The Importance of Becoming a Lifelong Beginner

What relearning how to be bad at something taught me about growth, identity, and why competence isn't the whole point

“Being a beginner again lately has reminded me that the hard part of learning something new as an adult isn't that learning itself has gotten harder. It's that you've accumulated enough competence elsewhere to forget what incompetence actually feels like.”

A few weeks ago, driving home from a six hour long CorePower Sculpt teacher training, I pulled up to a four-way stop at almost the same moment as another car. I was turning left. She was going straight. Halfway through the turn, I had a brief crisis of confidence about who actually had the right of way. I had gotten there first. I knew this. I finished the turn. But for a second, I had to consciously think through a rule of the road I normally follow without any thought at all, and I think it happened precisely because I had just spent six hours relearning how to think about something else I'd assumed I already understood.

At the Sculpt teacher training, I was learning how to cue a squat while keeping time to the music, tracking a theme, calling people by name, and speaking to a room that was looking to me, of all people, for instruction. Somewhere in the middle of all that mental effort, my brain apparently ran out of room for the four-way stop, and I remembered, for the first time in years, that there was a point in my life when I had to learn how to drive.

I remember sitting in driver's ed at age 16, memorizing the rules of the road like a foreign language, nervous about the written permit test before anyone was even going to legally allow me behind the wheel of a car. Then the state of Massachusetts did allow me, which in retrospect feels generous. I was a terrible driver at first. I hit the gas when I meant to hit the brake. I took turns I shouldn't have taken. I drove too fast through neighborhoods and too slow on highways, and my parents took turns inventing excuses to avoid getting in the passenger seat with me. Now I can drive the hour from my house to work and barely remember having done it. There was no single day when driving became easy. I just did it enough times that the mechanics disappeared, and the thing that once required my full attention became something my brain could do without me.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because for the first time in a while, I was a true beginner at something.

I finished teacher training two weeks ago. I went in having taken hundreds of CorePower classes myself, which I assumed, somewhat naively, would give me a head start. It turns out there is a significant difference between knowing how to take a fitness class and knowing how to teach one. There are formulas and sequences, cues and transitions, music to follow and timing to manage, and a room full of people who need to understand, in real time, exactly what you're asking their bodies to do. You have to know what comes next while explaining what's happening now. Things I had watched instructors do effortlessly for years suddenly looked, and felt, like feats of genuine cognitive skill. Two days in, I remember thinking, I cannot believe how hard this is. And then, almost in the same thought, I cannot believe how much I’ve picked up in just a few days.

This all has led me to think about how strange our relationship with learning becomes once we leave school. For roughly the first quarter of our lives, learning is essentially the job. As children, we're legally required to show up for it. If we're lucky enough to continue on to college and graduate school, we spend nearly twenty consecutive years in an environment built entirely around the premise that we don't know things yet, and being a beginner there isn't embarrassing. It's the entire a point. You take calculus because you don't know calculus. You take macroeconomics because you don't understand macroeconomics. Someone designs a whole semester to move you from ignorance to some passable level of competence, and nobody expects you to walk in on day one already knowing the material.

I genuinely loved those years of my life. I remember midway through high school, when classes started moving past the basics into subjects that genuinely stretched how I thought, and college only intensified that feeling. I filled my schedule with majors and minors and requirements, but underneath all of that structure was the extraordinary luxury of spending most of my time learning things I hadn't known before. The more I learned, the larger my world seemed to grow.

Then you graduate out of learning institutions and into the real world, and the whole orientation shifts. You're still learning, of course, especially in the early years of a career. My first job involved a tremendous amount of it. I was learning the ins and outs of the finance industry, studying for the CFA, and figuring out how to function in a professional environment, all at once. But the purpose of learning at work is different. You're rarely learning simply to understand something for its own sake. You're learning because you need to do something with it, usually immediately, and preferably well. There's also a layer of noise in that kind of learning that doesn't exist in a classroom: Am I performing well enough? Does my manager think I'm ready for the next level? Am I getting the right projects? Where does this position me for whatever comes next? None of these questions are inherently bad. They're simply part of having a career. But they do change your relationship with learning. Curiosity gets tangled up with performance.

Leaving the workforce for two years in my late twenties for business school gave me a temporary return to the other state of mind. For two years, my primary responsibility was, once again, to absorb. I could take a class because I wanted to understand something, and I could be genuinely bad at it because I was there to learn, not to perform. There was something that felt indulgent about stepping away from the constant pressure to produce and back into an environment where not knowing was the expected condition.

