A beginner’s mindset is essential in your career, hobbies, relationships, and developing innovation. Shunryu Suzuki, the Buddist monk who established Zen Buddism in the United States had this to say about the benefits of a beginner’s mindset:
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Shunryu Suzuki
As you develop skills in your disciplines, it is easy to become attached to your knowledge. People begin to view you as the expert, and you can start to see yourself that way as well. They should look to you, you’ve dedicated time and effort to learning this skill, discipline, or domain. People should be coming to you for your insight, but expertise can also lead to blind spots.
Overcoming these blindspots is where cultivating a beginner’s mindset is crucial. A beginner’s mindset is one where expectations and preconceived ideas about something are abandoned to instead favor seeing things with an open mind and fresh eyes. Just like a beginner. It entails having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and a lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level.
The Drawbacks of Expertise
Sydney Finkelstein studies business and is a coach to top executives. He works with experts daily. These are people who have spent decades being high performers, through cultivating existing skills while simultaneously building new skills and relationships.
Yet, that sought after expertise can lead them to failures that seem glaring to even a novice. These failures are because expertise in an area can lead:
- Overconfidence
- Failure to see innovative new ideas that change the status quo.
To illustrate, Motorola was a cellphone giant in the early 2000s. When Apple released the first iPhone, Motorola called it, “the death of apple”. No mobile device would sell without a physical QWERTY keyboard. The Motorola experts believed their practices that had revolutionized the cellphone industry in the 1990s would preserve them forever. Thinking they had nothing to fear from a competitor led to them being over-confident and complacent when it came to advancing technology in their industry.
Check Your Beginner’s Mindset
It isn’t just companies that can become trapped in an expertise trap. Think about your career or hobbies. Where have you become over-confident and unaware of changes? To check yourself, ask yourself some of the below questions:
- Do you answer questions with, “I’ve always done it that way”
- Where do you focus? On the risk, your options pose rather than on the opportunities they present?
- Do you use the same strategies and tactics to address new challenges?
- Do you continue to try to make old solutions even more precise rather than pioneering new ones?
If so, that is okay! It is normal to rely on your expertise to carry you through new situations, that is why developing expertise in the first place is so crucial. Developing expertise makes it easier to address new challenges with time-tested solutions.
You just need to check yourself before tackling a new problem to make sure you aren’t overly relying on expertise to avoid doing the hard work of seeing the problem with a pair of fresh eyes.
Why Cultivate a Beginner’s Mindset?
Learning a beginner’s mindset is like any skill. With time and dedication, it can be learned. Luckily, we’ve all been a beginner at some point in our lives, and we can continue to be beginners. Having a beginner’s mindset means taking this mindset of being a novice and applying it to an existing discipline where we already have some expertise.
Doing so can seem backward at first, but it provides a litany of benefits.
1. It opens you up to new ideas and possibilities
When there is established expertise, it can be easy to dismiss new ideas. Rejecting ideas is seen at work all the time. Think of any time at a meeting where a novel idea has been pitched, and the expert says, “no, that hasn’t worked in the past” and the conversation ends there.
Having a beginner mindset eliminates this tendency, and promotes questions like, “that hasn’t worked in the past, but how could we make it work now?”
2. Beginner’s Mindset allows for easier collaboration and faster learning
In meetings with experts, where pride and prior knowledge are on the line, the sharing of information can be stagnant. Everyone wants to protect their hard-earned knowledge and corresponding ego.
Instead, shift meetings to let people focus on having a beginner’s mindset. Moving to a beginner’s mindset makes people willing to ask naive questions, and share their expertise that can lead to new knowledge gain for everyone involved, with no egos getting bruised along the way.
3. Failure is feedback, not a reason to stop
Having an expert label can make failing seem detrimental. It can hurt your image of yourself and can make working on new ideas a painful experience. Instead, with a beginner’s mindset, new ideas are seen as experiments where failure is a crucial part of the learning and skill development process.
Da Vinci himself, that master of innovation, failed countless times. Learn how you can practice his best innovation practices with this post here!
