a certain length of football fields that the average infant in these studies walked in an hour. My editor saw it. He's like, "You have to check that fact because that can't be right." Yeah, exactly. I was panicked. I thought, "Well, I'm pretty diligent with this," but I called the researcher and she's like, "No, that's the statistic." There's a ton of practice.

Andy: Isn't it like two and a half football fields?

Tom: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Andy: I recall that from the book because it blew my mind. Yeah.

Tom: I mean, there are some days I don't walk that now. I mean, it's just another thing we might forget is just how much time it took us to get to that point of learning. Then, I wanted to project this forward into an adult learner trying to take a class in, let's say, skiing or something. You go to the lesson, you fall 30 times, you barely make it down to the bottom of the bunny hill. That is not a reason to think you're not going to be a good skier, could be a good skier, a reason to give up. It's just classic beginner behavior that a lot of us have forgotten about.

I thought infants were just that fascinating learning process that is, and then one other thing that emerged that I thought was really interesting is they would have infants do these experiments when they were learning to crawl and they would give them certain obstacles like a ramp, and the infants would figure out, they would figure out the ramp and then they would have a fall off and they would figure out whether they thought that falloff was too risky. There was always a person standing by. They weren't putting infants at risk here, I should say.

Andy: No babies were harmed in the making of this research. Don't worry.

Tom: Exactly. They got to be really good crawlers and then they wanted to learn to walk. First of all, there's a question of why bother to learn to walk when you're such a great crawler because it's going to be hard and you're going to fall a lot and well, it's obvious benefits and you can move a lot more. You can reach things. You can communicate with people more easily and also that's what adults are doing.

Babies love to model what we're doing, but the funny thing, when they started to learn to walk, they would go back to those same ramps that they had sort of figured out the hazards of, and they would just approach it as if they hadn't learned anything. They would run toward the end of the ramp and take a plunge. I said, I asked the researcher, Dr. Karen Adolph, I said, "Would it be useful if they remembered those risks and brought that into their new learning?" She said, "Well-"

Andy: Don't they already know that from crawling that?

Tom: Yeah, but she said, "Walking is such a different use of your body that to keep that old crawling mentality and behavior within your body, within your mind, would get in the way of learning that new activity. You have to be just a sort of fearless learner all over again. This gets back to what I was saying about my brain.

My brain is filled with a history of crawling and all these things, so it's harder for me to wipe the site clean and start from scratch and just plunge into exactly unlearn. When I go to something like skiing, I'm just not going to hit that slope with totally fresh eyes. I have things in my mind and my memory and I just have adult fear and all those other things, but yeah, babies, I think, just that reminder that we were all beginners once.

This is something you hear any master of any task also say is that I was once a beginner. You just start at some elevated level. It's an obvious thing, but sometimes we do forget that.

Andy: It seems like a really a theme that runs through a lot of the book. It strikes me that that just happens in so many different areas of life for where we learn that hey, maybe or we get in trouble for speaking up too much in disrupting class in kindergarten, and we start to learn, oh, I shouldn't, I need to just be more quiet or not speak my mind so much.

You talk about things like singing in the book, which I thought was really interesting and something I found really fascinating actually was you look at this researcher who has tested the singing abilities of different groups from various ages, and there's a really interesting pattern where from kindergarten to sixth grade, there's clear improvement, but then college students are back to the equivalent of kindergartners. Why don't we actually improve until about middle school and then start going backwards again?

Tom: Yeah, I mean, I think the main reason is sort of a use it or lose it dynamic. As kids, this is something, again, I was reminded of as a first time parent, there was a lot more singing in my life than there had been. There's this constant singing. There was singing in class. I was singing to my daughter as a young child. There was school recitals, their birthday parties, games, children's television, nothing but songs, songs everywhere.

I would encourage her to sing along and I would join in that and lose my inhibitions and all those voices telling me I was not a good singer because I, myself, was out of practice. Kids are great sort of natural singers, all of them essentially. They get to the stage though where that separation begins to happen and the teachers or the system or sometimes the kids themselves and the parents want to figure out who's going to do best.

My daughter even did this audition, a youth choir in Brooklyn, and I actually mentioned this to a vocal professor of voice studies I was talking to and he was, I think, she was in something like third grade or something. She was very young, but he was horrified. They had auditions at that age. He said, "Kids should not be, all kids could rise to a certain level of talent if given enough attention. They all have this promise, but the idea that this kind of sorting was already happening.

Again, you're getting this sorting. You have the art kids, you have the math kids, you have these kind of kids. Singing becomes something that is considered a luxury or not relevant to another course of study and people just don't do it. We don't do it that much of life in general these days anymore.

