Always walk through life as if

Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will.

Vernon Howard

The meaning of the quote

Writer Tom Vanderbilt was in his 40s when his 4-year-old daughter spotted a chessboard and asked if they could play. He said yes, though the moves he’d learned as a boy had never stuck.

So he learned chess alongside her. A psychologist told him his daughter would probably pick up the game about twice as fast as he could, and Vanderbilt kept going anyway. Chess led him to singing, surfing and juggling, and in the book Beginners he writes about starting from zero as a grown man.

Vernon Howard‘s quote promises that if you go through each day expecting to learn something, you’ll find it.

Lessons show up in a failed test, a chat with your grandmother, a mistake at your part-time job or a chessboard with a 4-year-old on the other side. You only notice the ones you’re looking for. Someone who believes they already know enough walks past them every day.

Adults find this harder than kids do. Vanderbilt’s daughter came to chess with nothing to unlearn, while he arrived with 40 years of habits and opinions that got in the way. The older you get, the more you feel you’re supposed to have the answers, and asking questions starts to feel embarrassing.

Another of Howard’s sayings puts it in 7 words.

“Be teachable. That is the whole secret.”

Action steps

These steps turn the quote into a daily habit.

1. Live with the quote for 6 months. Howard told his students to pick one short saying and live by it for half a year. Put this one on your lock screen or a sticky note on your mirror so you see it every morning.
2. Ask the question you’d normally skip. When your coach, a mechanic or a nurse explains something, ask “why?” one more time.
3. Treat everyone as a teacher. Your little brother knows a game you’ve never played, and the bus driver knows every shortcut in town. Ask them about it.
4. Stay a beginner at something. Pick one skill you’re bad at, the way chess was for Vanderbilt, and keep at it.
5. Write 1 line before bed. Answer the question “What did I learn today?” If a day comes up empty, you’ll start the next one looking harder.

About the author

By the early 1960s, Vernon Howard was making a living as a writer in Los Angeles. Born in 1918 near Haverhill, Massachusetts, he started out in the 1940s writing humor and children’s books, then moved on to success guides with titles like Success Through the Magic of Personal Power.

He swung between highs and lows, and the highs depended on applause. In 1978 he told the Los Angeles Times how he broke the pattern.

“I decided I had to find something without applause.”

In the mid-1960s he gave up writing success guides and started studying his own mind.

In 1967 he published The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power. The title sounds like a comic book, yet it became his best seller, with over a million copies sold.

He later moved to Boulder City, a small desert town in Nevada, where about 50 students came to his Thursday night classes.

A magazine poked fun at the “cosmic master” of Boulder City, his pamphlets were advertised in supermarket tabloids next to weight-loss products, and his own sons called him “mean” after hearing his talks.

In the 1970s he founded the New Life Foundation, which still publishes his books and recordings. He taught there until his death in 1992.

Howard wrote in short sayings like the quote, and he lived by this one himself. In his late 40s, he did what Tom Vanderbilt did at the chessboard and admitted he still had something to learn.

Then he learned it.

Resources

• The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power by Vernon Howard (Book)
• Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt (Book)
• Learning Chess at 40 by Tom Vanderbilt (Article)
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (Book)
• The Anti-Philosopher by Mitch Horowitz, on Vernon Howard’s life (Article)
• Vernon Howard (Wikipedia)
• New Life Foundation (Website)