4. Enhances relationships
You can even become an expert in relationships with the people in your life. We tend to hold people to preconceived notions of who we think they are. Jon Kabat, a Ph.D. Professor specializing in stress reduction recommends using the beginner mindset to see people as they are in the present moment. Look at your partner, friend, child, or co-worker as who they are today, not as who you knew them as two years ago. It can be an eye-opening experience to see how much people have developed and allows us to appreciate people for who they are instead of who we think them to be.
5. Foster’s innovation and creativity
Having a beginner’s mindset requires thinking of each problem as a new challenge where there are no assumptions or expectations. Starting from the ground-up requires you to bring in domain experience from other areas of your life to solve the problem. This cross-discipline approach leads to innovative ideas that might not have happened before. The easy example to point to is Steve Job’s taking a calligraphy class in college, only later to use that to create the text options we continue to enjoy on computers today. Being a beginner forces you to steal from other areas you are already familiar with.
How to Cultivate a Beginner’s Mindset
Cultivating a beginner’s mindset can be done in a handful of ways.
1. Mix it Up
Saba Ghole is the Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of NuVu Studio, an innovation school focusing on middle and high school students. She says that to encourage innovative thinking, she mixes it up with people and themes. Creative tension rises when pairing experts with novices. The experts contain decades of experience, and the novices might never have heard of the discipline before, and now they have to work together to create something they didn’t even know existed. It forces the experts to question their assumptions and allows novices to brainstorm the feasibility of ideas with the people who are well-versed in that area. The collaboration leads to quickly being able to tinker and test new ideas that have many potential solutions.
To apply at work, mix up skill levels, and disciplines. Bring in someone who normally wouldn’t be involved in a meeting. Bring in a graphic designer to a meeting with coders making a new application. The graphic designer may not know how to code, but they know design and organization. They could provide insight on how to lay-out the design and design principles that could be applied to coding. Novel ideas come from mixing expertise up.
2. Check egos at the door
Pride can become wrapped up in expertise. Understandably so, some people spend their entire careers becoming an expert in one area, and when that knowledge is challenged in a non-constructive way, egos are bruised. Instead, check the egos at the door. All that matters is brainstorming and coming up with a solution. Depending on the complexity, this requires exploring many avenues, some of which trample on existing conventional knowledge. By checking egos, those with the knowledge do not feel attacked and can share their insight from that area without the need to defend it.
3. Methodically revisit assumptions
Sydney Finkelstein, a business professor at Dartmouth, recommends when faced with a new problem, jot down three hypotheses before tackling the problem. Analyze these assumptions one by one; decide which are valid and which you should discard, and change your strategy accordingly. This thinking encourages seeing the issue through multiple lenses and can lead to multiple potential solutions. Some of which might be better than the tried and true method. The benefit is this forces re-evaluation of assets as well as enabling us to better keep up with the constant changing of technology.
4. Embrace experimentalism
Being stuck in our expertise can stop us from experimenting and risk-taking. Being stuck ultimately leads to setbacks because we stop learning anything new. It is crucial to push the limits of your comfort zone, even if there is a danger of failure. Because failing to learn is the only guaranteed way to fail.
In order to push that sense of experimentalism, it is crucial to recognize the compound effect and how a little work each day can lead to a big pay-off.
5. Seek new learnings
An imperative part of excelling in creative thought is pulling dissimilar disciplines and combining them to create something new. The example earlier with Steve Jobs is a perfect example of this. Make a habit of spending at least ten minutes a day learning something new that is 100% outside of your normal discipline. An example could be watching a short YouTube video on photography principles, watchmaking, home-brewing, or anything else. You would be amazed at how different topics can come together. Plus it is fun to learn new things and keeps us humble that there are many areas we do not know.
This also helps foster a growth mindset where we realize we need to continually learn and expand our own comfort zone!
Main Take-Aways
- Having a beginner’s mindset fosters creative thinking because it forces us to challenge assumptions. It also fosters creativity because it encourages cross-collaboration between varying skill levels and disciplines.
- Leave the ego at the door. Still develop expertise in areas, but do not let your identity become overly tied to that specific teaching. Instead, let it be a tool in the toolbox instead of a personality trait.
- Learn new disciplines, even at a novice level, and increase general knowledge allows for greater creative thinking.
Action item
Take one of the ways to cultivate a beginner’s mindset and apply it to your week. Build it into your schedule and assess how the process is different than if you went with your normal routine.
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