This is an ABC podcast.

Tom Vanderbilt didn't know how to play chess.

That fact never bothered him until one day at the library with his four-year-old daughter.

We were playing a game of Checkers, which is something I know how to play.

And right next to the Checkers board, there was a chess board, and she asked this kind of simple question, can we play that game? It

looks really interesting. I said, you know, I would love to, but I actually don't really

know how to play. I don't think I ever fully learned. So, you know, this was sort of kind of a

shameful thing to have to admit to his then four-year-old daughter that I didn't know how to do something.

But I wanted to encourage her and I sort of had the sense of chess as a very sort of dignified

game that was somehow sort of good for you mentally. So I did what a lot of modern parents do and

I hired a coach. Tom decided he wanted to learn as well.

He'd been trying to teach himself online, but wasn't really getting anywhere.

So this coach came by and I said, is it okay if I sort of jump in on these lessons as well?

And I thought it would be a funny, non-scientific experiment with a sample size of two,

in which you had these two different beginners at the same task,

separated by all of these years of age. I was approaching 50 at the time, and it also raised the idea that I myself had not really learned that many new skills like the game of chess in quite some time.

It just struck a chord that I thought, here I am telling my daughter how important it is to learn new things.

Why aren't I doing the same thing?

You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

Lifelong learning can have a multitude of benefits, but there are also many reasons more of us don't do it.

Does that come at a cost, though? There will be times in everyone's life when they have to be learning new things, right?

Because the world is changing rapidly.

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