Your drive to master new skills comes from evolution: early humans who excelled at fire-making, hunting, and protection survived to pass on their genes. Modern neuroscience shows we generate new neurons throughout life, so learning ability doesn't sharply decline after childhood. You can learn Sudoku at 80 or a new language at 50.
A clip from Erika Andersen's latest book, Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future.
Mastery and Survival. If you reflect upon our history as a race, it makes sense that mastering new skills should be so gratifying. Imagine a prehistoric tribe fighting to survive in a world of climactic extremes, large predators, and inconsistent food sources. Those ancient humans who got good at the most critical tasks— making fires, avoiding being eaten, finding food, and protecting themselves from the elements— were more likely to survive and reproduce. This argues that the human urge toward mastery isn't just a modern feel-good innovation; it's a survival instinct. In other words, the will toward mastery has been bred into us over thousands of generations. Throughout history, those who were best at mastering the skills needed to stay alive managed to stay alive. And those folks were then able to pass on that trait—their will toward mastery—to succeeding generations. And as with the other things we need to do in order to survive—eat, sleep, stay warm, procreate—mastery feels great. Those things most key to our continued existence are generally the things we find most attractive. No wonder mastery makes us feel so good. There's yet another piece of good fortune to go along with our love of mastery. We are all capable of continuing to master new knowledge and skills throughout our lives. This may sound obvious, but until fairly recently, scientists believed that this wasn't the case. They thought that once people were past early childhood, their ability to learn declined steeply. This belief about our ever-declining learning ability was based on 3 assumptions widely shared by neurologists and brain researchers. These scientists thought, until very recently, that each baby had at birth all the brain cells he would ever have. They further believed that those brain cells would begin to die off almost immediately and would continue to do so as the person aged. And finally, it was thought that the remaining brain cells would, over time, lose their plasticity— their ability to change structure and function in response to new experiences. Fortunately for all of us, it turns out that these 3 assumptions were dead wrong. Thank goodness for today's ongoing explosion of knowledge in the sciences. While it's true that we start losing brain cells as soon as we're born, we also keep adding new brain cells throughout our lives. And those cells work just as well for learning as the ones we had at the beginning of our lives, the ones we used to figure out how to walk and talk. In other words, we can keep on learning, and learning well, until we die. That means there's no neurological reason for us not to take up Sudoku at 80 or decide to learn a new language in our 50s. No reason we can't become as adept at using social media or growing a garden or running a business at 60 or 90 as we can at 20 or 30.
Thank you for listening. You can find Be Bad First on Amazon.com and anywhere books are sold. And if you'd like to find out how good you are at being bad first, go to getgoodatthingsfast.com and take the quiz.
