I’m all for trying new things in an attempt to improve my skills. However, biological imprinting of baby ducks (and humans for that matter) is actually a physical process of building neural pathways in the brain which provide the infrastructure to accomplish the learned tasks. This is the reason you can’t teach an animal that has imprinted on a human to be like it’s wild brethren. It’s also one of the reasons languages are easier for young people to learn and harder for adults. Adults form those same hardwired infrastructures for complex repetitive tasks (although much more slowly). I think this biological factor frequently outweighs intellect in our decisions to try new things. In many situations it’s probably a good thing though. It’s our brain instinctually telling us that we’re going to suck or that we are going to have to expend too much effort to learn something new that strays significantly from our imprinting because we don’t have the right hardware. My brain tells me that I’m going to suck at things a lot.