I've been back at work for three years now, and I think I’ve forgotten how different it feels to be in a real learning environment, to give yourself permission to be truly bad at something and keep going until you're not. Competence is comfortable. It feels good to be good at things, and for that reason it's always tempting to settle into a routine, chasing enough reps of the same tasks that they eventually stop requiring my full attention. I know the vocabulary of my job. I understand its unwritten rules. I can often anticipate a question before it's asked. But I've also started to notice that settling into competence has a way of dulling your appetite for growth.

I’ll give you a particularly geeky example: when I was learning financial modeling in my first job out of college, it seemed impossibly difficult. We spent a full week of training on it, and even that felt inadequate. You needed to understand accounting and corporate finance and how the three financial statements fit together, all while learning the temperamental mechanics of Excel. One broken reference could blow up the entire model, and fixing it meant understanding not just that something was wrong, but exactly where and why. At the time, it seemed like the kind of skill other people simply, mysteriously already had. Years later, I can build a detailed financial model in half a day. Give me a full-size keyboard and my F2 and F4 keys, and my fingers know what to do before I've consciously thought about it. If something breaks, I already know where to look. I didn't become a different kind of person between then and now. I just did it hundreds of times.

The same is true of driving. And marketing. And moving to a city where I didn't know a single person. And probably a dozen other things I now file away, without a second thought, under things I know how to do, forgetting that they once lived in the much larger category of things I had no idea how to do at all.

Becoming a beginner again lately has reminded me that the hard part of learning something new as an adult isn't that learning itself has gotten harder, it’s that you've accumulated enough competence elsewhere to forget what incompetence actually feels like. At 16, almost everything is unfamiliar. At 31, much less is. You can build an entire life around the things you already know how to do and grow steadily more efficient at doing them. Your career specializes. Your routines solidify. People start coming to you for answers instead of the other way around.

There's an uncomfortable kind of vulnerability in being bad at something once you're old enough to already be good at plenty of other things. You have to ask basic questions. You misread simple instructions. You watch someone else do, effortlessly, what currently requires every available cell in your brain, and if you're used to being capable, it's easy to read this discomfort as proof that the thing simply isn't for you. But my pause at that four-way stop reminded me that everything I'm currently good at has its own version of driver's ed buried somewhere in its history. I find that enormously reassuring.

There's something useful, I think, about deliberately returning to beginner-hood every so often, the stage where the vocabulary is foreign and everyone else seems to already know what's happening. It keeps the distance between “I can't do that” and “I don't know how to do that yet” surprisingly small. And embracing beginner-hood as an adult makes the boundaries of a life feel significantly less fixed, not because I now believe I can become an expert in anything I set my mind to, or because every new interest has to become some grand exercise in personal growth, but because I used to think expertise was the destination. You study long enough, work long enough, accumulate enough experience, and eventually you become the person who simply knows. I think now I'd rather always keep at least one part of my life where I don't.

15 years ago, I was sitting in driver's ed trying to memorize who had the right of way at a four-way stop. A decade ago, I was staring at an Excel model wondering how anyone kept track of all those formulas. 2 weeks ago, I finished learning how to teach a fitness class, and soon I'll stand in a room of my own and try to be the person on the other side of it, the one everyone is looking to for instruction. I have no idea what the equivalent will be in another 10 years. I just hope there is one, mostly because there are still so many things I don't know how to do, and not knowing how to do them today says almost nothing about whether I could learn them.

For a long time, I thought about identity mostly as something to be discovered: some essential version of myself I was supposed to uncover and then faithfully remain. I grew up in Massachusetts. I studied economics. I worked in finance. Those facts accumulated into a person who seemed to be getting more defined by the year.

But my life has gotten more interesting every time I've added something that didn't fit intuitively into the previous description. I moved across the country without knowing a soul. I left finance and learned marketing. I started writing in public. Now I've spent weeks standing in a heated studio learning how to direct a room full of people through squats and push-ups, on beat, without losing my train of thought. None of these additions erased the person who came before them. They expanded her.

Maybe this is the part of adult learning I underestimated. A new skill doesn't need to become a career, or produce anything especially useful, in order to matter. Sometimes it simply gives you access to a part of yourself that competence alone was never going to reveal.