Before we head into the world of adults learning new things, let us consider these: 1. We all have latent abilities that can be unlocked.

the idea of what you thought of as being competent at something didn’t really match what actually being competent at that thing was, by the time you got there.

because positive feedback boosts learners’ confidence and motivation, this might be more helpful than repeatedly pointing out what they did wrong, which might just make them more anxious and self-conscious. You can have too much feedback, of course. As learners, we need to make our own mistakes, then figure out a way past them.

Letting someone else’s ideas about performance stop you from trying something means relinquishing your freedom.

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.

Humans seem to perform better in the presence of others.

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

7. Always be on the edge of the impossible.

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