‘It’s wonderful, it makes you laugh a lot’: The benefits of being an absolute beginner

4 days ago 3

Gus Balbontin says he was “born with FOMO”. After a successful career as an executive director at Lonely Planet, he decided to quit his job and seek out the new and exciting.

“We push novelty away from our lives the older we get. We stop doing new things. We stop doing new things for lots of reasons: because we’re comfortable; we’re scared of failing; we’ve got more to lose; our knees hurt; we claim we have no time,” says Balbontin.

Gus Balbontin says that as we get older, it’s harder to remain flexible to change.

“We put all these excuses, and bit, by bit, by bit, our lives become more repetitive. When you don’t feed your brain novelty, your brain loses its tolerance to change.”

Balbontin is passionate about seeking out the new to maintain a healthy brain and positive outlook. Now on his seventh round of a personal challenge to try something new every year, he has tackled activities as varied as competitive pinball, drumming, underwater photography, and astrophysics. This year he’s taking on glassblowing.

“I started Googling it and one thing led to another … this glassblowing studio popped up in my search that was around the corner from my house and I thought ‘s--t, this is meant to be, let’s go’,” Balbontin says.

The 46-year-old, who grew up in remote Argentinian Patagonia, has been practicing his new hobby at Melbourne’s Studio Dokola under the tutelage of owner Billy Crellin. He says his passion for trying new things has challenged his way of thinking, and led to a career in keynote speaking.

“You have more fun,” he says. “You laugh more because you will find yourself in situations where all you can do is laugh because you feel very stupid. When you are a little kid you always feel stupid because that’s part of life, you’re learning. As you get older you become very against feeling stupid, but it’s wonderful, it makes you laugh a lot.”

In Sydney, 78-year-old Maria Nichles is also embracing the joy of being a beginner. After a long career in education, the former teacher has been taking a beginners’ landscape painting course at Darlinghurst’s National Art School.

Maria Nichles says that learning a new skill means she’s “constantly thinking”.

Nichles says she had always wanted to do an art course, but it took a push from her daughter to get her there. “She said ‘mum you’ve been talking about it on and off for a while, you’re not working any more, it’s a good idea for you to start thinking about something else’. I think she was staving off my possible dementia,” Nichles jokes.

The new painter describes herself as a “total amateur”, but says learning something new is stretching her abilities and encouraging her to be “constantly thinking”. It is also teaching her to laugh at her own mistakes.

“I’ll sit there, and I’ll paint something [incorrectly], and I’ll get the giggles. Everybody around me is looking very serious, and I’m going ‘look what I’ve done!’ That’s all part of it, part of the fun of it,” she says.

Dr Susanne Roehr, an associate professor at UNSW’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing says that trying new things is “absolutely beneficial for brain health” at all stages of life, and “comes with other benefits such as boosting confidence, meeting new people, and building new relationships.”

“Everything that stimulates novelty is good because, in a simple way, it encourages your brain to build new connections. Just like building muscles. It fosters neuroplasticity,” says Roehr.

“People often have a barrier in their head of ‘I’m too old to do this or that’. This barrier needs to be removed. People shouldn’t feel too old to take up a new hobby or try something new … there is absolutely space for building cognitive capacity throughout the life course,” says Roehr.

Leisure activities that are cognitively stimulating like learning a language or instrument, travelling to a new place, or reading were among Roehr’s list of useful habits for brain health.

“If [activities] are super easy then it entails that it has been learned. Think about driving a car, you don’t pay much attention to driving a car, but if you learn something new, then your brain really has to figure out how to navigate a new task, or a new exercise. This is where growth is happening,” says Roehr.

Michael Martis, 32, recently moved from Melbourne to Sydney for work, and found the pressures of his “very intense” job were affecting his life. To combat this, and introduce novelty into his routine, he joined a beginners’ ballet class at the Sydney Dance Company, despite never having danced before.

Software engineer Michael Martis, 32, says taking up ballet for the first time has enriched his life.

“I wanted to take an explicit step to add something to my life that would broaden my horizons. That would add some interesting texture to my life outside of work,” says Martis, who says he enjoys the creative, social and physical sides of ballet.

“As we become adults maybe we naturally avoid new things, or maybe we have learned to pursue things we are skilled at. I don’t think we have as much experience of starting something from the beginning and being bad at it for an extended period of time,” says Martis.

“I was thinking about work a lot of the time, even when I wasn’t working. Having this interesting creative, constructive thing that I would think about … [made] my life richer, and broadened the things I was thinking and concerning myself with,” says Martis who is now considering taking a cooking class.

“It feels like you’re stretching yourself in a different way. It feels healthy.”

For those still needing a push to try something new, Maria Nichles has some advice.

“It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve made a fool of yourself, or you’re not achieving what you wanted to achieve. You will achieve something. Whether it be a skill, or speaking to other people, or being in a new environment. Just do it.”

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