The Practice of Beginning Again
For the first time in over ten years I attended an event I did not produce for the spiritual enrichment of no one but myself. As it happened, many people beloved to me were there, and surely they found their spiritual enrichment too, but I was not responsible for it, and that made it somehow all the more glorious. That any person should seek to find a deeper connection with spirit is glorious, but that they did it alongside me, and with the added benefit of my getting to witness their evolution…chef's kiss. Nothing better.
This makes me think of how rarely it is that I find myself out of control of a situation, or out of my element at all, really. Mostly I just handle everything myself. On departure day alone I showered, walked the dog, made the dog food for the next couple weeks I'd be in so-called Australia, did the dishes, prepared a roast for the family for dinner that night, organized my vitamins, did my hair, finished packing, helped water the plants and tidy up the downstairs area, had a couple conference calls, handled some emails, had a few AI interactions, and headed to the airport, where I made it through security in a leisurely fashion, with plenty of time to get properly tipsy before the first leg of a twenty hour journey across the world.
As a hyper competent, independent first-born daughter, the need to know everything is as strong as The Force with me. And yet as a human who seeks personal growth above all else, beginner's mind is something I value. It's a state where I am ready to receive information, to stretch my edges and learn, to develop a new skill, have a novel experience, or hone my approach in any given situation as I respond to a new environment.
Beginner's mind is the practice of approaching what we're doing as if we've never done it before, even when we have. It means showing up curious instead of certain. Asking instead of assuming. Looking instead of anticipating.
The expert mind walks into a room and immediately knows there's a square table in the center. The beginner's mind walks into the same room and notices the way the light dances on its surface.
Why does it matter? Because the world keeps changing, and so do we, and the expert mind closes doors that the beginner's mind easily walks right through. Because certainty is comfortable, and comfort is the slow death of growth. Because the people we love are not the same people they were yesterday, and meeting them as if they are is one of the quieter ways we can lose them.
I am not the only one who thinks so. Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher who brought the concept to American shores, said it best: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Adam Grant, in Think Again, makes nearly the same case in business-school language, calling intellectual humility the most underrated skill of our era. Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset is a close cousin, as both rest on the radical idea that we are not fixed, but eternally forming. And every spiritual teacher I have ever sat with eventually comes back to the same point: we each begin again, in every moment and on every breath, in our ever unfolding becoming.
Cultivating beginner's mind is a skill that not only benefits us in new situations. Being able to encounter each seemingly familiar experience with the curiosity of a person encountering it for the first time helps us identify rather than overlook the possibly different details that make this particular situation unique. It helps us avoid the disappointment that comes when we impose our expectations on a situation or outcome, and lets us instead stay in the moment.
The phrase "beginner's mind" is a translation of the Japanese 初心, shoshin — sho meaning "beginning" or "initial," and shin meaning "mind" or "heart." Its lineage in Zen Buddhism reaches back to the 13th century and Dōgen Zenji, founder of the Sōtō school, who taught that practice itself was its own enlightenment, and that returning again and again to the spirit of the first day was the whole point. During the 15th century, the Japanese playwright and Noh theater master Zeami Motokiyo wrote one of the most quoted lines on the subject: shoshin wasuru bekarazu — "Never forget the beginner's mind." He was writing about the discipline of performance, but he could just as easily have been writing about parenting, or marriage, or coaching, or showing up to your own life.
The term landed in the West thanks to Shunryu Suzuki, a Sōtō Zen priest who left Japan in 1959, settled in San Francisco, and began teaching the burgeoning American counterculture how to sit zazen. His students Marian Derby and Trudy Dixon transcribed his informal talks at the Los Altos Zen Center and shaped them into the slim, world-altering book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, published by Weatherhill in 1970. Steve Jobs was famously influenced by Zen Buddhism, and the book became something of a quiet bible in Silicon Valley.
