When I first moved to Boston as a graduate student, I joined the local science fiction fan group. After each meeting, we would all go to a Chinese restaurant and order a bunch of dishes, family style. And there was one rule: you had to eat with chopsticks. Which was a skill I’d never learned….
It was dark in my old home town and I’d just run over a curb. I was piloting the Nissan Rogue Sport SUV I’d rented earlier in the day, driving through Ambler, Pennsylvania, a half-mile from where I went to high school and 400 miles from where I live now. You know how, when you…
After 1,789 blog posts here, I may have learned something about blogging — and about myself. And if I’ve learned something, I’ve also learned that I have to share it. What did you learn today? Imagine for a moment that, like me, you have decided to do a substantive blog post every weekday. What would…
In six decades on earth, I’ve learned that these things are worth doing. Learning. Because knowing a thing you didn’t know before is a joy in itself. This is as essential to me as it was when I was small — it keeps me going. Teaching. Because that is how you can bring the joy…
What comes before learning? In 1995, I was out of work and interviewing for a job as an analyst at a research company. As they described the job to me, I became very excited. My job was going to be to identify important questions for business clients where the answer was not yet known. Like…
When you learn things, you know them. Then, if you try to teach someone else, you realize you don’t know them, and you learn them at a deeper level. I recently tried to teach my teenager to parallel park. I’ve been successfully parallel parking for many decades, of course, but we needed to practice together to…