Why Being An Expert Is Overrated
If you haven’t picked up Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act, I highly recommend it. Rubin argues that we are all creative in one way or another and that tapping into our more creative selves can unlock great power and possibility in our work and lives. I could go on about the merits of this book but let me share just one of the concepts that resonated as I think it’s pretty powerful: the beginner’s mind.
Rubin describes this mindset as “starting from a pure childlike place of not knowing. Living in the moment with as few fixed beliefs as possible…There’s a great power in not knowing,” he continues. “If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress.”
For those of you with kids, this way of looking at the world probably sounds familiar. Little kids are honest to a fault, uniquely present with their wants and needs, and they can’t help but approach the world with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and play.
When I went down the rabbit hole a bit further on this topic, I found that Alison Gopnik, who runs the Cognitive Development Learning Lab at UC Berkeley, talks about this topic in her research. Hence, it’s not just the Zen masters who are onto something here. Children, Gopnik argues, are smarter than adults in many ways. Of course, we develop expertise and efficiency as we get older, so our developed brains are high functioning but think about it: that also means we regularly cling to and reinforce what we know. We lose the ability to unlearn things. To question things. To shed old habits and assumptions.
Rubin taps into the beginner’s mind to elicit the best work from his clients - to get them to drop their expert minds and instead show up questioning, experimenting, and with a spirit of innocence, wonder, and awe. But I’ve seen this mindset work in my own life as well.
When my wife and I left New York City and moved to the woods of Connecticut after thirty years, we were looking to dial down the volume, spend more time in nature, and generally live at a slightly slower pace. It was a big transition for us, and you’d think it would be the perfect opportunity to show up with a beginner’s mind.
Ironically, because we’re empty nesters and in mid-life, we initially told ourselves we already had all the friends and community we needed in the other places we had lived. But twelve months in, having made no connections or ties to our new town, I realized that I was clinging to my expert mind. I had defaulted to thinking I already knew all there was to know about this situation, that I had nothing new to learn from this place or the people here. I was closing myself off to the possibilities of what else might be. I needed to approach this new experience as a child would: by being curious, flexible, present, and open.
It’s funny how, once you move through the world with a more open spirit, you start to see the benefits almost immediately. Someone I had been introduced to months earlier and promptly forgotten about reached out to invite us over to his home for dinner. I said yes. My wife started striking up the occasional conversation with her fellow commuters on the train platform, and last week she discovered two work colleagues live in a neighboring town. We are exploring taking classes, joining a local chapter of a professional organization I’ve been meaning to check out, and we are going to try and revive our tradition of having other couples over for Shabbat dinner (even though we can count the people we currently know in town on one hand). It will take some time, of course, but I’m already feeling better, having shed what I thought I knew about this big move in favor or approaching the transition with a beginner’s mind.