How to Become a Newbie With Journalist Tom Vanderbilt
When was the last time you tried something new? This week we talk about why we lose this thirst for learning after a certain age, and what we can do to revive it, with the help of journalist Tom Vanderbilt. Hear Tom as he lays out the reasons why we should continue to develop new skills and hobbies, including the cognitive benefits that come with and what this can mean for your interactions with the world at large.
Tom is the author of the bestselling books Traffic: Why We Move the Way We Do (and What He Says About Us) and You May Also Love: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice , and his latest book is Beginners: Joy and Joy. … The transformative power of lifelong learning .
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Tom Vanderbilt:
On the immediate benefit of trying something completely new:
I found it incredibly enjoyable and just took me by surprise … And you seem to have no choice but to try to learn. I mean, this is the purest form of the Buddhist concept of the “beginner mind”, really capable of looking at the world again with fresh eyes, like a child.
On the importance of being able to quit a new activity that doesn’t bring you joy:
On the other hand, don’t be afraid to walk away if it turns out to be something you really don’t have a liking for. You can often hear quite a lot of anti-smoking rhetoric. But, you know, life is short. Your free time, you know … I mean, it’s the only thing we control. So you can do exactly what you want with it.
On how learning a new skill can help you become more engaged when you need it most:
I just discovered that, like all people of our time, I had moments when I just felt completely distracted by various devices around my house, it was difficult for me to do something like a book … which I found interesting in work over this book is that while doing these activities, something like drawing, I found that it really took all my attention to have so much visual information to digest when you really started looking for it that I had no time for anything else, and these hours passed, and … I looked up and asked: “Wow, where did the time just go?” Again, this is difficult to describe. It just seemed cleansing. And I felt like a more whole person, like I was in the gym in some way for my brain … So it was just another way to interact with the world on a different level. And I think, especially over the last year, you know, [I] was just looking at an article in a psychotherapy journal … talking about learning skills as a way to keep in touch with the world in this very isolated time. So I think there is a huge element of self-care here that I don’t think we should see as narcissistic or anything, but it is really important.
To learn more about why we need to learn new skills, we highly recommend listening to the entire episode.
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