A beginner’s mind with an advanced toolkit
Yesterday I listened to a Podcast with Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) on the topic of how to think like a Nobel Prize winner. The key takeaway is the same title is this blog post. The message resonated very strongly with me because I have used a similar approach for the past decade in various endeavors. The beginner sees a lot of options but has very few tools to use. The expert on the other hand, tends to see few solutions to a given problem, and has many different tools to solve them. To take the best of both worlds would indeed be a lot of options and many ways to approach the problem.
In the podcast, they also mentioned a method to realize a beginner’s mind with an advanced toolkit. The best form of mentorship is apparently to present a problem that is insolvable, even if there is a solution. I have said for a long time that if a problem seems difficult, it’s just because you haven’t made it difficult enough. Thus, a better strategy than complaining about how difficult something is, just crank up the difficulty level even more. What happens then is that you will have fewer options on how to move forward. This makes the choice easier. If you are playing the game of life on the lowest difficulty, you can choose just about any road and still reach the goal. Even if you make extremely bad choices, you will still succeed. When the difficulty is on the Nightmare setting, you only have a couple of choices at hand, at best.
When I use this method, it always identifies the weakest link in my chain ruthlessly and with surgical precision. Hence, I instantly know where I must focus my efforts to get a massive boost in performance. It’s just like when you shift your old mechanical hard disk to a solid state SSD drive, if you’re old enough to remember that shift? Take the slowest bottleneck in your computer and give it a massive upgrade and your computer will feel a decade newer. And the same works for you too. If you know your mind to the degree that you can specify what is your mechanical hard disk and replace it with an SSD instead, you will be amazed by the productivity increase. I haven’t thought about it much, but it just struck me that the principle probably works at least as good in the other direction. Replace the most well-functioning component with a horrible one, and total performance will sink like a stone in water.
I learned this super-power from music. I love learning new instruments from scratch, and from almost a decade of daily practice I now know for a fact that the fastest way to pick up and master a new musical instrument is to choose an extreme song and learn it. As an example, when I took a one year singing course, I decided to learn opera and sing Nessun Dorma. When I decided to learn the drums, I decided to learn Bleed, also arguably one of the most difficult drum songs in the world. By the way, I am now in my third year of daily practice on that single song. Practice is extremely easy, because every single day when I do my practice session I know exactly where I should focus my energy. I then give it everything to replace that slow old mechanical hard drive. I throw everything I got on the problem at hand and see what sticks, and do more of that until I identify the next bottleneck. If you are playing the game of life on very low difficulty, you will have a hard time to specify what is the weakest link in your chain. Consequently, you have a ton of options on where you should start the improvement process. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
When I am learning a new instrument, I am not an expert. I know next to nothing about how to play the instrument. But I do know a lot of stuff about how I should learn any instrument. That’s why the message of a beginner’s mindset with an advanced toolkit resonated so stronly with me.