A beginner's mind
I really love TED talks. Here's another really great one from Liz Wiseman about why we should never grow up.
Walt Disney said:
"Too many people grow up. That's the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don't remember what it's like to be twelve years old."
Some great quotes:
"I just slowed down and played."
"How does what we know, get in the way of what we don't know."
"Once we know [a pattern] we can be blind to other possibilities. We stop asking 'why' and we just do ….we don't let ourselves make mistakes or fail."
"In the process of discovering, we tend to do our best thinking"
"It's not what you know, it's how fast you can learn."
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can't read and write. It will be those who can't learn, un-learn, and then re-learn.
Children are curious, unpretentious, playful. It's about a choice.
- Ask more questions
- Seek novelty
- Play more
"Perhaps the way to handle our big grown-up problems is to think more like a kid."
"Let's not grow up all the way."
So what?
This makes me think of one of the things that Creativity Inc. talks about which I think he called having a beginner's mind. I've thought for a while now that one of my greatest gifts is that I never feel like I'm good at things. Because of that, I almost always approach things with a beginner's mind.
I've often felt that experience can be hindering and maybe the best people for some jobs are people that have no experience so that they'll think about the problem differently.
As a missionary, it was always fun to work with "new recruits" because they always had so much desire and hopes that it was infectious. You wanted to tell them all the ways they were being too naive, but hopefully I didn't, because their naiveté is so important to helping everyone be better.
One of the comments by Michael Hargiss in a recent post about how my job had drained my creativity was that to recharge his creativity he does things that he enjoyed as a kid. He does things like play with Legos or read fantasy. That feeds into this discussion well. If doing child-like things replenishes your resource of creativity, does that mean that doing those things more often make you more creative over the long run?
One of the comments by Michael Hargiss in a recent post about how my job had drained my creativity was that to recharge his creativity he does things that he enjoyed as a kid. He does things like play with Legos or read fantasy. That feeds into this discussion well. If doing child-like things replenishes your resource of creativity, does that mean that doing those things more often make you more creative over the long run?
So go be naive and playful and curious and then come back and tell me how it affects your work.
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