I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new

podcast McCartney A Life in Lyrics. Listen to McCartney A Life in L lyrics on the I-Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to approach any new skill

the way kids use to approach the puzzles on Blues Clues.

Keep repeating your way through it

until you feel familiarity and mastery.

Blues Clues is an educational cartoon where preschoolers help Blue The Dog solve puzzles with three clues.

When this show first started, and this was back before people recorded everything,

each episode ran five days in a row before a new episode aired.

The thinking was that preschoolers appreciated becoming familiar with an episode,

recognizing the characters and setting and story. As they watched the same episode over and over again,

they understood what was happening,

and they were able to figure out the mysteries, which felt really satisfying and fun.

If you want to build your skills and confidence in anything, You might consider the Blues Clues

method too. One obvious application. Skills in the kitchen. A lot of people have been challenging themselves to cook more during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, the way most of us do this is we find some recipe, try it once, and then either decide we like it or we don't.

If we don't really like it, we abandon it.

If we do, we might cook it on occasion in the future,

...