We need your beginner’s mind | Hacker News Reader

We need your beginner’s mind

joshcanhelp.com

141 pointsjoshcanhelp45 comments

> The world needs more people who are two days into learning something writing about the problems of people who are one day in.

~ https://twitter.com/patio11/status/803825771349426176

See also:

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is a book of teachings by the late Shunryu Suzuki, a compilation of talks given to his satellite Zen center in Los Altos, California. Published in 1970... helping readers to steer clear from the trap of intellectualism...it is one of the two most influential books on Zen in the west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind

Came here to post this. You beat me to it. Thank you!

The "no bad questions" thing is big with me. I remember about 40 years ago talking to a smart latinist retraining into IT who said she felt hugely shamed and embarrassed at work having to ask what an IDE ribbon cable was.

Whoever was teaching them, needed a good talking to. Sure, in hindsight it's obvious, but also not.

I'm a better beginner than an expert at anything I do. I mainly attribute this to the excitement around learning and the rate of returns I'm the initial part of the learning journey.

Most people become rigid in thinking and lose elasticity in the problem, solution, and containing domains — especially when hardened onto specific workflows and process. We are all guilty of it.

Consulting addresses this at the org level — they are the "smart dumb group" that will unlock lateral and z thinking.

On a personal level, do not think in failures or successes. Think in learning and level gains. "Success" as per your definition is a side-effect of reaching higher and higher levels of ability. Learning ("failure") is a major path.

> On a personal level, do not think in failures or successes. Think in learning and level gains.

I wanted to include that in my post but I didn't want it to get too long. This is so critical, IMHO. When I truly internalized this I felt like I had unlocked some secret mode in life. I had heard it over and over but it also sounded like a way to make yourself feel better. I know better now!

I wrote about this as well [1] but from a mental/physical health perspective.

[1] https://www.joshcanhelp.com/improvement-as-experimentation/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

> In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.

One of the most important lessons I've learned from fiction is from the relentless joy in spite of, or maybe because of, repeated failure in some stories.

The most common source of this trope in my memory is in anime, but it's everywhere, in every culture and narrative medium I've experienced.

Failing is not a negative in itself. Sometimes the consequences are a negative. Usually though, there's a lesson to be learned that's a net positive.

Something something Edison.

Do you have a particular story/book/anime that really drove this home?

I find I’m able to think that way about failure far removed from when it happened but, in the moment and soon after, it’s near impossible.

The one that comes to mind for me is Tenga Topa Guerren Lagan, but most shonen shows have a plot arc of getting defeated and coming back at some point. The other one is Steins;Gate but that one is deep into the show.

While a different medium, the Dark Souls series of video games does a great job of conveying this.

The vibe is more of, “things can seem hard and unfair, but by adapting and persevering, you can overcome.”

I think it is an excellent life lesson and one I find highly resonant.

Most immediately, Hunter x Hunter comes to mind. The main character, Gon, gets excited even when faced with some pretty shocking problems.

I've always liked the perspective that all three of problem, learning, and information can be defined as "the difference between expectation and outcome". They're effectively the same thing.

I think the most valuable articles I’ve written were in the beginning of my development career. I struggled to do so many things and was able to document them with a beginner’s mind. Most of those things are so easy now they don’t even make it to the “prerequisites” of an article I write. What I write now reaches a smaller, more focused and advanced audience.

> Your lack of understanding is a valuable attribute that goes away as you gain experience

Not necessarily true. Beginner's mind can be embraced by anyone who stays humble. Some of my favorite people to work with have ample experience, but approach each new challenge from the ground up.

> Not necessarily true. Beginner's mind can be embraced by anyone who stays humble.

Beginner's mind can be simulated by anyone who stays humble.

I can give you the most humble and competent person. The most they can do is to "guess", or in a better term, simulate how another mind will think. It depends on multiple factors, including culture, education, and environment they are in. Sometimes, the best way is to just ask/observe a real beginner's mind.

Mostly agreed but I'd say it goes beyond simulation. You can have experience but refuse to make a lot of assumptions about the task at hand, instead feeling it out by asking questions and trying to determine if past approaches are really suited. The opposite of this are people who approach any task with a solution in mind, devoid of context.

> but refuse to make a lot of assumptions

You can try but a lot of the assumptions are unconscious, unknown to you.

not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

I agree. In fact this post was inspired by someone I work with who embodies this mindset.

I probably could have said something more along the lines of it fades naturally unless you mindfully keep it around.

That quality, though, feels like a hard one to learn. Not impossible but it seems like it comes naturally to some and not to others.

In a society dominated by signalling, few want to risk looking like they don't know what they are doing. They fear people will mistake humility for incompetence

It is not an unfounded fear, especially with people not capable of understanding what you are being gracious about.

The irony is that true competence demands the ability to inhabit beginners mind when necessary in order to continually hone one’s skills.

100%, I totally agree. I linked to an article [1] that talked about one person's experience with this. My argument here is that I believe it's overall better to accept that risk and important to encourage that in others.

[1] https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

I think the opposite makes it even clearer that state of mind and actual expertise aren't the same thing, plenty of beginners without a beginner's mind

Isn't that then the dunning-kruger effect?

I'm routinely stymied by the projects I take on. I learn new stuff every day. It annoys me to be treated like a n00b, but that comes with the territory. I don't let it stop me.

I write about it here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

> If you don't feel safe to ask questions and make mistakes at work, it might be time to find a place that you can.

There is basically no such job. You can find jobs where you are allowed to make small mistakes, but no job will let you make big mistakes without lots of experience and big mistakes is the important part to learn. If you want to learn big things quickly you have to do it on your own and not at a job.

That's simply not true.

There is no "Sysadmin School" the only way to learn is through experience. The only way you get experience is to do things.

That's why we don't fire people if they make $1,000,000 mistakes, because those are very expensive lessons and that is a large investment in a persons education.

If you only make $1,000,000 mistakes and you keep making the same ones, then it's time to talk safety nets.

We are talking about different things here. You assume the company put you in a position where making $1,000,000 mistakes is reasonable. My point is that companies wont put you in such a position unless you have enough experience that they trust you wont make the mistake. Similarly, for them to put you in a position where you are allowed to make $1,000,000,000 mistakes you need even more experience.

That is why company CEO's have tons of experience if they were hired, they were forced to take the slow path of slowly ramping up the mistakes they were allowed to make. Compare with Bill Gates who was the CEO of a massive global company when he was 30, he ramped up to big mistakes really quickly, no company hires like that.

Sure, but even junior sysadmins can take down production systems by mistake.

What do you need to know to be a junior sysadmin? Not a lot (comparatively).

> The only way you get experience is to do things.

Why can’t you do sysadmin things at home?

Cost (cloud is pricy!) or enterprise hardware that is loud.

You can do some stuff, but you will still make mistakes.

Your experience will determine where you're able to contribute and that determines what the blast radius is. I don't believe that you only learn from big mistakes and that was not the point I was trying to make here. You learn from all mistakes and if you're in a job or relationship or environment where you feel punished for making a mistake then that's probably not a great place to be. What I'm encouraging here is getting over your internal resistance.

I have once spent four sprints shipping and then unshipping a minor feature because no one on the dev team explained an implicit invariant in the object model, despite repeated questioning. The unit tests ran fine and people rubber-stamped each successive revision without hesitation. Then the change would land on our scary haunted staging instance, and the release manager would come knocking at my desk.

Gatekeeping is totally a thing.

It's possible they weren't aware of it and were answering honestly. Systems can grow incredibly complex. These dependencies and contracts became not-so-well-defined after long periods of time.

Like so many things, there is that implicit caveat “none of this applies in a toxic environment”

This is what made Data from Star Trek TNG such an interesting character to me. He embodies the beginner's mind quite well I'd say.

The way people responded to him was nice as well, they understood he was a beginner and either trying to learn or challenge his image of what he'd learned until then.

Can you be a beginner like this and even still be able to get a job these days? It seems like the industry as a whole has entered a new phase of professionalization and scientific recruitment that makes attitudes like this obsolete.

In enterprises/organizations consciously playing the long game, yes, definitely - because they know they need this to survive and gain new perspectives, and budget accordingly.

That, they will not only tolerate, but search for people that will not be what-you-could-consider-as-productive-in-a-narrow-view-way for some time.

Wow, I felt like I'm listening to myself, thanks a lot for writing this. "Beginner" is an such an important concept.

“The professional...must fight to preserve the naiveté that the layman already possesses.” —Bill Evans

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