One of the findings from the interviews we conducted with adults from a wide range of backgrounds and ages and stages of life is that they have relatively little to say about the meaning and impact of formal education. Also, many participants find it difficult to articulate what they have learned from their life. Nonetheless, their life-stories provide abundant evidence that people have learned from their lives and that their learning has had an impact on the ways in which they cope with important life-events. If lifelong learning is more than the acquisition of qualifications through participation in formal education; if, in other words, an important aspect of lifelong learning has to do with the ways in which people learn from their lives and, through this, learn for their lives, then we must ask what opportunities people have to engage in such processes of 'biographical learning' and how such opportunities and the access to them are structured differently for different individuals at different ages and stages in their lives. In the paper we focus on the ways in which a life-history approach can help us to answer the question what it takes to learn from one's life.