A Midlife Guide to Learning Something New

It’s not too late to be a novice at something — and to get good at it

Tom Vanderbilt,

AARP

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Published March 27, 2026

a graphic and photo illustration shows a man throwing himself headfirst through a void, represented by a horizontal red bar, at the bottom of the frame

Throw yourself into the deep end of beginnerhood.

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When did you last learn something new?

I’m not talking about the time you joined Instagram or started doing pour-over coffee at home. I’m talking about deep, considerable skills.

Truth is, you’ve probably avoided taking up that dream hobby — be it learning the banjo, learning a new language, the art of bonsai or anything that would require longer than an afternoon to pick up — because you think you don’t have time or that you won’t be good at it.

And you’re right, you won’t be … at least in the beginning. And why, given the polished veneer of professional and personal prowess we have in our more mature years, would we want to deliberately look bad in front of someone?

That was one of the questions that motivated my book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, in which I set out, deep in middle age, to try and pick up a number of skills that had long interested me but had been too daunted to try.

As I found, there are all sorts of reasons to learn a new skill: not just the pleasure found in the activity itself but also the expanded sense of self that learning a new skill gives you, kick-starting all the new opportunities that life’s second half will offer, and boosting your neural plasticity — working the adaptable muscles of the brain — in the process.

Taking up something new is like throwing a pebble into a pond. The ripple is small at first, but it grows wider over time, and you never know what distant shore it may reach. For all our expertise, many of us have forgotten how to be beginners.

Here’s a quick guide, based on my time in the beginner trenches, to navigating the deep end of novicehood.

Avoid overly strict or ambitious goals

I know this sounds like the opposite of everything you’ve heard. We’re supposed to set goals. Don’t they steer us toward success?

The problem is that setting precise goals is like trying to forecast the weather with no knowledge of meteorology. Setting the wrong goals and then failing to meet them is hugely de-motivating. Your failure will turn into resentment of the thing you’re trying to learn.

Best to set goals that you can see. Kenneth Nowack, a licensed psychologist and president and chief research officer of Envisia Learning, points to research that shows if you want long-term goals to stick, you should divide them or chunk them into manageable smaller actions. Rode one wave today while surfing? Tomorrow, ride two.

It doesn’t have to be a ‘passion project’ (at least at first)

It’s tempting to want to label a new pursuit a “passion,” if only to justify the time and money we may be spending on it.

Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and a Stanford University psychologist, notes that when we think a passion is “implicit,” we will walk away more readily when things get challenging. She and her colleagues looked at five studies in 2018 and found that people who thought passions needed to be developed tended to stick with the learning longer. More than “finding your passion,” you may have to work hard to see it blossom into passion.

Embrace failure

When we were infants, we were supreme beginners. The whole world was new to us; everything had to be learned. This did not happen without errors.

In learning to walk, infants fall an average of 17 times per hour, according to research by Karen Adolph, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and her colleagues.

Do they agonize over what went wrong or let embarrassment halt their progress? No, they simply get up and go on their way.

A vital reason children are such good learners, according to researchers, is that they “explore” a wide range of solutions to a problem rather than “exploit” the solutions they already know. This comes with more potential errors, but also more learning.

Do it for the fun of it

Historian and author Steven Gelberg posits that hobbies are a contradiction. In his book Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, he writes that “they take work and turn it into leisure, and take leisure and turn it into work.”

We often think that learning new things as an adult must be related to our work, or because we lack fulfillment in work. Or we might view them as a “side hustle,” to be mined for monetary gain.

In his book Painting as a Pastime, Winston Churchill, a keen amateur painter, once observed that “those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.”

Learning new skills that might seem irrelevant to one’s career may actually help that career profoundly. Research by Robert Root-Bernstein, emeritus professor of physiology at Michigan State University, shows that Nobel Prize-winning scientists were much more likely than the average scientist to have engaged in amateur pursuits, ranging from musical performance to woodworking. For scientists, Root-Bernstein notes, such activities are not necessarily a distraction but potentially a form of extra creativity that helps inform their scientific work.

Be humble

To learn something new, one must be open to learning. The personality trait known as “intellectual humility” — knowing one’s cognitive limitations — is, psychologists argue, a healthy one. It makes a person less likely to rigidly cling to views in the face of changing evidence; it makes them more empathetic; it’s a boon for innovative thinking. It’s also hugely important for learning.

As research has suggested, people ranked higher in measures of intellectual humility were predicted to do better in so-called “mastery behaviors” — i.e., they were likely to learn something. Intellectual humility was an even more powerful measure of learning success, the researchers found, than the celebrated “growth mindset.”

Act like a student

If there’s something to be learned, chances are there’s an online video showing you how to do it. But I recommend learning with others in a class. It provides structure, discipline and motivation.

Learning with other people has additional benefits; in a “learning community” we not only learn from others who might be better than we are, but we also learn by teaching others who might be worse than we are at something. We even learn from seeing the mistakes of others.

Be a scientist

The late scientist and mathematician Richard Hamming wrote in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn that, “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.”

In our jobs, we’re engineers. We may not want, particularly as middle-aged people, to take huge risks or venture into the unknown. But taking up something new in our spare time is our chance to be scientists — to mess around, to explore, to have fun. Don’t treat a new pursuit as another job; this means giving yourself permission to be mediocre.

“Start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type,” writes Paul Graham in an online essay. The computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur and investor says to use smaller language for what you’re hoping to tackle. “To start a painting, saying that it’s just a sketch; or a new piece of software, saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling, you can sneakily convert it to something more.”

So start by calling yourself a dabbler. Who knows where you might end up?

Editor’s note: This story ran previously in The Arrow, AARP’s former online magazine for Gen X men.

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