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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Why it's great to be a beginner - at any age
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Tom Vanderbilt has written a new book about being an ‘adult beginner’, and how lifelong learning has many benefits for your mind and health.
(The Guardian, approx 16 mins reading time)
No one wants to stay a beginner. We all want to get better. But even as our skills improve, and our knowledge and experience grow, what I hope to encourage is the preservation, or even cultivation, of that spirit of the novice: the naive optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions – the unencumbered beginner’s mind. What the chess master Benjamin Blumenfeld advised a century ago applies as much to life as to chess: “Before you make your move, look at the position as if you were a beginner.”
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