Something I mentioned in the book is this whole tradition before recorded media in particular of just communal singing. This was something you did for around the piano or just from the campfire. It still exists in certain ways. If you go to a soccer game in England, you'll hear some amazing singing in unison of like 50,000 people at once, but it's just not very often. We all sing Happy Birthday once in a while and we all are all embarrassed by how bad we are it's because we don't do it.

Yeah, we've lost the ability and then we think we're bad singers, so we don't do it because we think we're bad. It's a vicious cycle that just perpetuates itself and brings us into, we lose this thing that we could have had access to.

Andy: It's also that kind of learning that takes place that we're touching on earlier where it's like you try out for the choir and you don't make it so you learn, "Oh, I'm not that good at singing," or even you make it and you see other people are way better than you and you just start to tell yourself, "Oh, I'm not that good at this," and then the more and more of that that you tell yourself that or that message comes to you that, "Well, maybe I shouldn't be singing so much because I don't want to be embarrassing myself." Then, you stop doing it.

It strikes me that we were talking about earlier with toddlers that it's like, well, toddlers can fall over 70 times in an hour and not tell themself, "Oh, I guess I'm just bad at walking. I guess maybe I just better not try anymore." It's almost like this switch gets flipped at some point as we start to learn language and get older that we start to take on these identity of being not good at certain things and not good at other things and that we better just not even try on the things that we aren't naturally just really good at.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there might be a listener too who's thinking, "Well, what about kids who really are good?" I'm all for competition and finding the best talent. I am literally not one of those parents that goes to a soccer game and is told there's not going to be a score kept. As a soccer player myself, I would not be happy with that, but even if you do have a choir of let's say, "the best," it doesn't mean that you can't have other choirs that are not necessarily intended for kids who are even thinking of pursuing a career in that field.

Other sorts of just more, we've lost a lot of that recreational just doing it for fun aspect and this is something my daughter even reports to me now. I mean, there's certain things she really likes to do and there's other things she likes to do somewhat, but since I'm mentioning soccer, she did a year with the soccer team, but she hadn't played that much when she was younger and she found that the kids, and this is in the middle school, when she was playing, were already so good and it was treated so seriously that she didn't have fun during the year and she wasn't terrible.

I think she could have grown into it, but she just wasn't finding it fun. We looked around and there wasn't even another option for a more, let's say, chill soccer experience. It's all these academies and training during the summer. I'm not quite sure for what, because the professional soccer, this is a thing I'm always amazed by the chances of that ever becoming your career are so vanishingly small, especially in the United States obviously, but the amount of attention and focus we put on trying to develop the absolute best soccer players at the expense of some other qualities and characters we might want to build, I think is a little disappointing. Again, it's not to say I don't like competition and all that.

Andy: Also, this interesting sort of dynamic that you pointed out with your own biking career in the book that the more serious we get about things sometimes with the more mastery that we gain and the more we're trying to really improve and get competitive or times or our speeds or whatever our skills are in some certain area, then, also sometimes the less fun it starts to feel or the less relaxing it is.

It's like if we get rid of all the things that just kind of okay at and only focus on the things that we're really trying to gain mastery in or showing a lot of potential that that's also at the same time we're prioritizing things that are not necessarily going to be fun or as much of a break or something.

Tom: Yeah, yeah. There's sort of a tunnel vision that takes over. The cycling's interesting because it was sort of one of the first beginner experiences I had as an adult, even though I already knew how to ride a bike, but what happened was I began to take up really seriously road cycling, which if you don't do it yourself, you've all seen us out there on the road where the ones annoying you while you drive and wearing the pajamas in public basically, but it was an amazing liberating experience.

I fell into it hugely, but then, as you just mentioned, that found you get better and you want to try harder and then that puts you in with a different group who are going longer and going faster. Then, maybe you go through that group and then you get into racing and it starts out just fun. You don't care if you know just finish the race, you're happy with that, but then you really start to want to do well.

I found myself, I think the low moment was sitting there cycling as hard as I could in a lab while someone was pricking my finger and withdrawing blood samples so they could test my blood lactic acid threshold and just that sheer pain and of that I'm thinking, what, I'm not going to become a professional cyclist at my age. It's not going to happen. Yeah, exactly.

I just started try to take the gas off a little bit and look to some other kinds of experiences and just try to bring back some of the joy. I mean, cycling is a pursuit that does involve a lot of suffering for some people, but I wanted to get back to that sense of joy and I still do it quite a bit. I just don't do it with that kind of singular focus I did and trying to always keep that novel, that sense of just of joy and it's not a second job. It doesn't have to be another job where I need to apply all that same rigor and responsibility that I bring to my professional life, to my hobby, essentially.

