{"id":2014,"date":"2016-06-02T13:30:07","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T13:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marvel7077.wpengine.com\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2018-06-16T09:48:35","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T08:48:35","slug":"beginners-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marvelapp.com\/blog\/beginners-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginner’s mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are all naturally narrow-minded. The moment we\u2019re born into this world, we are moulded by external influences: society, our friends and family, the media, our work. All of these influences create an identity for us, a lens through which we see the world. As Anais Nin once said: \"we don\u2019t see things as they are, we see things are we are.\" To go beyond our lens of the world requires strength of the imagination, a quieting of the ego, and a cultivation of the beginner's mind.<\/p>\n

Beginner\u2019s mind, which is also known as Shoshin<\/em>, is a Buddhist concept popularised by Shunryu Suzuki, a monk and teacher who helped to bring the teachings of Zen to the United States. Taken from his book of meditations, Zen Mind, Beginner\u2019s Mind<\/em>, the concept teaches us to view ourselves as works in progress. We should never assume that we know everything; instead we should constantly be cultivating and\/or maintaining intellectual curiosity.<\/p>\n

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\"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.\"\n<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

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Beginner\u2019s mind is known by other terms too: open-mindedness, design-thinking, divergent thinking<\/a>, mindfulness. Carol Dweck calls it the \u2018growth mindset<\/a>\u2019, Orson Welles calls it \u201cthe gift of ignorance<\/a>\u201d. In regard to his film Citizen Kane, Welles said: <\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know what you couldn\u2019t do. I didn\u2019t deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, \u2018Why not?\u2019 There is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything, you know.\u201d<\/span><\/section>\n

Some people don\u2019t do well with not knowing. What beginner's mind can teach us is how to cultivate an attitude that embraces uncertainty and an eagerness to learn. Slowly, we learn to be OK with not knowing yet at the same time excited to know. This way of looking at the world helps us to be less attached to our ingrained beliefs, to recognise them as just a small view of the world, so that we are less prejudiced and more welcoming when presented with an unfamiliar situation.<\/p>\n

Fairly recently, Fortune Magazine<\/a> interviewed Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, and one of the main takeaways is that he\u2019s always eager to learn new skills. \u201cTo be a leader of any kind\u201d says Bezos, \u201cyou have to be interested in self-improvement and growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bezos is known for having projects completely unrelated to Amazon. He owns The Washington Post, which he hopes will become more than just a local newspaper; and set up Blue Origin<\/a>, an aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company that will enable human access to space. Bezos shows that our background does not need to set the path for our future. As long as there\u2019s interest, there\u2019s moving forward. For him, it\u2019s mandatory to maintain a beginner\u2019s mind, not just for our creativity, but because the fast-changing world demands it: <\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe best inventors have a high level of expertise in a particular arena, and they simultaneously maintain a beginners\u2019 mind. And that\u2019s hard to do. But that\u2019s what you have to do if you want to invent and pioneer. The world is so complex and deeply rich with prior invention that it\u2019s very unlikely that as a naive beginner you\u2019re going to invent anything of use. So you have to be an expert in the state of the art and then somehow let that expertness not make you jaded.\u201d<\/span><\/section>\n

Beginner\u2019s mind helps us to understand that there is more than one way of doing something, and that ours is not necessarily the best way. We have a tendency to repeat behaviour because we are resistant to change. The routines by which we live our lives becomes almost mechanical. When we set ourselves to work, we turn to the familiar: the same tools, the same space, the same research sources, because they've not let us down before. There\u2019s a saying that \u2018if it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it,\u2019 which appears like sound advice, but has a defeatist undertone to it. Truth is, things can always be better; there's always an alternative. That's what innovation is all about: making tweaks on existing products to improve the way people live. <\/p>\n

Those who insist on making things better are those who are not satisfied with what they know. Angus Woodman of Crew has a great article on why they only hire noobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAre you an expert in something? Great, do some of that, but also do things that you don\u2019t understand. We believe that keeping one foot over the \u2018edge\u2019 at all times keeps us sharp.\u201d<\/span><\/section>\n

Noobs are naive. They break rules. Why? Because they don\u2019t know any \u2018better\u2019. College dropouts, for example, have the advantage of not being constrained or indoctrinated by a traditional education. They go and break all rules because they\u2019ve not been taught otherwise. Of course, that\u2019s not to say all college dropouts and all noobs go on to be success stories. The more important factors here are attitude and a hunger to learn. Not knowing isn\u2019t the thing we should be worried about - since anything can be learned if given the time - but a lack of motivation. Two people can see the same thing and have different ways of dealing with them. A noob would keep going and going and spend more time considering different outcomes. An expert would stick to their bubble, do what they know, and generally stop there. <\/p>\n

Our lives consist of bubbles that anchor us, from our friends and family, to society. We work in industries that are bubbles and when we enter a workplace, we are shaped by its culture and values. Yet the danger is that those with similar roles end up grouping together, limiting the inflow and outflow of knowledge within those respective groups. Marketers will go on about KPI's and other acronyms no-one else gets, designers conflict over function and aesthetic, writers express their annoyance over that misplaced semi-colon, developers wished they didn't have to tackle bugs all the time. How the workplace is set up can exacerbate such grouping and self-referential conversations. <\/p>\n

Office-cubicles are where ideas go to die. They\u2019re miserable, soulless, and they don\u2019t help us do better work. Thankfully, more and more companies are embracing open-space offices because they understand the importance of looking outward for growth. People are dipping into each other\u2019s disciplines, expanding their world view and learning from each other. Within these organisations, teams are deeply multidisciplinary, so people are less likely to have the same ideas because they\u2019re not inward-facing. Pixar\u2019s original workplace<\/a> separated scientists, animators and everybody else into three respective buildings, until Steve Jobs came and helped redesign it. Jobs saw that these barriers stopped everyone from sharing ideas and solutions. He understood that space and roles don't have to be so defined, that borders are both transitory and arbitrary. Jobs envisioned a big atrium for Pixar as a hub in which everyone would go and talk to each other more in order to get outside of their own heads. When we intersect fields, we see new angles to a current problem. <\/p>\n