Beginners

PROLOGUE
 
THE OPENING GAMBIT
 
One Sunday morning in a crowded room in New York City, I sat down to a chessboard with my heartbeat elevated and my stomach on the boil.
 
My opponent and I shook hands, as is the custom. Apart from stating our names, which we duly jotted in our notation pads, we exchanged no words. While I set the time on the clock twenty-
five minutes for each player he methodically centered each piece on its square.
 
Nonchalantly, as if to appear faintly bored, I did the same. I tried to arrange my pieces even more symmetrically, as if seizing some minute advantage (a ploy undermined by momentary panic that I d incorrectly placed the bishop and knight). An expectant hush fell about the room as we waited for the tournament director to give the start signal.
 
As we sat, I tried to size my opponent up. He idly rolled a pencil between his fingers. His eyes drifted to the neighboring tables. I peered at him with what I hoped looked like remorseless pity. I was trying to project as much feral menace as one could while sitting in a library chair. I wanted to channel a feeling that had been described to me by Dylan Loeb McClain, the former chess columnist for The New York Times, when, in 1995, he d played the then world champion, Garry Kasparov, in an exhibition game.
 
I didn t feel like he wanted to beat me, McClain said. I felt like he wanted to reach across the board and strangle me. He intuited that Kasparov, hunched like an angry bear and channeling unbelievable psychic ferocity, would not be happy gaining some minor positional advantage, or even simply winning. Something more personal, more disturbing seemed to be driving him.
 
This is a common sensation in the world of chess. I like the moment when I break a man s ego, the mercurial champion Bobby Fischer once put it.
 
I looked again at my opponent. Could I, through tactical finesse and the withering power of my merciless gaze, slowly

TOM VANDERBILT has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Popular Science, Financial Times, Smithsonian, and London Review of Books, among many others. He is a contributing editor of Wired UK, Outside, and Artforum. He is author of You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), and Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio programs, from the Today show to the BBC's World Service to NPR's Fresh Air. He has been a visiting scholar at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space, and a winner of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tom Vanderbilt elegantly and persuasively tackles one of the most pernicious of the lies we tells ourselves--that the pleasure of learning are reserved for the young. Beginners belongs with David Epstein's Range on the list of books that have changed the way I understand my own limitations."
Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Outliers

Beginners is ultimately about more than learning. It s about the about the possibilities that reside in all of us.
 Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell is Human

Tom Vanderbilt s book explores how to learn completely new skills, how to change our world - even after we re supposed to be done with schooling. This is a book about how to become a beginner again, and it makes you want to plunge in with both feet.  
The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better

"A thoughtful and stirring look into the art and science of lifelong learning. Currently, I m learning Gaelic, dressmaking and how to lay floors. Last year, it was knitting and coding. I m 50, and not supposed to be a beginner any more -- according to society s conventions -- but Tom Vanderbilt turns that flawed assumption on its head with the grace with which he learns to reach a high note or surf a wave."
Rose George, author of Ninety Percent of Everything

"Tom Vanderbilt shows us why it s never too late to be a beginner, and that there should be no shame associated with the word dilettante. Now I m off to learn how to play the trombone, speak Portuguese and bake soufflés"
A.J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically 

"A wonderful and inspirational book. The only thing that will make you put it down is a burning desire to try something new. It's full of the sort of encouragement and wisdom that bridges the small, tricky gulf between enthusiasm and action. A book that will launch thousands of journeys that