Falling down an internet rabbit hole I ended up on this post, part of an anthology of submissions from the University of Sydney on the topic of ‘simple pleasures’. The author uses Mozart as an exemplar of having a childlike approach to life:
‘Growing up, my piano teacher would paraphrase 20th century pianist Artur Schnabel, saying “Mozart is too easy for children, but too difficult for adults”. Some people construe Schnabel’s statement to mean that children overlook the complexity and nuance of Mozart that only a true artist can appreciate. My teacher’s interpretation was, however, the opposite. She posited that adults in fact miss the true essence of Mozart’s compositions; that their art and genius lie in their uncluttered simplicity. Children, she claimed, access this intuitively. Adults get caught up in the performance, prestige, displays of virtuosity. Amongst this noise, they overshoot the heart of the music.’
This intuitive interpretation, says the author, is easy for children ‘who scoop up each everyday moment free from preconceptions and open to possibility‘, but harder for adults who ‘approach each day encumbered by expectation, who must capitalise on our time, who must have something to show for every minute of our days‘.
The post made me think about what Zen Buddhists would call ‘Shoshin‘ or the beginner’s mind, and how difficult this is for adults to achieve. As we progress through life the risk is that we lose not only innocence, but openness, curiosity, eagerness for new experiences. The danger is that we become subject to preconceptions and expectations, and closed-minded towards new ideas or ways of looking at the world. This can be amplified by the hubris that comes with being considered an expert in something. The Einstellung effect relates to where we become predisposed to tackle challenges in a certain way even when there may be a better way of solving the problem. Our expertise or experience holds us prisoner.
The practice of Shoshin is the of art of maintaining an enthusiasm to explore alongside an eagerness to learn and a freedom from preconceptions. We are approaching a problem as a beginner would. When Orson Welles was asked where he got the confidence from to try so many technical and creative leaps forward in the making of Citizen Kane , he replied that it was from complete ignorance about the norms of filmmaking. But it’s something more than just ignorance. It’s about an endless curiosity, a willingness to try new approaches, to always be open to new ideas, and even a freedom to be foolish and to muck about.
My favourite example of this comes from the scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov who won the Nobel prize for Physics in 2010 for isolating and characterising Graphene for the first time. It was called the ‘scientific discovery of the century’. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms which are tightly bound together in a hexagonal lattice. This ‘wonder material’ is the thinnest and strongest substance known to science (it’s about 200 times stronger than the strongest steel) and it has potentially limitless applications.
Yet Graphene was not created from a long-term, well-funded research programme. It came from mucking about in the lab. The two scientists held ‘Friday night experiments’, sessions where they could try out new experiments that weren’t core to the day job. In one of these sessions they were playing around with Scotch tape and graphite flakes. They realised that using the tape they could separate graphite fragments repeatedly, peeling off layers of carbon until they got down to the thinnest possible layer, just one atom thick, which created a new material with completely new properties.
When Geim and Novoselov won their Nobel prize, the committee praised the ‘playfulness’ with which the scientists had approached their work, and which was fundamental to the way that they worked together. It was this approach, the scientists believed, that kept their interest in the topic and enabled them to generate new ideas. And it was this playfulness, and beginner’s mindset, that led to arguably one of the biggest scientific advances of the century.
One of the most famous quotes on Shoshin comes from Shunryu Suzuki: ‘in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few’. Expertise is wonderfully useful but inflexible expertise is dangerous. Knowledge in any domain evolves but intellectual hubris and over-confidence can easily prevent us from advancing our own thinking. This Psyche article references a couple of telling examples and studies which demonstrate how difficult it can be for new thinking to emerge in a field.
One of the pioneers of plate tectonics German meteorologist Alfred Wegener first wrote about his theories of continental drift in his 1915 paper ‘The Origin of Continents and Oceans’. His theories were met with significant scepticism and even ridicule by other scientists. It was not until decades later in the 1960s that other scientific advances led to the idea of continental drift resurfacing. Wegener never lived to see his theory accepted.