Again, it's not like you can't take these things seriously and also have fun, but I found that I crossed sort of a threshold that was not productive anymore, or not, productive is the wrong word, but just pleasant.
Andy: Yeah, I totally see that. I think it's something we all can relate to and it's funny that it's like I think on some level, we know that, but then, we still keep doing that. Almost like one of those things that you see coming but you just still keep marching toward it.

Tom: Yeah, we still prioritize productivity and maximizing our time and getting the most out of something. I found with doing all these things is that sometimes just doing them badly was really sort of fun and refreshing and was still bringing a lot to my life. Surfing, I'm never going to surf and I say never, I'm never going to surf pipeline in the Hawaii's north shore. It's just not, I don't have the time to build up to those 20 foot waves and be barreled and all that, but it doesn't mean that I can't have a hell of a lot of fun at much smaller waves all over the world, which is something that I didn't have access to before.

Even by being just a mediocre surfer, my world has been greatly expanded because I can now tap into that experience, which is, it helps, is another way to experience a place, another way to meet people, another way to engage with life. That was another takeaway I had from this was just doing all these things. They all just opened so many doors that had been a little bit closed in my life and it just requires a certain time and energy, but more importantly, just a willingness to put yourself out there and say, "Okay, I'm going to give this a go. I might be bad. I might look foolish. I might be the worst person in the class, but I think there still could be something here." For me, there really was.

Andy: Why is it that you say that sometimes thinking can get in the way of learning?
Tom: Knowledge has been divided into two broad categories, declarative knowledge, that's basically knowing about something, and there's procedural knowledge, which is knowing how to do something and those sort of occupy different regions of the brain and can actually not be that related. I mentioned riding a bike before, I could read a book right now about how to ride a bike, but it really wouldn't bring that much to me the moment I got on the bike and I just had to do it.

Conversely, I could be a great bike rider and really be able to explain how I do it. I mean, even scientists don't, actually, it sounds strange, but physicists do not fully understand how a bike even stays upright when we're on it. How can you explain how you're riding this thing and giving instructions to learn? Just the idea of that.

Golf, the idea is to learn a skill and be really effective at it. Sometimes you just have to leave that declarative side, that analytical side of your brain out of it because it will interfere. I mean, the classic example is something like walking, which I mentioned before. We're all masters at walking, but when people have suffered something like a stroke and their walking is impaired, they then have to essentially relearn how to walk.

What people do is sort of think about how to walk and then you see them taking these odd shuffling steps because that you're too self-conscious of it and that sort of self-conscious energy is literally getting in the way of the connection of your brain to your nerves and telling your muscles what to do. It's a two-way process.

Andy: Hip 30 degrees, extend knee, flex ankle.

Tom: Exactly.

Andy: Oh no, flex knee, no. Shoot.

Tom: That's a great description by the way. It happened with me in surfing, for example, I was given, like you just said, these very specific instructions, move your elbow, put your arm out and bend your elbow back like you're drawing a bow and that's how your hand should look and then you should do this. It was six different steps. They had to be broken down like that just so I could understand them piece by piece, but at some point, you have to stop thinking of them to get any good. You can't. You just have to automate that process and they all have to flow into one another with no separation between those tasks.

What you see at the beginning is very herky-jerky, okay, now I'm doing step three. Now, I'm doing step four. That all gets wiped away and this is, and just another reason why young kids are such great learners. There's literally less of that other kind of thinking going on that they're just jumping into something, letting their, throwing their bodies into it. I mean, literally.

Andy: It really gets me thinking. I love how you, at the end of the book, you're talking about just how doing all of these things has changed your outlook a little bit or your mentality. It's like you were saying earlier, it's not necessarily that you became a world-class expert at any of these things you are doing, but it strikes me that what you are saying is that you became comfortable with being a beginner and got excited about just trying new things and that these things that you had, you're set out to get good at and to try then also led to just trying other new things as well. I thought that was really cool.

Tom: I could have walked away thinking that being a beginner itself is a bit of a skill that just having, and the more you go through it, the better you get at it, the more comfortable you get at it. Now, I feel like I'm at a stage where there's really nothing I wouldn't try because I've been through the ringer so many times that, I mean, just this past summer, I did some downhill mountain biking for the first time.

