Learning is Risky

This is one of my favourite passages from Self Renewal: The Individual and Innovative Society. I thought I would share it.

“As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interest we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things.

As the years go by we view our familiar surroundings with less and less freshness of perception. We no longer look with a wakeful perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world.

It is not unusual to find that major changes in life- a marriage, a move to a new city, a change of jobs, or a national emergency- break the patterns of our lives and reveal to us quite suddenly how much we had been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves.

One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure. In infancy, when the child is learning at a truly phenomenal rate- a rate he or she will never again achieve- he or she is also experiencing a shattering number of failures. Watch [any child]. See the innumerable things he or she tries and fails. And see how little the failures discourage him or her.

With each year that passes [the child] will be less blithe about failure. By adolescence the willingness of young people to risk failure has diminished greatly. And all too often parents push them further along that road by instilling fear, by punishing failure, or by making success seem too precious.

By middle age most of us carry around in our heads a tremendous catalogue of things we have no intention of trying again because we tried them once and failed- or tried them once and did less well than our self-esteem demanded.