You may have to put in some work, but you probably will get better and here’s how to do it. And so I thought, if my daughter could see me struggle, and be sort of bad at something, rather than just being this figure of constant authority and this omniscient source, I’d like to think that this would be a benefit. So I think one of the things that happens with parents in particular is that they’re often espousing these things that they themselves are not actually living in their own life, like the importance of learning, when often they’ve stopped learning new things. I really wanted to model learning for my daughter. And for me, it was more than about just wanting to learn myself. And I said, can you teach us both at the same time? We’ll both be beginners, we’ll have all these years between us, but we both want to learn and take on this new thing.

So I hired this coach, which seems kind of weird for a four-year-old, but that’s what parents do nowadays.

So I quickly tried to learn how to play this game and was struggling a bit with it. But secondly, as a kind of a middle-aged person in mid-career when you’re supposed to be competent at everything, to sort of admit that you actually don’t know how to do something is hard. We were playing a game of checkers and she saw this chessboard nearby and she was quite young and it looked intriguing to her because chess looks kind of cool.Īnd she said, can we play that? And I was like, Yeah, I’d love to, but I actually don’t know how, and this was sort of a horrible thing to have to admit to your daughter, number one. But you know, I was a middle-aged dad and was faced with this situation one day when I was in the library with my daughter. Tom: It’s a good question, Sam, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Sam: I guess maybe to start, Tom, what made you write the book? One of the great things about being a beginner is that it creates this sense of empathy.Positive feedback has a stronger role than negative feedback.You can find more Bring It In podcast episodes here. Below are some of the insights Vanderbilt shared during our chat, edited for length and clarity.

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