Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

ALSO BY TOM VANDERBILT

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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2021 by Tom Vanderbilt

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Portions of this work previously appeared, in different form, as Learning Chess at 40 in Nautilus, Issue 36 (nautil.us) on May 5, 2016, and My Family Vacation Swimming in the Open Sea in Outside (outsideonline.com) on July 2, 2019.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vanderbilt, Tom, author.

Title: Beginners : the joy and transformative power of lifelong learning / Tom Vanderbilt.

Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: lccn 2019057320 (print) | lccn 2019057321 (ebook) | isbn 9781524732165 (hardcover) | isbn 9781524711849 (open market) | ebook ISBN 9781524732172

Subjects: lcsh: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Self-managed learning.

Classification: lcc bf637.s4 v375 2020 (print) | lcc bf637.S4 (ebook) | ddc 646.7—dc23

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057320

lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057321

Cover illustration and design by Tyler Comrie

ep_prh_5.6.1_148814534_c0_r2

To my father,

for picking up the piano,

and sticking with it

You must become a beginner.

—rainer maria rilke

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE OPENING GAMBIT

CHAPTER ONE

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO BEING A BEGINNER

CHAPTER TWO

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

What Infants Can Teach Us About Being Good Beginners

CHAPTER THREE

UNLEARNING TO SING

CHAPTER FOUR

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING, BUT I’M DOING IT ANYWAY

The Virtues of Learning on the Fly with a Group

CHAPTER FIVE

SURFING THE U-SHAPED WAVE

The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Advanced Beginner

CHAPTER SIX

HOW WE LEARN TO DO THINGS

CHAPTER SEVEN

MEDITATION WITH BENEFITS

How Drawing Changed the Way I Saw the World, and Myself

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE APPRENTICE

or, What I Learned

Acknowledgments

Notes

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 dismantle the core of his being?

Just then, a woman appeared at his side, bearing a small carton of chocolate milk. She kissed him on the head, said, Good luck, and flashed me an owlish smile. Ryan, my opponent, was eight years old. With admirable composure, and an occasional sniffle, he dispatched me somewhere after the thirtieth move. I congratulated him, and as I went to inform the tournament director of the result, I saw him in the hallway, ego intact, proudly relaying the news to his mother.

Ryan and I were among those gathered for a Sunday morning Rated Beginner Open at New York City’s Marshall Chess Club. Occupying several floors of a historic town house on one of Greenwich Village’s most handsome blocks, the Marshall is a delightful anachronism, a relic of the days when any number of chess teams, collegiate and otherwise, battled across the region, their exploits recorded in the sports sections of newspapers.

That it exists here today, nestled amid some of the most expensive real estate in the country, is only thanks to a plot twist worthy of Dickens.

In 1931, at the height of the Depression, a group of wealthy benefactors, chess enthusiasts all, bought the building on behalf of the club’s namesake, Frank Marshall. A grandmaster and U.S. champion who’d once operated an oceanfront chess emporium in Atlantic City—where he sometimes played passersby for money—Marshall had for decades piloted his eponymous club through a number of iconic Manhattan locales, from Keens Chophouse to the Chelsea Hotel. The Marshall now had a home for life.

The place has lost a bit of its old-school luster—there are no longer jacketed waiters to serve coffee or tea—but playing chess at the Marshall today, you still feel you’re in some Gilded Age temple to the Game of Kings. History envelops you: busts of famous grandmasters; vintage photographs of team champions; the very table that Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion, sweated over as he defended his title against Sergey Karjakin in 2016.

The Marshall is no museum, though. Entering the place on a weekend, during a big tournament, is like walking into a human-powered data center: rows and rows of processors, silently calculating, thrumming with intensity, generating heat and a persistent tang of nervous perspiration.

The Sunday Beginners tournament was strictly small stakes, for players rated under 1200, or having no rating at all. Most grandmasters have ratings above 2500; I had the newbie rating of 100.

