Tell Everyone: What Swimming Taught a Researcher

Fuel Your Curiosity NewslettersGuest Posts
Written By michele ronsen

Editor's note:

This is the first guest post in Fuel Your Curiosity (FYC).

I met Janani Venkataraman four years ago, when she was in Australia and participated in Ask Like A Pro. We met in person at the May 2026 Learners conference in San Francisco. She mentioned, almost in passing, that learning to swim as an adult had fundamentally changed her. I encouraged her to write about it.

She did. What she wrote is the best essay on researcher identity, adult beginners, and where AI fits into the insights industry I've read this year.

Janani is Director of Research and Insights at Bill.com. She has spent her career doing the work most of us do: gathering evidence, sitting with complexity, turning what she notices into something a team can act on. In this piece, she turns those instincts on herself. What comes out is not a personal essay wearing a research costume. It is research, done well, with a body of one.

FYC will run original guest posts occasionally, when someone in the community writes something I truly want you to read. This is that.

Over to Janani.

- Michele

A Coastal Girl Who Didn't Learn to Swim Until She Had Three Kids of Her Own

What learning to swim as an adult taught me about being a researcher — and why your most human skill is the one AI will never touch

By Janani Venkataraman

The Moment My Body Knew Before My Mind Did

January 2025. A Friday evening. I push off the wall and begin my freestyle toward the far end of a 25-yard pool. I reach it. And without pausing, without thinking, without looking to my coach for permission — I turn and keep going.

My first 50 yards. Not clean, not perfect, but mine. And it was my body, not my mind, that decided.

Four months earlier, I had walked to that pool for the first time not as a parent dropping off a child, but as a learner. An adult beginner. A woman who grew up in a coastal city and never learned to swim.

This is a story about water. But it is also a story about research — about the skills we spend years applying to other people's problems and forget to apply to ourselves. And about the one thing no AI, however powerful, will ever be able to do.

A Coastal Girl Who Never Learned to Swim

I was born and raised in Madras — now Chennai — on the edge of the Bay of Bengal. Marina Beach stretches for miles. Water was the backdrop of my entire childhood.

And yet I never learned to swim.

My mother has always had a deep fear of water — not of water itself, but of being swept away by it, of losing control to something vast and indifferent. She kept to dry land, and without anyone to take us to a pool, my brother and I simply never went.

A researcher would call this my primary research context: a household where water carried fear, where the behavior I needed to model was absent. The environment shapes the outcome before the individual ever makes a choice.

The Failed Pilot Study: Sydney, 2009

In 2009, I got married and moved to Sydney. My husband Aswin encouraged me to try swimming. I caught the train from Lidcombe, got off at Croydon, and walked to a pool with no idea what I was walking into.

It was the first time in my life I had stepped into water with any intention of learning. My body resisted. My mind resisted harder.

I took eight classes and dropped out. I told myself I didn't like it, didn't need it.

In research terms, this was a failed pilot. The methodology was wrong, the conditions were wrong, the participant — me — was unprepared. No mental models. No trusted guide. No shared context between coach and learner. I had recruited myself poorly into a study I hadn't designed.

A good researcher doesn't bin a failed pilot; they learn from it and redesign. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I put the experience in a drawer for fourteen years.

But here is the thing about pilots, even failed ones: the data doesn't disappear. It waits.

The Fieldwork I Didn't Know I Was Doing

Fast forward to 2023. After more than a decade in Australia, we moved to the United States with our two boys and a third on the way.

In January 2024, my eldest wanted to rejoin swimming. I drove him to a nearby team, and a youngish man by the pool stepped forward and gave him a swim test — calm, observational, precise. A researcher would recognize what Coach Noah was doing: running a screener. Eight months away from the water had taken a toll, he told us. One-on-one sessions before the team. I enrolled my son on the spot.

I had felt that quality once before. Years earlier in Sydney, my four-year-old screamed through a pool lesson. I was seconds from pulling him out when a senior coach swam across the lanes, gathered him in her arms, and carried him to the deep end.

