Why Education Is Important

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It’s one thing to glorify beginner’s mind and lifelong learning, and another to begin something later in life.

If your sense of identity is wrapped up in feeling capable and competent, it’s harder to risk incompetence.

In learning new skills as you age, the comfort zone can be a cage and the attitude of expertise an obstacle.

When tackling new skills later in life, look for classes geared to adult learners and career changers.

I recently went sailing for the first time, a 10-day island-hopping journey through the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. I was with half a dozen friends, but we were also crew, and for most of us it was a crash course in operating a 42-foot sailboat.

One morning, I found myself in an outboard dinghy with two of my crewmates, attempting what’s called a stern tie, where you run a line from the back of an anchored boat to some secure object on shore, and back to the stern.

I’ll spare you the agonizing details, but our operation resembled nothing so much as a Keystone Cops episode, a slapstick display of incompetence, misdirection, and tangled ropes. I ended up chewing on this little fiasco for the rest of that day—or it chewed on me—prompting one of my comrades to ask why it bugged me so much. I told her I felt frustrated at my ineptitude and embarrassed at my poor performance.

I think of myself as a quick learner, agile and coordinated, and possessing ambidexterity and good spatial intelligence. But I felt like a complete klutz at the helm of that dinghy, with my non-dominant hand on the tiller, my dominant hand on the gearshift, my brain doing flip-flops trying to coordinate the two—and all of it exacerbated by an audience.

It’s one thing to glorify beginner’s mind and lifelong learning, to hail the tackling of new skills and the........

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