Beginner's mind
What it truly means to have one
There’s a lot of Twitter advice out there on having beginner’s mind, but unfortunately, there’s little to explain the term properly.
Beginner’s mind is such a beautiful yet complex concept that rarely do people explore the full ramifications of it.
Ability to see freshly
This is perhaps a more common understanding of the term.
Here’s what usually happens.
You start out fresh in a domain. With experience, successes and failures, you develop expertise in a domain. Now you know all the nuances of the domain, so when someone comes with a new idea about the domain or a new way of doing this, you can already see where they might fail. This is, to be honest, not really your fault. A side-effect of experience and knowledge is often cynicism.
When you start deciding from your experience, you often neglect looking at the situation from first principles. Does the new idea/process warrant a completely independent study that, may be, proves its worth. And looking at not just the idea, but evaluating the entire ecosystem again to see if some complex variables have changed to make the new idea possible.
E.g. Metaverse is a new idea. Today, it may not make sense. But if the other parts of the ecosystem change a lot, e.g. Oculus gets sold a lot, people really start liking 3d avatars, 3d avatar creation becomes easy with AI, suddenly it starts making sense. This is of course, hard to predict when it’s happening.
It often may, but that study takes long. Figuring out things from first principles is much more time-taking vs relying on heuristics through experience. So you inadvertently gravitate towards the latter.
Willingness to start from zero
A broader application of the earlier concept is the willingness to start from scratch, not just in thinking, but even in your actions. This is rarely talked about as a beginner’s mind but I believe it is.
If you are a creator, of any kind, you would know that editing your drafts could take you in any direction. This is of course truer in writing - you start out with a draft, edit it, realize something that you would have missed in the past drafts and may get on a direction which is completely different than what you set out to do. At this juncture, a writer either takes a call to make a compromise and edit in a way the new versions don’t look drastically different from the earlier ones or has the courage to delete it all over and begin afresh.
The latter is an example of beginner’s mind. And you can see why it’s hard, because you delete all1 the aspects of the previous versions to start afresh. The stakes become way higher in situations more complex than writing.
Shifting careers completely requires beginner’s mind.
So does moving countries.
So does changing long relationships.
And a lot of other things.
This willingness is rare also because our notion of progress is often linear, we don’t subconsciously consider changing paths as progress. That’s why changing paths / starting things from 0 feels like failure often more than progress. This is more societal conditioning than truth though.
Starting from zero means you can go anywhere
If you are on a set path, the human tendency to seek for coherence2 makes you look for only paths in continuation of the path you are on. However, once you start at 0, you are at the center of an intellectual town square and can take any road you want.
This implies that beginner’s mind leads to more creativity.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
To sum it up, beginner’s mind comes from an intelligence and courage to see things differently, and then having the creativity to generate and pursue different paths from there. These factors are definitely not mutually exclusive, but which one do you think is the hardest?
Tangibly. There’s a lot of intangible wisdom gained from the experience but of course, you cant put a value on it
This is in line with our tendency to minimise effort. Low variance from base often an act of effort minimisation, in this case, it’s for thinking or understanding
if you are new to this publication, you should read Opportunism vs Conviction and Macro Goals .