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" Everything must be for something. I tell someone I'm going on an eighty-mile bike ride, and they ask, "What are you training for?" I want to answer, "I don't know... life?" "What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," write the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience."
But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?
The idea of undertaking new pursuits, ones that you may never be very good at, seems perverse in this age of single-minded peak performance. "
― Tom Vanderbilt , Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning