Enjoy Being a Beginner

Put on your white belt and prepare to lose

Self-portrait, Rupert Cocke, CC BY-NY-ND

Young kids are often keen to show off their developing skills. They are happy to let relatives watch them do things at a very basic level, without caring very much if it doesn’t come off as expected. When this happens, grownups normally smile indulgently and encourage the kids to keep doing it.

Unfortunately, though, once we get past a certain age, few of us are willing to let ourselves be bad at a new activity. Many of us pick a hobby or two in our teens, 20s or early 30s and then try and get as good as possible at it over many years while making it part of our identity. I plead guilty! This is, of course, completely fine.

However, today’s essay will try to convince you that you should also look for activities that you find difficult and just play with them without necessarily turning every challenge into a goal-based exercise to become excellent. Enjoy being terrible at something new! Just do the activity every day (or most days) and let any benefits come along in their own time without hurrying them along.

When I was a boy, I used to love drawing. When I started reading books fanatically, around the age of seven or eight, I put down my pencils and pretty much never drew another picture for pleasure again. After being inspired by my experience of improving my Catalan language skills every day on Duolingo a couple of years ago, I decided to see if daily practice would help with drawing. In the words of someone wise: “little and often over the long term.”

My first attempts at drawing as an adult beginner were terrible, but I refused to let myself get demotivated and just concentrated on doing one picture every single day, mostly quick ones. Doing exercises from books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters turned out to be fun challenges. Although I'm still very much a beginner after two years of drawing nearly every day, I think I’m not completely terrible any more. Please check out an example above!

Of course, if you practice a skill every day, you will eventually reach an intermediate level or higher. As you get better, I think it is important to pick a new activity to be bad at. As well as drawing every day, I am also teaching myself to play chess and to juggle, as well as stretching every day. I’m pretty bad at all of these, but I have more aptitude for chess than for drawing, juggling or stretching, largely because reading geeky books about positional strategy can help develop the skillset for chess. In any case, my level is unimportant in all these activities. All I’m doing is enjoying being a beginner in several different realms simultaneously.

Some research from the University of Oxford in 2009 showed that learning to juggle (and presumably learning other complex skills) can rewire the brain in interesting ways. What is fascinating about the research is that it showed that time spent practicing a new skill was the main factor, rather than the level of skill attained.

Beginner’s mind

Zen Buddhists in Japan developed the concept of shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn - a molecular biologist who has researched and promoted the benefits of mindfulness meditation while ruthlessly stripping away any woo - beginner’s mind is a powerful tool we can use to stay in the moment.

The richness of present-moment experience is the richness of life itself. Too often we let our thinking and our beliefs about what we “know” prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We tend to take the ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary. To see the richness of the present moment, we need to cultivate what has been called “beginner’s mind,” a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time.

Perhaps strangely, practicing mindfulness meditation every day can change the way we see our identities. By standing back, nurturing the mind of a beginner and observing our thoughts as they rush in and out of our heads, without necessarily following them where they want to go, we can learn an important lesson: our core identity can (and must) stand apart from our opinions.

There are benefits to defining our identities with broad brushstrokes, like a beginner, rather than basing it on one big idea, like someone who is deeply committed to a project. I have argued in previous essays that it is better to be a social democrat than a socialist; that liberals need to watch out for a slippery slope to the hard right and be wary of market fundamentalism; and that conservatives worried about threats to traditional values in a changing world should be aware of the dangers of nationalism. In general terms, being an institutionalist is better than being a populist or an insurrectionist. Recognising the fundamental unity of humanity is always going to be better than classifying people like insects.

Downside

Unfortunately, being a beginner can have some downside too. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a study showing that beginners often over-estimated their own abilities. Beginners often aren’t good enough to realise just how low their level really is. Since then, this tendency, which became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, has been extensively studied across a range of domains.

As a professional journalist for nearly three decades, my feeling is that most conspiracy speculation is often an example of beginners over-estimating their competence while failing to develop basic analytical skills. Instead of rushing to strange conclusions, people who want to think critically about current affairs should spend some time sharpening their axes. Please think about your methodology before you get stuck into the material! Is it valid?

Do you know about friction or intentionality bias or open-source intelligence (OSINT) or suspending judgement or Bayesian statistics? If not, don’t worry! Slow down and take some time to explore the territory. Why not read one essay a day from a friendly, neighbourhood critical-thinking blog? Like perhaps, ahem, this one. And then why not buy (or borrow) one of the books that I recommend at the end of every essay? And then read one or two pages of that book every day? When you finish it, there are plenty more recommendations. There is no rush. You have the rest of your life. Just enjoy the process.

I strongly believe that a little daily practice of new skills will be good for you, whether it is drawing pictures, mindfulness meditation or OSINT. What is more, spending time as a beginner in a new activity or two will be more fun than you might expect.

I suspect that people who are goal-orientated, productive and driven in their daily lives will particularly benefit from developing beginner’s mind through the daily practice of challenging new skills without worrying too much about the results. Kabat-Zinn says that “not striving” is another important aspect of mindfulness meditation.

Having said that, if you really insist on striving, prompt engineering is an interesting area where nearly all of us are beginners. It involves writing prompts for a generative artificial intelligence (AI) system; and it is becoming more important by the day. Gaining expertise in this area today will give you an edge in the future.

The comments are open this week. Have you tried picking up any new skills that you find difficult recently? Also, please don’t be too horrible about my self-portrait: I’m still a beginner! See you next week! Next week’s post will return to Saturday.

Further Reading

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters by Robert Beverly Hale

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen

This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.

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Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and X (formerly Twitter), are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries