Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 252-252 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:39:38 PM
it’s about spending your life not avoiding tense situations but getting into tense situations.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 254-255 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:40:11 PM
It’s not a “how to do” book as much as a “why to do” book. It’s less about making you better at something than making you feel better as you try to learn.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 262-263 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:41:23 PM
It is, she writes, “an epistemically unique” experience. Meaning: You don’t know shit.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 278-279 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:43:19 PM
Such “errorless learning” may make the learner feel better, but it eliminates the huge part of learning that comes from mistakes.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 341-342 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:51:38 PM
Under what’s called “symbolic self-completion theory,” parents are often suspected of trying to vanquish their own failed ambitions via their children’s accomplishments.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 363-364 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:54:34 PM
Beginners ask the same obvious questions, suffer from the same misconceptions, make the same mistakes. Every field has its nervous beginners.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 385-386 | Added on Saturday, October 16, 2021 11:57:30 PM
In Zen Buddhism, this state is referred to as beginner’s mind. Your mind is ready for anything, open to everything.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 408-410 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 12:08:11 AM
For most of us, the beginner stage is something to be gotten through as quickly as possible, like a socially awkward skin condition. But I want to suggest that even if we’re only passing through, we should pay particular attention to this moment. For once it goes, it’s hard to get back.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 430-431 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 12:11:27 AM
sometimes, the “habits of the expert,” as the Zen master Suzuki called it, can be an obstacle—particularly when new solutions are demanded. With all their experience, experts can come to see what they expect to see.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 437-438 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 12:12:26 AM
This tendency for people to default to the familiar, even in the face of a more optimal novel solution, has been termed the Einstellung effect (after a German word that means “set”).
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 627-629 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 11:05:22 PM
This sense of “self-expansion” can apply to couples as well. Research suggests that couples who undertake novel and challenging activities together recapture some of the “initial exhilaration” of when they first met, and the positive feelings they experience—from,
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 634-635 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 11:06:10 PM
psychologists theorize that openness entails a “cognitive and behavioral flexibility” that’s useful in addressing the challenges of later life.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 641-642 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 11:07:44 PM
“Our large brain and powerful learning abilities evolved, most of all, to deal with change.” We’re always flipping between small moments of incompetence and mastery.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 646-647 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 11:09:22 PM
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.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 669-671 | Added on Sunday, October 17, 2021 11:14:01 PM
“For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at,” writes the legal scholar Tim Wu, “is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1006-1007 | Added on Saturday, October 23, 2021 11:40:48 AM
Learning to walk may be less the goal than simply unlocking all the good things and places walking gets you to.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1145-1146 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2021 12:51:02 AM
Singing has come to occupy a curious place in our lives. It’s a furtive, almost shameful activity that few of us feel confident doing in front of anyone.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1235-1237 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2021 1:02:01 AM
I would urge you to take the online test that Steven Demorest helped create.*6 It’s based on pitch accuracy, the easiest-to-measure, most fundamental variable in singing quality. No matter your score, remember one thing: It can be improved.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1252-1253 | Added on Sunday, October 24, 2021 1:04:08 AM
“Disbelief in one’s capabilities,” writes the psychologist Albert Bandura, “creates its own behavioral validation.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1397-1398 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 12:05:58 AM
“Let’s enjoy ourselves and let the sound come out and stop being so intellectual about it.” Maybe in trying to open up my voice, I was opening all sorts of other things that had been held back.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1481-1482 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 12:17:38 AM
I soon realized that to consciously sing a song is to suddenly hear it, and understand it, in a way one never does when simply listening.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1543-1544 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 12:22:47 AM
This is the rehearsal space for the Britpop Choir, which mostly performs, as the name portends, a range of popular music
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1605-1605 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 12:29:52 AM
Notability, a program that will sound out the musical notes you input)
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1667-1668 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 12:36:57 AM
I was well older than she was, but in that curious way of the student-teacher relationship I somehow felt younger.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1702-1703 | Added on Monday, October 25, 2021 11:12:37 PM