My day had started promisingly. Against my first opponent, John, a gray-haired man with the look and quiet gravity of a scholar, I’d initially fallen behind on material, as pieces are called in chess. As the game drew on, he tried to press his advantage. And yet I kept fighting, finding inventive obstacles to his victory. To each of these he would respond with a small, tired sigh. I could feel his discomfort, and with each sigh I seemed to grow in strength.

Then, with my own king nearly surrounded, I spotted the chance for a checkmate. I just needed him to not see it. There is an old expression in chess that the winner is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. And indeed, my opponent played offense when he needed to be playing defense, moving a pawn toward what he assumed was my demise. As I slid my rook into position, trapping his king along the A file (the first vertical row on a chessboard), a slow, queasy realization spread across his face.

My next opponent, Eric, was a serviceman on leave from Afghanistan, where he spent a lot of downtime playing online chess. He knew he’d be coming through New York on a visit stateside and had dedicated time for a Marshall pilgrimage. He looked a bit like the actor Woody Harrelson: buzz cut, grizzled, with a thousand-yard stare. Our match was tense and close fought, until he captured one of my rooks with a bishop pin. After I resigned, he looked relieved and said I had played much better than my rating would indicate—the first words he had uttered.

That morning’s grouping, everyone from U.S. Army Rangers to AARP members to fidgety kids, was typical of the Marshall’s Beginners tournament. The age range at the Marshall must have spanned six decades, but we were all, in the eyes of chess, beginners.

There is a wonderful purity to chess’s rating system, which renders distinctions like age largely irrelevant. Chess is one of the few skilled endeavors in which children can acquire a proficiency on par with adults—or above.There are twelve-year-olds who will innocently skin you alive.

There was one child in the Sunday tournament at the Marshall in whom I had a particular interest: my own daughter. We weren’t paired against each other—though that moment would come—and we took very different paths that morning. She placed near the top and collected a check for eighty-four dollars, money that was immediately plowed into Beanie Babies and glitter putty at the corner toy shop.

And as I heard her gleefully report to her grandparents on the phone, later that day, My dad finished, like, fortieth. Out of fifty-one.

What had I gotten myself into?

*

One day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of holiday checkers with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures (many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by horses and castles). "What’s that? she asked. Chess, I replied. Can we play?" she pleaded. I nodded absently.

There was just one problem: I didn’t know how. I dimly remembered having learned the basic moves as a kid, but chess had never stuck. This fact vaguely haunted me through my life. I would see an idle board in a hotel lobby, or a puzzle in a weekend newspaper supplement, and feel a pang.

I had picked up a general awareness of chess. I knew the names Fischer and Kasparov. I knew that the game had enchanted historical luminaries like Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Nabokov. I knew the cliché about grandmasters being able to look a dozen moves ahead. I knew that chess, like classical music, was shorthand in movies for genius—often of the evil variety. But I knew chess the way I knew the Japanese language: what it looks like, what it sounds like, its Japaneseness, without actually comprehending it.

I decided I’d learn the game, if only to be able to teach my daughter. Learning the basic moves was easy enough. It took a few hours, hunched over my smartphone at kids’ birthday parties or waiting in line at Trader Joe’s, to get a feel for the basic moves. Soon, I was playing, and sometimes even beating, the weakest computer opponents (the ones with catastrophic blunders abundantly programmed in). Yet it soon became apparent that I had little concept of the larger strategies.

I didn’t want to try to teach what I knew only poorly. And yet how to learn? The number of chess books was dauntingly huge. Sure, there was Chess for Dummies. But beyond that, the chess literature was enormous. It was filled with algebraic-looking thickets of chess notation, a quasi-language that itself had to be learned.

And the books were achingly specific: for example, A Complete Guide to Playing 3 Nc3 Against the French Defence. That’s right: an entire book devoted to the permutations of a single move—a move that, I should add, has been regularly played for a century. Yet people were still figuring out, one hundred years and many chess books later, 288 pages of new things to say about it.

