I'm currently a student. I'm in my final year of a business degree, and I'm actually just about to start my dissertation, which is a bit daunting, but I'm looking forward to picking a topic I really care about.

I try to stay active, so I go running two or three times a week, but if I'm honest, most evenings I end up reading. I've been getting into crime fiction lately, which isn't something I expected to enjoy as much as I do.

It's improved a lot, actually. When I was younger there wasn't much to do, but over the past few years a lot of new cafes and creative spaces have opened up, so there's a much better social scene now than there used to be.

I'd like to talk about learning to drive, which is something I found genuinely difficult when I first started, even though almost everyone around me made it look easy.

I began taking lessons when I was seventeen, once a week with a driving instructor, and I also practised occasionally with my dad on quieter roads at weekends. Looking back, I think having two very different teaching styles actually confused me at first rather than helping.

The main difficulty was coordination, honestly. I could understand the theory perfectly well, when to change gear, when to check my mirrors, but doing all of it at once, especially at junctions, felt completely overwhelming in the first few weeks. I remember stalling the car so many times at one particular roundabout that I started dreading driving past it.

What eventually helped was slowing everything down and focusing on one thing at a time rather than trying to do everything perfectly straight away. My instructor also gave me a really useful piece of advice, to treat each mistake as information rather than failure, and that completely changed my attitude.

Once I finally passed my test, after failing it once, I felt an enormous sense of relief, but also genuine pride, because it was probably the first time I'd stuck with something that difficult without giving up. Even now, a few years later, I still remember that feeling whenever I get in the car.

I think it largely comes down to fear of failure, if I'm honest. As adults, we're used to being reasonably competent at things, so being a complete beginner again can feel quite uncomfortable, almost embarrassing, in a way it didn't when we were children. There's also the practical issue of time, adults often have far less free time to dedicate to deliberate practice than children or students do.

I'd say it's more about balance than choosing one over the other. Academic subjects teach you how to think critically, which is valuable in almost any career, but I do think practical skills, budgeting, basic cooking, even public speaking, are often neglected, and a lot of people end up having to learn them the hard way as adults instead.

I imagine it will become far more personalised, largely because of technology. We're already seeing apps that adapt to how quickly someone is progressing, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach a traditional classroom has to take. That said, I don't think in-person instruction will disappear entirely, particularly for skills that involve physical coordination, where feedback in real time is genuinely hard to replace.