Guwahati, June 29 -- I get asked a version of the same question pretty often. Usually from a parent, sometimes from someone in their sixties picking up a new hobby for the first time. "Aren't I too old for this" or "isn't my kid too young." And every time, my answer is basically the same: no, you're probably right on time.

Skill development doesn't have an age window. People act like it does, like there's some invisible deadline where learning something new stops being worthwhile. That's nonsense, honestly. I've watched a fourteen-year-old outshoot adults who'd been carrying a gun for twenty years, simply because the kid got proper instruction early and the adults never did.

Kids absorb instruction differently than adults do. They don't...