Learning to ride at forty

On the Al Khan waterfront in Sharjah, early on a weekend morning, you can sometimes see a grown man learning to ride a bicycle.

He is easy to spot. Too much concentration, elbows locked, a friend jogging alongside with one hand on the seat. He wobbles, puts a foot down, laughs a little too loudly, and tries again. Teenagers glide past without looking.

Most adults would rather not be seen like this, which is exactly why most adults stop learning. Being a beginner at forty means admitting, in public, that you are bad at something a child can do. It is easier to say you were never interested.

But that discomfort is not a side effect of learning. It is the learning. You cannot get better at anything without first standing clearly in the place where you are not good at it, and feeling the gap between what you can do and what you could do. Someone who refuses to feel that gap has no reason to close it.

The same holds at work, where incompetence feels more expensive. The seller who has never filmed a product video, the founder who has never read her own numbers, the marketer who has only ever run one kind of campaign. Each of them can stay inside what they already do well forever. Plenty do.

The ones who move are the ones who go looking for the wobble. They pick the thing they are bad at, do it badly where people can see, and keep going.

And there is a quiet reward at the end that the always-confident never get. A few weeks later the man on the waterfront rides past the same spot without thinking about it, and he remembers, clearly, that not long ago he could not.