What TJ Maxx Can Teach Us About Deep Learning in Midlife

With a perspective on life that comes from time and experience, one of the things that I now truly believe is that luck and serendipity have had a far greater role in how my life has unfolded than I ever imagined when I was a sure-footed, logical 20-something.

The biggest decisions – who we love, where we live, the work we end up doing – often look planned only in hindsight. In reality, they were usually a matter of right time, right place, right person.

That’s not to say planning has no place. It does. But the older I get, the more convinced I am that life runs on two vibrations at once.

One gets things done.

One gets lucky.

A mode for efficiency, lists and predictability and a mode for wandering, recognising and discovering.

If you think about it, you already know these two modes. You’ve lived them. You’ve relied on both. All I’m doing here is giving language to something your intuition has understood for years.

And over the past 3 years in particular, as I’ve wrestled with how to help adults truly understand the French they’re learning – to make it lived and felt rather than memorised – I’ve realised these two modes explain far more about adult learning than any textbook ever has.

Let me put names to them.

Let’s call them Walmart mode and TJ Maxx mode.

The Two Modes We All Know

Walmart mode is the linear part of us.

You know what you want, you go in and get it. You tick things off. Clear, calm, efficient. There’s nothing wrong with that mode – we depend on it daily.

TJ Maxx mode, though, is entirely different.

It’s when you arrive with a feeling rather than a list. You’re not looking for something. You’re looking for something right. A jacket you didn’t know would suit you; a bowl that feels like it has history; a French hand cream you thought had disappeared in 1998.

This is the treasure-hunter mode. The mode that says, stay open – today might be the day something wonderful turns up. It’s the same mode that brings us most of our biggest wins in life.

Poker vs Chess: Why Discovery Feels Like Alchemy

A behavioural scientist once told me that life is played in two games: chess and poker.

Chess rewards logic, planning and step-by-step progress. Poker rewards possibility, instinct, risk and the willingness to be surprised.

Walmart mode is chess. TJ Maxx mode is poker.

And this is why serendipity matters.

A perfectly played game of chess earns you one point. But one lucky hand in poker can change the whole night.

Learning works the same way – a single unexpected discovery can propel you into another league, sometimes much further than weeks of steady effort.

The more I teach adults in midlife, the more convinced I become that most breakthroughs aren’t incremental. They arrive like a jackpot. You work steadily… steadily… steadily… and then suddenly everything clicks.

My Friend’s Chalet in the French Alps

Recently, a friend furnished her chalet in the French Alps almost entirely with finds from TJ Maxx. Not because she needed to save money – she didn’t – but because every object came with a story.

A set of glasses discovered by accident. The matching set found months later in a store two hundred miles away.

A throw that felt like it had travelled continents. She never once remarked on the price. What she loved – what she showed off – was the serendipity. The chase. The luck. The thrill of having recognised treasure when it appeared.

That chalet was beautiful, yes. But what made it sing was the emotional electricity of discovery. And that, I’ve found, is exactly what adults bring to their learning when they’re given permission to operate in both modes: the certainty of structure and the thrill of serendipity.

Why This Matters for Real Learning

Midlife learning doesn’t thrive under pressure or perfectionism. It thrives under permission.

Permission to take a straight line and permission to wander.

Permission to follow a plan and permission to chase a spark.

Permission to spend ten minutes on something tiny and forty minutes lost in something wonderful.

This is where the deepest understanding is built – the kind that stays, the kind you can use, the kind that becomes part of who you are.

And for me, this realisation was a complete breakthrough. It shifted everything about how I taught French. It solved a problem I had been circling for years. And – much like the best finds in TJ Maxx – it arrived in the most unexpected way.

The Gold Find I Didn’t Expect

When I finally accepted that adults learn best when they have both order and serendipity, something clicked.

I stopped thinking in terms of lessons and tasks and started thinking in terms of places. Places you can move through; places where structure lives alongside chance.

So I built something surprising – not a syllabus, not an app menu, but a map.

A simple, elegant map of a virtual, fictional French town that shows you how and what you can learn but also leaves space for wandering and discovery.

I didn’t plan it as a big idea. But I am so pleased to see my students react exactly the way I do when I turn a corner in TJ Maxx and spot something perfect I didn’t know I was looking for.

That sharp, delighted, “Oh! …this.”

And that was the moment I realised: sometimes the thing that unlocks real fluency is the thing you never would have asked for because you didn’t know it existed.

Just like the treasures hiding at the back of the store.

Closing Thoughts

So, here’s what I’d love you to take from all this: learning in midlife is not about grinding through a plan. It’s about giving yourself permission to move in both modes.

The steady mode.

And the serendipity mode.

Chess and poker.

Walmart and TJ Maxx.

I believe real understanding – the kind that lasts, the kind that surprises you, the kind that lets you express yourself with ease and pleasure – isn’t a straight line.

It’s a collection of treasures you found because you were curious enough to look.

In midlife, we recognise ourselves most clearly in the things we choose, not the things we’re told. And that, I think, is the magic of this chapter of life. We finally understand that wandering doesn’t take us off the path.

Often, it is the path.

And if all of this has stirred something in you – a curiosity to see how these two modes might reshape your own learning – you’re warmly invited to come and have a wander around The French Room.

But before you go, let me leave you with

A Question:

What treasure in your life did you only discover because you wandered?