To be honest, I’m not sure I had many views of learning, as it was something I’d largely stopped thinking about since graduating from college.īut there were all sorts of things I learned about learning while I was writing the book, most of which pair up to concepts that have been put out there by people like Carol Dweck (mindset), Lev Vygotsky (the zone of proximal development), Gabriele Wulf (the external locus of attention), among others. The book was intended to try and push people over that hump. So many of us get hung up on the idea of being that awkward beginner that we never even want to go there. I wrote the book in an effort to try and quell this self-talk, to get whatever fears and social expectations were keeping me from embarking on these episodes of playful exploration, which, in the end, were incredibly powerful. Second, there was my self-protective ego, protesting “why would you want, at a time when you’re supposed to be at peak competence, to be bad at something?” Third, I felt a sort of guilt i.e., how is chess going to help me in my job, in my life? Isn’t that just a silly distraction? How good could you actually get at chess, as if mastery - which in chess comes in the form of an actual title - were the only goal. Learning was reserved for young, lightning-quick learning machines like my daughter. There was the notion that, first, I’m too old. Why was that? Of course, I’d been busy the previous few years being a beginner parent, and trying to earn a living.īut there were some larger obstacles, some discouraging self-talk. This sparked a broader realization: It had been a long time since I’d tried to learn something new, some substantive skill.

So there we were, two beginners, separated by decades of age, trying to learn the same thing. I quickly learned the basic moves, but as chess is an immensely complex game - becoming a grandmaster is harder than earning a Ph.D., one grandmaster with a doctorate told me - I thought she might benefit from some expert lessons. The initial inspiration came when my four-year-old daughter suddenly decided she wanted to play chess and I didn’t quite remember how to.

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