Learning new skills

I think adults struggle with new skills for one main reason: we have more to protect. A child who falls off a bicycle has lost nothing; an adult beginner risks looking incompetent in front of people who know them as competent, and that fear shrinks the amount of practice they're willing to do in public. Add real constraints — jobs, children, tiredness — and the practice hours simply aren't there. On whether everyone should keep learning throughout life, I'd say yes but not for the usual economic reasons. Retraining for work is often forced and joyless. The more convincing argument is that learning something badly, as a beginner, is one of the few experiences that keeps adults humble — it reminds us what our students, children and juniors feel every day.