Unlearning & The Beginner’s Mind
“The hard part is not the learning but the unlearning. The walking back down the mountain.”
The above is from Naval Ravikant of Angelist fame and one of the modern philosophers (my opinion but also a popular one I’m not unique to). It’s been sitting with me since this morning.
It truly must feel so difficult for someone to knowingly try to unlearn everything. Imagine being a Ph.D. in poli-sci or psychology and having to tell yourself what you’re doing isn’t actually science. None of the experiments are verifiable, falsifiable, and repeatable after all.
As one progresses through life…walking up the proverbial mountain….the feeling of sunk cost makes it so much harder to come back down the basecamp as one realizes this is not the mountain to be climbing. When you are just about to start the climb it’s easier.
I bet it’s also taxing to repeat it over and over again with different mountains too. I mean, because you rarely truly know till you climb far enough that this isn’t the right one to climb.
It makes this idea of having a ‘beginner’s mind’ oh so difficult.
At first I thought it was rather intuitive and simple. You always want to approach everything as a student and be willing to learn. I think that’s the implicit directive behind the idea.
However, there is the contextual “when” of deploying the beginner’s mind. Does one deploy the beginner’s mind in the context of learning a specific accounting rule? Or should it be applied to the general notion of a career?
It’s the difference of learning a new rule in the realm of accounting vs. Asking oneself if five years in accounting was a mistake and it’s time to climb down that mountain.
Generally speaking, it would take more courage the more foundational the beginner’s mindset is applied. A person who leaves accounting after three years into an entry-level sales position needs a large amount of courage. It’s not an easy trigger to pull. Implicit in this are my biases from being in that world. It’s not a competition but I believe this is an even greater difficulty for the accountant in her fifth year in the profession leaving it all to become a designer.
I know both individuals and it is truly something quite courageous. It almost seems like a power law where time is on the x-axis and difficulty is on the y-axis and the longer one stays in one contextual setting, the harder it is to look at it entirely from a beginner’s mindset and descend from the mountain.
This isn’t to fault anyone for sunk costs or not being able to make rational decisions with facts. Life is irrational and I’m beginning to think many things in life are driven by irrationality from one person’s perspective but can be perfectly rational from another. Context changes all.
This is more so a thought on how difficult it must’ve been for those who descend the ‘wrong’ mountains and how difficult the decision would be for those who are about to realize they are on the wrong mountain.