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Started reading
July 11, 2018
What assumption does the author of the text hold?
What do you agree with in the text?
What do you want to argue within the text?
What parts of the text do you want to aspire to?
Expertise is helpful at certain points, not so helpful at others; wide-open, unfettered divergent thinking is critical at one stage, discipline and focus is called for at another.
• Step back.
• Notice what others miss. • Challenge assumptions (including our own). • Gain a deeper understanding of the situation or problem at hand, through contextual inquiry. • Question the questions we’re asking. • Take ownership of a particular question. While a fairly straightforward process, it begins by moving backward.
distancing himself from his own assumptions and expertise. For a moment, he stopped knowing and began to wonder.
old. But at least temporarily, it’s necessary to stop doing and stop knowing in order to start asking.
The “doing” part would seem to be more in our control to stop than the “knowing”—yet it might be even harder.
In a world that expects us to move fast, to keep advancing (if only incrementally), to just “get it done,...
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The pressure to keep moving forward—and the accompanying reluctance to step back and question—is not just a business phenomenon.
If asking Why requires stepping back from “doing,” it also demands a step back from “knowing.”
Having this sense of knowing can make us less curious and less
open to new ideas and possibilities.
To make matters worse, we don’t “know” as much we m...
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“Our brains have evolved to dump most of what we see, quickly categorize the rest, and file it away in our long term memory using our brain’s equivalent of the Dewey Decimal system.”
safe to ask “stupid” questions.
“We allow people to fall backwards and be caught by one another.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Beginner’s mind, along with other Zen principles of deep thinking, mindfulness, listening, and questioning, gradually caught on with others in Silicon Valley, beyond Jobs and Apple.
“Steve had an unusual relationship with Zen. He got the artistic side of it but not the Buddhist side—the art, but not the heart.”
Jobs proved that, for better or worse, you can be both a questioner and a conqueror.
Beginner’s mind is akin to adopting a more childlike mind-set.
young children tended to perform well on creativity tests because they are uninhibited.
Upon stepping back and reexamining something you’ve been looking at the same way for years, you might suddenly feel as if you’re seeing it for the first time.
The value of this kind of excavation-by-inquiry is becoming more widely recognized in the business world, most recently as part of the Lean Startup methodology taught by the author/consultant Eric Ries, who is a big proponent of the five whys.
The rapid test-and-learn approach has caught on throughout the entrepreneurial world, fueled in part by Eric Ries’s Lean Startup phenomenon.
