Further Thoughts on Shoshin

"In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

Another example of U-shaped learning curves can be found in combat sports. Arguably, you are a worse fighter after a few months of practice than you were when you first began.

The first few training sessions make people conscious of their movements in a detrimental way—they become clunky and robotic. They overthink and slow down. They follow the wrong rules down to a tee.

Absolute beginners, on the other hand, spar like there’s no tomorrow—they flail about and spaz out. They break every imaginable rule of thumb devised for fighting but they do so quickly. They are destructive creativity at its purest. Beginners are dangerous.

The goal here, just as with writing, is to know the why behind the techniques. Great boxers fight with low hands not because it’s always a good idea to do so, but because they know when and why to keep their guard high.

This reminds me of a tweet by Paul Graham where he explains the difference between knowledge and understanding. (I won’t bother to link the tweet because I detest Twitter’s search engine). Knowledge, he says, is when you are able to perform an action. Understanding is when you can explain how you did it.

Some might assume that knowledge (embodied, instinctual, intuitive) comes before understanding (verbal, explicit, and conscious). Understanding sounds like a higher level of expertise, a later stage of apprehension.

But it isn’t always so. Sometimes, we learn things consciously and then develop an intuition for them. Words percolate down to our subconscious like rainwater to deeper layers of soil. In martial arts, you first learn what to do and then, little by little, get a sense of how to do it.

Your words, your conscious thoughts are fated to affect your body, sometimes down to your gut. Hypnotherapy, for example, seems to be an effective treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).

But a lot of what is labelled as hypnosis in the research is just people mindfully meditating on phrases like “this food is healthy for you”, or imagining that they ingest some panacea that solves their issues. I’m not gainsaying the method—quite the opposite, this is an extreme example of conscious thought leading to embodied knowledge.

I’ll stop rambling and state my point: conscious knowledge is often unwieldy and might even yield worse results than pure instinct, but you can work to change your instinct through conscious work.

The subtitle allegedly cites Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I haven’t read the book, but I found the quote apt.