Gareth Malone turns tuneless workplaces, groups of military wives—even entire towns—into well-lubricated vocal machines.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2051-2052 | Added on Tuesday, October 26, 2021 11:45:40 PM
According to a theory from the sports psychologist Gabriele Wulf, we do worse at an activity when we focus on ourselves, instead of some “external” target.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2183-2183 | Added on Thursday, October 28, 2021 12:20:15 AM
The expert beginner quickly becomes the intermediate novice.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2215-2216 | Added on Thursday, October 28, 2021 12:24:35 AM
I’d not only plateaued; I felt I’d gotten worse. What had actually happened was my metacognitive window had been thrown open. Before, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2455-2458 | Added on Thursday, October 28, 2021 11:57:47 PM
“Don’t beat yourself up in the sessions that went badly, and don’t pat yourself on the back too hard when you have a really good one.” It seemed like a good mantra. You just did the best you could. It might work out, it might not, but the rest was out of your hands.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2630-2632 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2021 12:06:45 AM
When we become skilled at something, it becomes automatic. We don’t have to think much about it, because our brain, running on virtual autopilot, is constantly making predictions—and most of its predictions are true.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2637-2640 | Added on Friday, October 29, 2021 12:07:46 AM
We trip on the sidewalk, our brain gets this news one hundred milliseconds later, and we accusingly stare at the offending crack. The surprise violated our model. But when we try to tickle ourselves, nothing happens, because we already know what it’s going to feel like. Our cerebellum has “canceled” the sensory input, suppressed neurons. There’s no surprise; the model is intact.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2799-2801 | Added on Saturday, October 30, 2021 12:18:45 AM
Indeed, a whole body of research has shown that sleep, or even just a short rest, is one of our best learning tools. The resting brain “consolidates” the memories of what you were just trying to do; a big part of any skill, after all, is remembering how to do it.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2840-2841 | Added on Saturday, October 30, 2021 12:23:55 AM
The more learning older adults take on, the faster they seem to learn—the more they become like younger adults. Learning to learn, it seems, is a lifetime sport.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2914-2914 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2021 1:12:53 AM
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the classic book by Betty Edwards.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 2968-2970 | Added on Sunday, October 31, 2021 1:20:04 AM
But Edwards gave a simple instruction: Turn the drawing upside down. Suddenly they were much better at copying it. The secret to their improvement, she notes, was that they did not know what they were drawing. The parts of the drawing that were still recognizable, like the hands, were the most challenging.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3215-3217 | Added on Monday, November 1, 2021 1:20:26 AM
Norman Rush’s description of love as a series of rooms in which you keep moving from one to the next, each getting larger and better. “You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3250-3251 | Added on Wednesday, November 3, 2021 12:30:52 AM
learning new things together is a relationship tonic).
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3578-3581 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:07:03 AM
Ordering lunch via a few soft pushes on a smartphone screen feels wonderfully easy—compared with all the procuring and chopping and stirring of cooking—but seems to short-circuit the old connection between “effort and consequence.” — Back at David’s bench, I was about to begin the process of filing away the fingerprint-like ridges that the printing and casting process had left on the
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3578-3580 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:07:14 AM
Ordering lunch via a few soft pushes on a smartphone screen feels wonderfully easy—compared with all the procuring and chopping and stirring of cooking—but seems to short-circuit the old connection between “effort and consequence.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3618-3619 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:08:21 AM
John Stuart Mill, that happiness is something that cannot be found as an end unto itself. The way to achieve it, he suggested, was to have one’s mind “fixed on some object other than [one’s] own happiness.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3630-3634 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:10:08 AM
As if the would-be passion itself will do the work. But skill learning can be hard, and the moment that person encounters difficulty, they may feel it wasn’t their passion after all. A person with a growth mind-set, on the other hand, who believes that passions are “developed,” knows it may not come easy at first—or ever. These people are likely to be more motivated to stick with the pursuit when challenges arise. I
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3641-3642 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:11:14 AM
To be a traveler, the writer Daniel Boorstin once observed, you need some travail—that’s French for “painful or laborious effort.”
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3641-3643 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:11:22 AM
To be a traveler, the writer Daniel Boorstin once observed, you need some travail—that’s French for “painful or laborious effort.” Otherwise you’re just a tourist; someone else has done the legwork for you. You’re watching the how-to video without getting your own hands dirty.
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Beginners (Tom Vanderbilt)
- Your Highlight on Location 3673-3675 | Added on Friday, November 5, 2021 12:14:49 AM
“In science,” he wrote, “if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.” Meaning: Science was about probing beyond the edge of what we know. It was about experimentation and failure. There was no need to dabble in proven hypotheses.