In thirty seconds, he stopped screaming.

Coach Janelle swam back with him at the end of class and said she would take him from the next session. Her authority was so convincing I would have shown up at one in the morning if she had asked. She turned his terror into love.

What Coach Janelle and Coach Noah share is what the best senior researchers have: the ability to read a situation instantly and act without hesitation. They don't perform expertise. They exercise it. This is what ten thousand hours looks like once technique has dissolved into instinct.

For years I sat on the bench watching them work — watching my sons discover joy in the water, watching fear turn into confidence turn into mastery. In Jared Spool's terms, I was accumulating exposure hours: direct, unfiltered proximity to an experience I had never had. I was, without knowing it, doing fieldwork. A researcher in the stands, studying a world she hadn't yet entered.

The Research Question I Had Never Thought to Ask

September 2024. Both boys were thriving. I was telling Aswin we should enroll our youngest — not yet one year old — as soon as possible.

He asked me why.

I said: because I didn't learn as a child.

He looked at me, matter-of-factly: "So why don't you learn now?"

I had been so focused on closing the gap for my children that I never turned that intention toward myself. I was the researcher who had spent years studying the phenomenon — gathering evidence, observing outcomes, building hypotheses — and never thought to make herself the subject.

The question stayed with me, the way you sit with a finding that reframes everything. Then an email arrived from Coach Noah: he was opening adult lesson slots. I hadn't known he taught adults. The trust we had built meant I didn't hesitate. I enrolled the same day. This is what shared context does: it collapses the distance between insight and action.

This Time, I Came With a Hypothesis

On a cold Friday evening that September, at 6:55 PM, I walked to the pool. Not as a parent. As a learner.

The difference from 2009 was immediate and total. I was not afraid. I came with mental models and a hypothesis, knowing what good conditions looked like because I had watched them produce results, repeatedly, over time. In 2009 I was a participant poorly recruited into a poorly designed study. In 2024 I was a researcher who had done her fieldwork, designed her own conditions, and chosen her guide based on observed evidence rather than hope.

That first class was not groundbreaking by any external measure. I was — to use the most honest word — floppy. But I did not feel the urge to quit. I felt the urge to come back.

The Debrief, the Synthesis, and the Activation

Something I did completely differently this time was talk about it. I told everyone who would listen. I watched technique videos obsessively. I attended my boys' swim meets not just as a parent but as a student of the sport. I changed my phone wallpaper to open water. Everywhere I looked, I was signaling to myself: this is who you are becoming.

In 2009 I had done none of this. Eight quiet classes. No debrief, no synthesis, no activation. The insight — that I could learn, that I wanted to — never left the session room. It stayed in the folder, unreported, inert.

Researchers know that insight without activation is just data on a drive. What separates a good project from a transformative one is when the insight moves — when it leaves the deck and enters the world, and someone acts differently because of what you found.

Telling people about my swimming was my activation strategy. It created accountability, hardened intention into commitment, and made the identity shift real by making it social and visible. Fridays and Saturdays with Coach Noah became non-negotiable. I added laps at my local YMCA on other days.

Everything I Know About Research, I Now See in the Water

The longer I swim, the more the two worlds mirror each other.

The quant and the qual. Swimming has its hard data — split times, stroke counts, yards per session. But it also has feel. A split time tells you you swam faster. Only you can feel whether you swam better. You need both, and you need to know which one is speaking.

The lab and the field. A controlled pool with lane ropes and a coach on deck is a laboratory: conditions managed, variables minimized, performance measurable. Before 2026 is out, I want to swim in the San Francisco Bay — open water, currents, cold, that same vast indifference my mother feared. That is fieldwork. The lab gives you precision; the field gives you truth. At some point, you have to leave the building.

The art and the science. You can break a stroke into its components — catch angle, hip rotation, kick tempo — and optimize each independently. But the grace of a great swimmer is what happens when the science is so deeply internalized it disappears and only the art remains. The best research presentations work the same way. The methodology is invisible. The insight is all you feel.