I've ridden a bike, but downhill mountain biking is a whole other crazy experience where you're going down a ski hill in the summer and it's incredible. People wear full crash helmets and armor and age 54, why am I doing this? But I knew that I could just go at my pace and bring in the things I had learned and just try to have fun with it and indeed it was a lot of fun and am I going to become obsessed by it? Probably not, but it was great to do, whereas before this book began, I would've found many ways to say no to that and not even gone to the mountain and thought, "Well, God, there's a lot of 12-year-old kids. Why should I go out? This is no place for me."

I'm sure certain people already have more of this personality trait within them. I mean, there's something psychologists talk about, it's one of these big five personality characteristics called openness to experience. Some people are just willing to try anything, anywhere, like any kind of food, just do anything at the drop of a hat. I was a little bit more reserved, let's say, and then just because of being a bit older, I thought, "Well, I've probably tried everything that is worth trying at this point," which so far from the truth.

Andy: Really, I've been reflecting a lot on these takeaways you have in this last chapter of the book. I really resonated with that sort of idea of what you really talk about as lifelong learning, but also this phrase you keep coming back to of learning how to learn of that when we sort of get into this habit and we get into this mentality of being lifelong learners, we're also committing to being lifelong beginners and we're always going to be being bad at things and that's okay.

I love your reflections on doing a lot of these things together with your daughter and how as a parent, learning new things together with your child, it doesn't have to be a competition of who's getting better, faster, or something that we have to see as a challenge. How do we keep it feeling collaborative or just fun?

Tom: Since you say lifelong learning, I just want to get in one other quick point there, which is to really emphasize the lifelong aspect of that. One thing that happened in the course of this book is I met a number of people that were older than me, their 70s, even 80s, who were taking on new things, who were still trying to learn new things, who were taking on pretty serious endeavors.

In the book, I mentioned a woman named Patrice, who took up open water ocean swimming in her 70s. She didn't actually really know how to swim at all a year prior.

Andy: Wow.

Tom: Couldn't even find lessons for people her age and then was suddenly out there in the ocean swimming better than I was, not that I'm an amazing swimmer, but I figured, I consider myself pretty fit and all that. My-

Andy: I'm athletic. I can do this. Yeah.

Tom: My ego was sort of took a blow, but it was also inspiring because I thought, "Well, there's still a lot of things that I could just keep on doing. I don't have to just coast in middle age and just sort of this early retirement vibe and all that." There's a strong benefit to that kind of mindset, which is, it's really been that openness to experience I mentioned is linked in some studies to a lower prevalence of something like early onset dementia.

I mean, because this idea that constantly using your brain, continuing to use your brain and body in new ways, just gives you that extra edge of sharpness and keeps you moving forward and giving you new vistas to look for and things to other doors to open and not to be a static person.

Talking to a psychologist about this is something that often happens with older adults. They just get into this self-defeating trap of let's say a new technology comes out and they don't really understand it, so they don't want to ever use it because they say, "Well, I just don't understand it."

Then, they sort of just move further and further away from the modern world or learning new things and then the brain, it's use it or lose it. The brain begins to less active and agile. I would just urge everyone to keep that spirit, keep that candle just burning as long as you can and don't worry about looking bad because the alternatives can be much worse, to be frank.

Andy: Tom, thank you so much for coming on the Talking to Teens podcast today. That's been a great conversation, really enlightening. I loved reading your book Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning and it's got me feeling really inspired to get out there and be more confident and comfortable being a beginner in my own life. I really hope that it has the same effect on people listening and people who go out and pick up a copy of the book.

Tom: Thanks so much, Andy. Quick question, do you have something that is on your list, a skill, a new thing you would like to take a crack? No pressure.

Andy: No. Yeah, I've been just towing around with trying to learn break dancing, some break dancing moves.

Tom: Oh wow, okay.

Andy: Yeah. After reading this book, it's really got me inspired. Man, I just had watched some YouTube videos and started trying to learn, but I never really seriously got a coach and just committed to just like, "Hey, I'm just going to learn this." I think that's probably first on my list, but yeah, lots of things.

Tom: That's a great skill and also, it's one of those skills I think that everyone will be immediately impressed by, even if you can just do a few things, it's an instant payoff, I think.

Andy: Crowd pleaser. Yeah. Totally.

Tom: Exactly. Exactly.

Andy: Awesome. Talk to me just a little bit, where could we send people who want to just the maybe follow you or stay up to date on what you're doing or what you're working on next or anything like that?
Tom: Sure. I have a website, which is my name, tomvanderbilt.com. I put up writings and things there, and also it's that name on all of your leading social media channels, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and I think that's it, but yeah, so I'm sort of bumping around there once in a while and of course and the book.
Andy: Excellent. Yep, highly recommended. Tom, thanks again for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Tom: Thanks, Andy.