Beginners

Being a beginner is precisely about putting your status aside, about being willing to listen to and learn from others, about revealing your insecurities.

As the ultimate beginners, they need a kind of learning—learning how to learn—that is flexible, that is powered by exploration, that can allow them to adapt to novel situations, that accepts plentiful errors, often without any seeming cause, as part of the process. They experience fall after fall, until, slowly, their brain and body figure out how

Just because you’re not immediately good at something does not mean you won’t eventually get it.

Metacognition—your knowledge of what you know—is a harsh mistress. As a beginner in any discipline, you not only lack skill; you lack a larger sense of what you don’t yet know.

While we tend to think of feedback as a diagnostic tool for fixing mistakes, a growing body of research shows that people not only prefer to be given feedback on their successful attempts at a skill; they seem to learn better this way.

The more we want to learn, the more we prime the brain. The more curious you are to know the answer to a question, the better chance you’ll remember it.

when we hear our own voices, we’re hearing more than the voice that leaves our mouth. We’re also hearing an inner voice, transmitted through vibrations in our bones, resonating in our internal acoustical chambers.

Babies are constantly facing a new normal. Hard-and-fast rules about what works and what doesn’t will be of little use.

Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world.