Tell me about some challenge you faced which you thought was a little difficult.

The challenge I want to talk about is driving — an endeavor I began around 2 years ago and one which turned out to be a lot harder in ways I could not have prepared for than I thought it would.

I started learning in the city where I study—one of the most challenging environments, as many an Indian urban driver will concede, to master driving skills. The density and unpredictability of the traffic, coupled with informal conventions diverging radically from official rules, pedestrians, cyclists & auto-rickshaws making decisions on their own navigational logic, and just the mental pressure of using heavy machinery next to many other road users left taught to be wary in an already intense environment.

It was not so much the mechanical act of controlling the vehicle — more straightforward than I expected it to be — that made this challenge feel truly challenging, but rather the cognitive and psychological requirements of simultaneously maneuvering, situational awareness, anticipating traffic behavior and making decisions about where to go, all while under the duress of other impatient road users and in an environment filled with random urban traffic events. The first few lessons in particular took an enduring focus which I found truly exhausting like no other learning experience had prepared me to be ready for.

Emotionally, it was a bit tiring experience. I approached the process reasonably confident in my general learning ability; but I had not anticipated how early incompetence in a skill with real consequences for safety would affect my self-efficacy. All this physical tension, cognitive overload, and recognition that errors matter in this kind of learning situation beyond just academic failure produced a quality of anxiety I was surprised to find difficult to cope with during the early weeks.

I had to develop a way more authentically patient relationship with incremental improvement than I had previously practiced, which, looking back on it, I see an among the other biggest gifts from the experience beyond driving itself.