From Success & Wisdom, our YouTube channel · about 8 weeks left in 2026
Chain check: how many X's this week? Reply with the number.
Last week we put "I'm too old" on trial. This week, its twin: "I can't learn new things anymore." You know the saying about old dogs and new tricks.
Here's what happened when scientists actually tested it.
The juggling study
In 2008, researchers in Germany took people with an average age of about 60 and gave them three months to learn to juggle three balls. Their brains were scanned before and after.
After the training, the scans showed more gray matter in a few areas: one that tracks things moving in front of your eyes, and the hippocampus, an area that matters for memory. The gains were small, but they were real.
The older group learned more slowly than young people, and fewer of them became really good at it. But their brains changed. And when they stopped practising, the gains began to fade. Which is the most useful part of the finding: use it, and it grows.
Hard things work best
In 2014, a team at the University of Texas at Dallas took 221 adults aged 60 to 90 and gave them about 15 hours a week of something new for three months. Some learned digital photography, quilting, or both: new skills that were hard at first. Others did easy, pleasant things: meeting friends, listening to music, doing puzzles at home.
The people learning demanding new skills, photography above all, improved their memory more than the people who socialised or did easy things at home.
Comfort doesn't build a brain. A real challenge does.
She got her first computer at 58
Masako Wakamiya worked at a bank in Japan for decades. She bought her first computer at 58, two years before she retired.
At 81 she learned to program, and in early 2017 she released her own iPhone game, Hinadan, based on a Japanese festival for girls. That June, when she was 82, Apple invited her to its big conference for app makers in California, where she was introduced as the oldest developer there.
Hill on learning
Napoleon Hill didn't mince his words:
"The person who stops studying merely because he has finished school is forever hopelessly doomed to mediocrity, no matter what may be his calling. The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge."
What to do this week
Pick one thing you've always wanted to learn and never did. A language, an instrument, drawing, a computer skill, a trade.
Give it 15 minutes a day for the next 7 days. It should feel a little hard. That's the part that works.
Put an X on your card for every day you do it.
A question to carry this week
What would you learn if nobody could laugh at you for starting late?
Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Talk soon,
P.S. Next week: a study of people over 70 found one belief that made them 44% more likely to fully recover from a serious disability. It had nothing to do with their bodies.