A toddler learning to walk is the most determined problem-solver you will ever meet. Researchers at NYU once put the numbers to it: in a single hour of free play, a child just learning to walk takes about 2,300 steps, travels the length of seven football fields, and falls seventeen times. Seventeen falls an hour. Over a hundred a day. And not once does anyone in the room — not the child, not the parents — treat a single fall as failure. We have a different word for all that falling. We call it learning to walk.
I keep coming back to that, because somewhere between the living-room floor and adulthood, the word quietly changes. The falls stop being data and start being embarrassment. We learn to want the answer without the stumbling, the result without the risk. And I think that trade — safety now, in exchange for a problem-solving muscle we never quite built — is one of the most expensive bargains a person can make. I want to argue the opposite: that the best time to take real risks and to wrestle with hard problems is absurdly early, because that is precisely when both are cheapest.
Scarcity is a strange teacher
The best problem-solvers I know were, at some point, short on resources. When you can't look up the answer — no manual, no expert down the hall, no budget to buy your way out — you are forced to build the thing that finds answers. You break it and put it back together. You try, watch it fail, guess again. The lack is the lesson: it hands you not knowledge but the calm, stubborn confidence that a problem in front of you is solvable if you simply stay with it.
That confidence has a name in India, where I grew up: jugaad — the art of the frugal fix, of solving with what you have rather than what you wish you had. It isn't a technique; it's a posture toward the world. And you tend to acquire it precisely where the answers don't come easy.
The mathematics of falling early
Here is the part that feels like a secret, though it's just arithmetic. Risk has two sides — what a mistake costs you, and how much room you have to recover from it. Both of those move with age, and they move in opposite directions.
When you are young you have almost nothing to lose and a whole life to make it back. A failed venture at twenty-two costs you some months and some pride. The same failure at fifty-two can cost a mortgage, a family's stability, a career's worth of standing. Meanwhile the thing you gain from an early failure — the lesson, the scar, the reflex — compounds for decades. Early risk is a bet where the downside is capped and small and the upside pays interest for the rest of your life.
Nassim Taleb built a whole philosophy on this shape and called it antifragility: some things don't merely survive disorder, they improve because of it. Your muscles get stronger only when you stress them; a bone heals denser at the break. The mistake we make is treating a young person like something fragile that must be shielded from stress, when they are the most antifragile thing in the room. Taleb's practical advice was a barbell: keep the vast majority of your life safe and boring, and put a small, bounded slice into wild, high-upside risk. Not reckless — asymmetric. You can only lose what you put in; you can win many times over. When you're young, that slice can be larger, because the safe base is your entire future and it's still fully intact.
What we are doing instead
We are running the experiment in reverse. Over the last few decades, childhood in much of the world has been steadily stripped of risk. Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist, has documented a long decline in children's free, unsupervised play — the kind with real stakes, real conflict, real chances to get hurt — and tracked it against a startling rise in childhood anxiety and depression over the same period. His argument is uncomfortable and, I think, correct: by removing the small risks, we removed the training ground where children learn they can handle things.
The Norwegian researcher Ellen Sandseter studied what she calls risky play — climbing too high, going too fast, playing near water or fire, roughhousing, wandering out of sight — and found it does something specific and protective. Facing a manageable fright, on your own terms, is how a child inoculates themselves against fear. Take away the height and you don't get a braver child; you get an adult who never learned the feeling of I was scared and I did it anyway. We think we're removing danger. We're removing the antidote.
The oldest schools knew this
What strikes me is how many cultures, with no contact between them, arrived at the same conclusion: you build capable people by handing the young real problems and letting them struggle.
The Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of open Pacific with no instruments — reading stars, swells, the flight of birds, the colour of the water. When that knowledge was nearly lost, a navigator named Mau Piailug sailed the Hōkūleʻa from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 to prove it could still be done, and to teach it again. Wayfinding isn't a fact you memorise; it's a way of solving that lives in the body, earned only by going out on the water and being wrong until you're right.
The Japanese compress the whole idea into a proverb — nana korobi ya oki, "fall seven times, rise eight" — and into the figure of the shokunin, the craftsman whose mastery is nothing but ten thousand corrected mistakes. The Stoics went further and manufactured hardship on purpose: Seneca advised setting aside days to eat the plainest food and wear the roughest cloak, so you could look at your worst fear and say, is this the thing I was so afraid of? Marcus Aurelius left himself the line I return to most — "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
In the Indian tradition there is Nachiketa, a boy in the Katha Upanishad who walks straight up to Death to demand real knowledge and refuses every comfortable bribe offered to send him home. West Africa keeps sankofa — go back and fetch what you learned from the fall. The Greeks prized mētis, the cunning, improvisational intelligence of Odysseus, "the man of many turns," who wins not by strength but by out-thinking the problem in front of him. Different centuries, different gods, one curriculum: give them something hard, let them fail at it safely, and do it while they're young.
Struggle is the mechanism, not the obstacle
None of this is nostalgia for suffering. The point is mechanical. We now have good evidence that the difficulty itself is where durable ability comes from. The psychologist Robert Bjork coined the phrase desirable difficulties — learning that feels harder and slower in the moment (struggling to recall, being tested before you feel ready, mixing problems up) produces knowledge that lasts far longer than the smooth, easy kind. Anders Ericsson's work on expertise says the same from another angle: what separates the great from the good is not hours logged but hours spent at the ragged edge of your ability, failing and adjusting. The struggle is not the tax you pay to learn. The struggle is the learning.
Which is why the frictionless answer worries me, even in the field I love. I build with AI every day, and it is astonishing — it will hand you a working solution before you've finished asking. But a solution handed over is not a muscle earned. If a young person can get the answer to everything and the understanding of nothing, we will have optimised away the very difficulty that made them capable. The tool is not the danger. Skipping the struggle is.
Intelligent risk, not recklessness
Let me be precise, because "take risks" is easy to hear as "be reckless," and I mean almost the opposite. A gamble and an experiment can look identical from the outside; they are not the same thing. An intelligent risk has three properties: the downside is bounded — you can name the worst case and survive it; you have skin in the game — something real is on the line, or you'll learn nothing; and it closes a loop — you'll get honest feedback you can actually act on. James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of his vacuum, and each failed one taught him exactly what to change next; that's not stubbornness, that's 5,126 tight little loops. The Wright brothers didn't leap off a cliff and hope — they built a wind tunnel, tested some two hundred wing shapes, and made hundreds of low, cheap, survivable glides before they ever risked an engine. Fall early, yes. But fall on purpose, close to the ground, where the lesson is expensive enough to matter and cheap enough to repeat.
What I want to carry, and to give
I try to keep taking these bets on myself. I went back for a master's in AI in my thirties, well past the age when that felt sensible, because the discomfort of being a beginner again was the point. I learned to ski at forty and fell down a mountain more times than I'd like to admit. Every time I start a company or a project, I'm placing another small, bounded bet where the worst case is survivable and the upside compounds. I'm not fearless. I've just done the arithmetic, and I know the falls will never again be as cheap as they are today.
And when I think about my son, this is the inheritance I actually care about handing him. Not a padded world with the risks removed — that's a gift that quietly takes something away. I'd rather give him the dignity of hard problems, the freedom to climb a little too high, and a father who claps at the falls the way we clapped when he was learning to walk. Seventeen falls an hour. We had it right the first time.
Learn to fall early. It is the only skill that makes all the others possible — and it never gets cheaper than it is right now.