A well-traveled fact one hears early in chess is that after only three moves there are more possible game variations than there are atoms in the universe. And, indeed, I felt cosmically stupefied as I tried to figure out how to boil down this exponentially complex game to someone whose favorite show was Curious George.

So I did what any self-respecting modern parent does: I hired a coach. The twist was that I wanted someone to teach my daughter and me at the same time.

Through some internet sleuthing, I’d found Simon Rudowski, a Brooklyn-based Polish émigré. He had an air of old-world formality, and a hint of tough-love sternness, that lent what I thought was an appropriate gravity to the task. When playing, he would move pieces with an emphatic, almost operatic flair. Simon, vegetarian, thin and hyperalert, preferred that the house be quiet, save for classical music playing quietly in the background. There were cups of tea and my wife’s fresh-baked pastries, which she had served to him during the first lesson out of politeness.

This meant-to-be-occasional treat had soon hardened, and even intensified, into an almost comic ritual. We need to make pastries for Simon, she would urgently announce the morning of the lesson (store-bought cookies would only be nibbled at, in a subtle sign of displeasure). The music, along with the refreshments and the intrinsic elegance of the board and pieces, turned our house, or so I liked to imagine, into a sort of feverish, caffeinated Viennese salon, filled with the heady ferment of chess theory.

*

Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were also embarking on a cognitive experiment, with a sample size of two: We were two novices, attempting to learn a new skill.

We were starting from the same point, but separated by some four decades. So far, in her young life, I’d been the expert—in knowing what words meant or how to ride a bike—but now we were on curiously equal footing, at least in theory. Would one of us get better faster? Would we learn in the same way? What were our respective strengths and weaknesses? Who would prevail in the end?

I soon stopped attending the lessons. My presence, for one, seemed distracting; I was getting between her and her teacher. Also, in the beginning at least, she was picking it up much more slowly. Simon and I would sometimes grin at each other, secret confidants, when she was on the verge of discovering a difficult move on a crowded board.

I drifted to the background. I regularly played online, struggled through YouTube videos that analyzed tournament matches, and leafed through books like Bent Larsen’s Best Games. And then my daughter and I, each armed for battle in our own way, would come together, at the kitchen table, over the chessboard.

Early on, I seemed to be doing better with the game, if only because I was more serious about it. I had an attention span, I had decades of experience with other games, I had my adult pride. When we played, she would sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit disastrous blunders and hope she would see them. In the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house at least I felt like a sage, benevolent elder statesman.

Week by week, though, she improved. She would calmly explain to me some hidden intricacy in a puzzle, or tell me why the online game I was certain I was going to win was actually likely to end in a draw. She’d learned strategies and rules of thumb that were new to me. She’d started playing in tournaments: at first, small gatherings in the basement of the local library and, eventually, the big citywide competitions. She collected trophies and landed fairly high up on the list of the country’s top one hundred female players for her age. I suddenly had to work to beat her, and sometimes could not.

One reason, in retrospect, was obvious. Where I was just playing online game after online game, hoping to get better through sheer exposure—attributing wins to my talent and losses to bad luck—she was being drilled in opening theory and endgame tactics by Simon. When she lost a game, she would have to analyze, in painstaking detail, why she lost. Importantly, this often took longer than the actual match.

In the eyes of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the man behind the now-familiar, often-misunderstood ten-thousand-hour rule, she was engaging in deliberate practice.

I, on the other hand, was settling for mindless repetition, trying to get better through brute force, without tangible goals. I was trying, in a way, to play like AlphaZero, DeepMind’s celebrated artificial intelligence engine. Given no more than the basic rules of chess, AlphaZero had mastered the game after playing itself forty-four million times.* It learned as it went along the whole way through, without the aid of a coach, becoming the most formidable opponent in the world.

But I didn’t have that much time or that much brainpower. If you want to improve in chess, wrote Ericsson, you don’t do it by playing chess. You do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games. In my crowded life, it was usually easier to play a five-minute blitz game while riding the subway.

