One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.
Ruth Reichl
The meaning of the quote
At 82, Jimmy Wilson had never touched a computer. Then he joined a study in Dallas that handed him a digital camera and sat him in front of Photoshop.
Researchers split more than 200 older adults into groups. Some spent 15 hours a week for 3 months learning digital photography or quilting. Others spent that time on familiar activities like puzzles, classical music and watching movies with friends. As NPR reported, only the people who learned a new skill improved their memory, and photography, the hardest skill, helped most. A year later, the gains were still there.
Ruth Reichl’s idea of staying young works the same way. Your body ages whatever you do, but a mind that keeps facing new problems can stay sharp for longer.
Being good at something lets your brain coast. Once a task feels familiar, it runs on autopilot and stops working hard.
The habit starts early. A student who’s good at science signs up for more science and skips the drama club, because being bad at something in front of friends feels awful. Repeat that for 40 years and you’re left with skills you mastered long ago and nothing new to push you.
The last words of the quote, to keep learning, turn one brave try into a habit. A single pottery class is fun, but signing up for the next term keeps your brain working.
Reichl admits that new challenges scare her, and she takes them on anyway. In an interview with delicious. magazine, she said:
“I don’t like doing things that scare me, but I feel like it’s the only way to live.”
Action steps
Reichl’s advice starts small, with one new skill and enough time to get better at it.
- Pick one skill you’d be bad at.
A language, a dance class, coding or baking bread from scratch. The volunteers in Dallas who took on the hardest skill gained the most, so choose something that makes you a little nervous. - Learn it with a teacher or a group.
A class gives you someone who corrects you and people who expect you back next week. Talent decides how fast you pick something up, but whether you keep showing up is a choice. - Give it 3 months.
The first weeks feel clumsy for everyone. The volunteers in the study practised for 3 months, so judge your progress after 3 months instead of 3 days. - When it gets easy, pick the next one.
Once a skill feels easy, your brain has stopped working hard on it, so find the next one you can’t do yet.
Jimmy Wilson picked up his first camera at 82. You can start this week.
About the author
When Ruth Reichl was 12, her job at family parties was guarding the food. Her mother, whom Reichl later nicknamed the Queen of Mold, served whatever was in the fridge, however old it was.
At the engagement party for Reichl’s half-brother, a casserole of spoiled leftovers sent 26 guests to the hospital, while young Ruth stood by the buffet steering people away from it. She tells the story in her memoir Tender at the Bone.
Learning to cook started as a way to protect herself and grew into a career. She cooked at a collectively owned restaurant in Berkeley in the 1970s, then became a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 1993, The New York Times.
Restaurants across the country pinned her photo up in their kitchens, so Reichl reviewed them in wigs and as made-up characters. Her best disguise, she says, was her own mother. She wrote about those years in Garlic and Sapphires.
In 1999, Condé Nast offered her the top job at Gourmet magazine. She said no at first, because she had never worked in management or edited anything but her own writing. In the end she took the job she didn’t know how to do and ran the magazine for 10 years.
On October 5, 2009, the company closed Gourmet without warning, and Reichl had to break the news to her staff. She covers that decade in Save Me the Plums.
She spent the next year cooking at home to recover, and those recipes became the cookbook My Kitchen Year.
In 2014, in her mid-60s, she tried something she had never done and published her first novel, Delicious! Fans assumed fiction would come easily after her memoirs, but she said she had to learn it from scratch. 10 years later came The Paris Novel.
On the podcast Wiser Than Me, Reichl told Julia Louis-Dreyfus she wrote that first novel mostly because she didn’t know how to do it. In the same episode, you can hear her explain the idea behind this quote in her own words.
Resources
- Julia Gets Wise with Ruth Reichl (Podcast)
- Learning a new skill works best to keep your brain sharp (Article)
- Ruth Reichl on the joys of Paris and reality of being a restaurant critic (Article)
- Tender at the Bone (Book)
- Save Me the Plums (Book)
- Better to know how to learn (Article)
- Ruth Reichl (Wikipedia)
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