In the decades since, shoshin has migrated well beyond the meditation cushion. Therapists invoke it to soften the entrenched stories we carry. Designers and engineers build it into user research and prototyping (the Stanford d.school is practically constructed around it). Leadership writers like Adam Grant frame it as the antidote to the "preacher, prosecutor, politician" thinking that traps so many smart people in defending what they already believe. Modern neuroscience increasingly suggests that novelty and curiosity help support neuroplasticity and cognitive resilience. All of this seems to suggest that the minute we stop encountering anything new, we start to calcify. Or, as Andy Dufresne says to Red in the iconic film The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
The wisdom holds, no matter the century or the language we put on it: we get the most out of life when we meet it where we are at, and we do so as if we are meeting it for the first time.
Earlier this year, when I was unexpectedly laid off from a startup that was doing very well (hence the surprise), I had to ask myself, do I want to persist in this life doing the same thing that I have done for twenty nine years, or instead, do I want to choose me, and try something new. After almost three decades of generating money, prestige and success for others, I wondered why it felt so scary to put the same proven skills and talents to use in service of building something for myself. And though the idea was and remains terrifying, I took a gulp and a breath and went ahead and committed myself to one year of trying to build my business into something that can sustain me. Three months later, I am well on my way.
The most surprising thing, despite having transitioned between industries with every job change, was how transferrable my skill set has become, and how valuable. Approaching life with a beginner’s mind, and bringing my full and diverse skill set with me as a journey into each new situation has made me very adaptable and capable of inventing solutions to complex problems out of the symphony of my own experience. And with the emergence of AI, we are now working differently. It's no longer true that we need to stop when we get to the end of our knowledge, though an unwarranted confidence past that point has always come more easily to some than others. Now when we don't know how to do something, but we know exactly what we want, how to properly ask for it, and how to inspect the output and provide immediate and relevant feedback, we can employ AI to assist us in achieving our goals.
For lots of people AI is scary, and I get it. I have heard one dear friend describe how leaning into AI is going to eliminate the very jobs of those folks using it, and perhaps that's true to a certain extent. It’s true that where all ditches were once dug by hand, these days most are managed by machine. Elevator operators, bowling pin resetters, audio transcribers…as technology progresses, many human jobs are absorbed by machines. The invention of the wheel itself meant that many fewer humans could complete the same amount of work as were needed prior to that very critical technological breakthrough. But regardless, not leaning into it is going to be worse, because technology will continue to progress and companies will make the switch if and when it makes sense to their bottom line, and when they do, it will be those who embrace it who still end up with jobs. Maybe not the same ones they had, since AI is already reshaping or reducing some entry-level work, but in managing the human component that is so necessary to make AI useful.
Like all technology, AI depends heavily on the input of humans to properly function and serve its purpose, which is to provide a synthesized response based on the whole of human knowledge to any query when prompted. The better the ask, the better the answer. I was speaking with my 22-year-old son about this the other day, and he was lamenting the stupidity of AI, and how useless it is. Ah, the hubris of youth. I gently offered him a different frame: that what feels like a stupid machine is often just an untrained mind, unable to fashion a question precise enough to return a useful answer. He pushed back. I pushed back gentler. These are the conversations I treasure with him, deep, candid, full of love and a little teasing, where I get to watch him try an idea on, hold it up to the light, and decide for himself what to do with it. He is still learning. So am I. That, after all, is the point.
For folks my age (Gen X) AI is the perfect tool, because we have been figuring things out, unsupervised, in a room alone by ourselves with insufficient materials or instructions since we were capable of navigating ourselves home, alone, from elementary school. Why should this be any different? We were among the first generations to grow up alongside pagers, home computers, the internet, and cell phones, raised on Atari and ColecoVision consoles. This tool is no different than any other flickering prompt on the green screen of our Tandy 1000s. And it even knows what Oregon Trail is.
Fostering beginner's mind and learning new things is essential to our health. It keeps our brains agile, our minds young, and helps us feel capable, useful, or even purposeful when we find a way to put our learning to the good use of helping others.
What new thing will you try today?
