You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everyone, I'm Stacey Vanick Smith inframarial Segera.

When was the last time you taught yourself something new?

That is a question NPR producer Ramel Wood

likes to ask people.

She used to help produce NPR's Game Show

Ask Me Another, and she'd always

ask potential contestants, hey, what's something you've taught yourself recently that you're proud of?

She says it was a great way to open people up.

So she called up a few former contestants to see if they remembered how they'd answered.

This is Sam Capoli.

He lives in San Diego and he taught himself how to drive a stick-shipped car.

Do you remember what the motivation behind that was?

Yeah, well my mom tried to teach me years ago and I was like a high school kid.

It was my first year at college because a while back, but I was just not amenable to it, got too frustrated and dropped it without giving a second thought.

Then they sold the old car that had the transmission and I felt, I don't know, sad or guilty,

like I had missed out on the part of like the family for doing that.

And here is Amy Paul, she's a stay-at-home mom in Houston. And a few years ago, she was trying to learn how to do a pull-up. Her motivation? Escape rooms. She got really into them with her family. Amy was great at the puzzle rooms, but she struggled

with the other kind. I get to the physical ones and I can do maybe the first room or

if my husband and my brother-in-law and one of my sons is on the team they can go do the hard stuff and so there are several things that require arm strength and it was like rock climbing kind of things or holding yourself up and I can't do any of that. So I was like I'm going to get stronger arms so that I can be a better teammate for this questing.

And so that was my motivation.

And Rommel also turned to an expert at learning new things,

...