Intellectual overconfidence can also lead to dogmatism. When, in this study, people were given the impression that they knew more than they actually did about a topic (through inflated scores on a political knowledge test for example), they became less willing to consider other political viewpoints. This is something (the researchers called it the ‘earned dogmatism effect’) that sadly feels all too common in today’s polarised world.
In an era of uncertainty and dogmatism, where technology is creating myriad new possibilities, and where innovation, new ideas and balanced thinking are more needed than ever it feels as though maintaining an open mind and intellectual humility has never been so essential. So how can we do that? The same Psyche article provides us with some good techniques and drawing from these, and adding a few of my own, here’s some thoughts on how we maintain Shoshin:
Promote open debate and healthy disagreement: as Richard Feynman once told us, it’s impossible to teach a concept to a child unless we truly understand it. Similarly, it’s harder to argue well for something unless we really grasp the nuances of our argument. The process of arguing a point of view with smart people brings us into sharp contact with how much we really know, or don’t know, about the topic. Teams which have the psychological safety to support healthy debate are more likely to change their opinions based on new information and less likely to fall foul of confirmation bias. In this environment diverse viewpoints are welcome and a high level of trust means that team members are more likely to contribute ideas, try things out, and disagree with each other in a healthy way.
Strong opinions, lightly held: Jeff Bezos has said that highly intelligent people who are right a lot change their minds often. As Jason Fried wrote:
‘He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved…They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.’
Conversely, people who get stuck in the details that support only one point of view are often wrong.
Actively challenge your own beliefs: it’s one thing being open to new ideas and thinking, and another to actively seek them out. The best people that I’ve worked with have been endlessly curious about the world, always seeking to learn, and have treated every belief or opinion as something that can be proven or disproven with new information. Their curiosity imbues them with a kind of restless desire to understand contexts, situations, concepts. They actively seek out the broadest range of inputs and stimuli to challenge or inspire their thinking. Carol Dweck’s concept of growth mindset distills a learning mind which instead of seeing intelligence as a fixed entity, regards it as something which can grow through continuous learning. With this mindset, we are far more open to learning from failure, setbacks and constructive feedback.
Optimism and imagination: in his Firestarters episode Kevin Kelly spoke about lifelong learning and the need to be positive about the future. He described how every major innovation had come from an optimist, but also the need to be more deliberate in how we think about change and new possibilities: ‘Optimism is less of a temperament and more of a choice…it’s almost a skill’. He talked about the need for imagination, and to let go of what we know so that we can not be bound by our assumptions or expectations. To me, these qualities are essential for a beginner’s mind. They are like the unbounded creativity that children often have before they’re taught to colour between the lines.
Be playful, and muck about: being taught to colour within the lines is just the start. The ‘seriousness’ of business often boxes us into unnatural patterns of behaviour which limit the whimsical and the mischievous. Playfulness helps us to break out of this but it also gives us permission to explore and try new things out. As we learned from the creation of Graphene, significant breakthroughs can happen when we approach challenges with a light heart and a curious mind.
See the wonder in things: never lose your awe and wonder at the amazing things in the world. Studies have shown that experiencing a sense of awe can open our minds to different opinions, and make it less likely that we will be seduced by definitive or closed viewpoints.
In his book Toward a Psychology of Being (the one with the hierarchy of needs) Abraham Maslow talked about a child-like quality that he had observed in people with high potential. He called this a ‘second naivete’, in reference to the willingness that these people had to revisit assumptions or knowledge in a particular domain of expertise. These people never lose (or somehow regain) the beginner’s mind that we are all born with. A sophisticated, intelligent mind combined with a curiosity, enthusiasm, spontaneity and openness that can foster new thinking and ideas. I’m a big believer that we can create positive habits for ourselves, and practicing a beginner’s mind feels like something we should all be doing every day.
I’ll leave the last words of this post to a thought taken from John Durrant’s notes on George Leonard’s book On Mastery:
‘The deathbed wish of Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was to be buried in his white belt. The belt of the beginner, despite being the world’s highest-ranking judoist. At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts.’
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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