Research as a team sport. Swimming looks like the most solitary of disciplines: you, alone, in a lane, against the water. And yet I did not get there alone. Aswin asked the question that started everything. Coach Janelle built my son's love of water. Coach Noah earned my trust through my boys before he ever coached me. Even my mother's fear was data — a fear that kept generations of women in my family on dry land. Every time I push off the wall, I am not just studying that pattern. I am breaking it. The lone swimmer, like the lone researcher, is a myth. The support is just less visible.

What AI Can Do. What It Cannot.

We live in a moment of real anxiety about what AI will replace, and research and insights is not immune. The question sits in the background of every strategy meeting, every restructure, every quiet conversation about what this profession looks like in five years.

And what AI can do is genuinely remarkable. In swimming terms: it has read every technique manual ever written and analyzed every Olympic race ever filmed. It can calculate your optimal stroke rate, predict your fatigue curve, design your training program with more data than any coach could hold in their head.

But it cannot get in the water.

It cannot feel the specific resistance of water against this body, on this day, after this night's sleep, in this emotional state. The felt knowledge that lives in a body cannot be reproduced by a system with no body.

This maps directly to what we do. AI can process a transcript. It cannot feel a conversation shift, or sense the half-second of hesitation before an answer that changes everything. It cannot build the trust in a room that makes a participant say the true thing instead of the safe thing. And it cannot carry fifteen years of pattern recognition into an interview and know, three minutes in, that the stated problem is not the real problem.

And here is the nuance that matters: the answer is not to resist AI. The answer is to be precise about what job each layer does. My training taught me this. My sessions with Coach Noah are my measurement layer — consistent, rigorous, comparable over time. My YMCA swims and video analysis are my diagnostic layer, deployed when a split time stops improving. And I am the synthesis — the swimmer who reads across both and knows which is speaking. Research works as a system for the same reason: AI catches the signal at speed and scale, the tracker — your always-on study — measures it with rigor, the diagnostic layer explains the why, and the researcher turns all three into something stakeholders can act on. The researcher who understands that system — who knows what no layer can replace — is not under threat from AI. They are indispensable to it.

Felt knowledge cannot be built into a model. It cannot be approximated. It can only be lived.

Go Find Your Irreducibly Human Thing

It is July 2026 as I write this. I can freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke. I can swim hundreds of yards without stopping. But beyond any data point, my body is at its calmest in the water. A mind that runs constantly — synthesizing, questioning, connecting — is finally, briefly, still.

To my fellow researchers — this tribe of curious, rigorous, empathetic people navigating a genuinely uncertain moment — I want to say two things.

First: the skills you have built are more transferable than you know. The curiosity that makes you a great researcher — observing without judgment, sitting with complexity, asking the question underneath the question — works everywhere. You have applied it to other people's problems your entire career. Have you tried applying it to your own life? To the thing you told yourself you couldn't do, or didn't need, or put in a drawer years ago? Those instincts are yours. Use them.

Second: in a world asking hard questions about what humans are for, go find your irreducibly human thing. The thing that requires your body, your history, your fear, your presence. The thing no model can be trained on because it does not exist as data. Swimming is not the point. The point is whatever your water is — the thing that makes you a beginner again, humbles you, compels you, and builds a kind of knowing that cannot be synthesized or summarized or scaled.

Go find it. Show up for it on cold Friday evenings. Tell everyone. Activate the insight.

For me, it is the water. The bay is waiting.

The girl from the coastal city who never learned to swim is finally getting in the water. And this time, she is ready.

​Janani Venkataraman is a research and insights professional. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and three sons, and has a personal goal to swim in the San Francisco Bay before the end of 2026.​
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P.S. Janani's essay will do more for the researchers who most need it if it reaches them. If it moved you, please forward it. Together we can "tell everyone."

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michele ronsen
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