In any case, my attention had largely shifted to her. She was the talent to be nurtured; she was winning the trophies. Her improvement was more important than mine. I had become the archetypal Chess Dad, waiting through the typical five or six hours of a scholastic tournament.

The experience is a bit like being stranded in a second-tier airport during a flight delay. You try to find a comfortable place to kill time, but you end up with the dust bunnies on the power-waxed tile floor, on some windowless lower level of a school, huddled near an electrical outlet to keep your devices alive. You graze Goldfish crackers scavenged from the parent-run concession stand and breathe stale air. You try to work, but you are hopelessly jittery and distracted.

Waiting for my daughter to return from a match, anxious about the result, I’d glance down the hall every few minutes, my senses so attuned that I could tell within a millisecond’s glance whether she’d won or lost. Each scenario—a bounding, smiling run or a stoop-shouldered shuffle often accompanied by tears—had the tendency to break my heart.

During those moments of tears, I would sometimes wonder why I was putting her—and, to be honest, me—through it all. What had started as a simple, playful exploration had become something more serious. But to what end? I’d mostly bought into the societal image that equates chess with intelligence and academic success, even though I knew, rationally, that the evidence was inconclusive. The studies were typically small, often filled with motivated chess players fully aware they were being studied, and often undertaken by chess organizations themselves. There was a big direction of causality problem: Did chess make kids smarter, or did smarter kids gravitate to chess? If chess were so tied to intelligence, one might think better chess players would be generally smarter than lesser players or non-chess players. Again, there’s no strong evidence.

Still, I tried to convince myself that there were tangible positives. I thought that chess, as a way to teach thinking, as one educator put it, was a useful proxy for the rigors of school—concentrating, solving, memorizing, applying—dressed up in a game.

As for those tear-inducing losses, I imagined that chess tournaments, with their poignant, mostly meaningless results, might be a good place to rehearse the larger challenges of life. And maybe the results weren’t so meaningless. Three times out of four, by my rough estimation, she was playing a boy. Despite efforts at change, an attitude of gender superiority persists in chess. Male players’ ratings tend to be higher, which may simply be, it’s been suggested, a statistical artifact of there being so many more male players.

But there’s something more to the story. A study looking at scholastic chess tournaments found that when female players played male players, they seemed to underperform. As the researchers wrote, "Girls lose to boys at a rate that cannot be explained in terms of initial ratings strength. The reason, they hypothesized, is the phenomenon of stereotype threat": Female players were battling not only male opponents but the perception that they weren’t as good. What’s more, female players who didn’t do as well as their rating would predict played in fewer tournaments the next year—an effect not seen in boys.

Life was going to be full of these vicious cycles, I reasoned. Let us tackle them head-on, right now. And, undoubtedly, my proudest moment as Chess Dad was when, at a big tournament, I overheard a boy telling his compatriots, all wearing the purple T-shirts of the elite Hunter College Elementary School chess squad, to watch out for the girl in the pink bunny shirt.

*

When my daughter first began competing in scholastic tournaments, I would chat up other parents. Sometimes, I’d ask if they played chess themselves. Usually, the reply was an apologetic shrug and a smile.

When I volunteered that I was learning to play, the tone was cheerily patronizing: Good luck with that! I thought, If this game is so good for kids, why are adults ignoring it? Seeing someone playing Angry Birds, I wanted to tap them on the shoulder and say, Why are you having your kids do chess while you do that? This is the Game of Kings! There are chess games recorded from the fifteenth century!

At chess tournaments, I saw a dynamic that was all too familiar from the world of children’s activities: kids doing the activity, adults like me staring into their smartphones. Sure, we parents had work to do, work that we allowed to spill into weekends, work that helped pay for the lessons our kids were enjoying (or enduring).

But I also wondered if we, in our constant chaperoning of these lessons, were imparting a subtle lesson: that learning was for the young.

