6. Skills rarely “transfer.”

Here’s one advantage of being a perpetual beginner: Rather than grinding out a marathon, you are putting your brain through a variety of high-intensity interval workouts. Each time you begin to learn that new skill, you’re reshaping. You’re training your brain again to be more efficient.

As you try to learn something, you shouldn’t lose sight of all the interesting little detours along the way.

Fathers, it’s been argued, are actually the main “gender socializing agents” when it comes to children.

The whole idea that there’s some sole passion that’s out there, or secretly within you, waiting to emerge and magically change your life is questionable.

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.

We “overvalue performance,” as one psychologist put it, “and undervalue the self.” We’re afraid of being just okay at things. This is a trap. “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.”

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

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.