Dave was looking for guitar lessons.

A successful professional with his own company and three school-age children, he joked in our first phone conversation about having a midlife crisis and said that he wanted to do something to stimulate his mind. He had no musical experience whatsoever, besides a lot of listening and attending shows.

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My sister, a mother of three, dazzled the crowd in the school talent show, accompanying her daughters’ singing on cup percussion.

No one had known she possessed this skill, and their minds were blown. “You’re so talented!” they exclaimed.

She shrugged. “I spent a few hours learning it.”

My sister’s real accomplishment was to believe she could accomplish what she set out to do, and then to follow through by putting in the necessary time. Anyone could; not everyone does.

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I recently took up rowing, enjoying a few mornings out on the water in a friend’s Cornish pilot gig.

Boating comes with its own specialized vocabulary — and its own fancy knots.

Our coxswain, Susan, is a patient and encouraging teacher. She was showing me how to secure the oars after one of our outings.

The sequence was long: The rope went under here, over there, around this, through that, and so on.

I had a moment of panic. I didn’t think I could learn this on the fly. I would need time and lots of repetition, preferably by myself. After all, it took me something like 45 minutes to learn to do a simple slipknot.

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I was an okay math student in high school — on the accelerated track, but got a little lost somewhere in trigonometry.

If only I had known about the shower.

When I revisited algebra and geometry in adulthood, it was fun. It wasn’t for fun, since I had professional reasons for doing it, but it felt like a hobby. And I found myself treating a difficult problem or proof like a puzzle to solve instead of an unwanted chore.

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The body of collective human knowledge is impossibly vast and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

That doesn’t mean we don’t bother to learn stuff. But we have to freely acknowledge to kids that there is no possible way to know everything. Otherwise, we create the illusion that they are learning everything they need to know in school.

So how do we approach learning without getting overwhelmed?

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