Strolling down the hall during one tournament, I looked into a classroom and saw a group of parents, with what I took to be an instructor. They were playing chess! Just then, as if on cue, a group of kids passed me, peering in on the same scene. Why are adults learning chess? one asked, in a vaguely mocking tone, to the collective amusement of the group. They marched on while I slowly died in front of a cheery bulletin board.

I was tired of sitting on the sidelines. I wanted in. And that is how I got a membership card from the U.S. Chess Federation and started joining my daughter, not at the scholastic tournaments—where I would have cut an odd figure—but at the Marshall.

Early on, I was nervous, even though I really had nothing to lose, save my pride. A master can sometimes play badly, as one grandmaster put it, a fan never! And fan I was: the somber rituals, the pulse-pounding encounters, the tense atmosphere. It was three hours of sustained concentration and intense thinking, with my phone turned off. It felt like a gym for the brain.

The most striking thing was how hard it was to play against people. Playing online, at home, you were just moving pixels. In a real-life tournament, you were sitting across from a human, in all their humanness: their eyes, their scent, their body language, the strange sounds emanating from their deepest inner recesses.

This was an early lesson in learning: It is context dependent. You want to get good at online blitz? Play lots of online blitz. You want to get good at chess tournaments? Play at chess tournaments, against warm bodies.

And you never knew who was going to sit across from you on any given Sunday. I played—to a draw—a young girl with blue-framed eyeglasses who had the disconcerting, perhaps involuntary, habit of commenting under her breath on my moves as I made them (thank you for bringing my king into the endgame). There was the older man with shaking hands who set a towering, sloshing twenty-four-ounce cup of hot coffee on the table as he sat down to play me, drawing alarmed looks from the neighboring players, positioned mere inches away; rattled, I nearly threw the game away and only salvaged a draw because my opponent was unsettled by his dwindling clock. I sent an earnest kid in a charter school uniform to his doom—it took more work than I would have liked—and felt obliged to tell his father, who was watching a movie on his smartphone, how well his son had played. I checkmated a lank-haired, somewhat eccentric man I had seen there on many occasions, wondering, a bit darkly, how long he had dwelled in the Beginners section. I was paired against my daughter, who coolly delivered a back-rank checkmate, trapping my helpless king on the last row.

I was nearing fifty and getting beat by kids. I loved it.

Skip Notes

* In terms of Ericsson’s formulation, assuming an average time of ninety minutes per chess match, this would entail some sixty-six million hours of experience for a human.

CHAPTER ONE

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO BEING A BEGINNER

A man…progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.*1

—george bernard shaw

BEGIN, AGAIN: A MANIFESTO

Beginners is a book for anyone who ever started out, who was unsure, who was afraid to ask a question in a roomful of people who all seemed as if they knew what they were doing. It’s for anyone who had to be shown the ropes, however many times, who didn’t know what they were doing but did it anyway. It’s for anyone who entered a race they weren’t even sure they could finish. It’s a catalog of errors, a celebration of awkwardness. To paraphrase the movie Repo Man, it’s about spending your life not avoiding tense situations but getting into tense situations.

It’s a handbook for the clueless, a first-aid kit for the crushed ego, a survival guide for coping with this most painful, most poignant stage: the awkward, self-conscious, exhilarating dawning of the novice. It’s not a how to do book as much as a "why to do" book. It’s less about making you better at something than making you feel better as you try to learn. It’s about small acts of reinvention, at any age, that can make life seem magical. It’s about learning new things, one of which might be you.

*

For me, it had all begun with the chess experiment. Something had been awakened in me, thanks, ultimately, to my daughter.

Becoming a first-time parent is one of the more fundamental experiences of being a beginner. You sail into the process having chatted with friends and maybe read a few books, and on day one you’re on the bunny hill of life.

Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others, writes the Yale University professor of philosophy L. A. Paul. You are wrong.

It is, she writes,