How "beginner's mind" keeps you strong in midlife

Keeping your access to naiveté is hard, but the creativity it brings is powerful.

My daughter, who is nine, and I were hanging her paintings on the walls of a stairwell in our home, and I suggested she go stand by the front door, to view the arrangement as a newly arriving guest would.

Finding my idea acceptable, she hopped over to the entrance and pretended to walk in as if visiting, adding in some make-believe conversation: “Well, the cookies were good….” she said casually over her shoulder, to no one, before turning to inspect the paintings.

The cookies were good! What else is there?

This is a sweet example of beginner’s mind, and it reminded me how incredibly important it is, as we age into the second halves of our lives, to embrace the childlike qualities that, in deep-middle adulthood, correlate strongly to greater longevity and life satisfaction.

I’m talking about childlike curiosity, wonder, naivete and ignorance, which if cultivated regularly as we age keeps us open to the kind of imaginative bursts of creativity, or willingness to take on outsized challenges, that are pillars of aging with strength — physically, emotionally, creatively.

“The impossible only becomes accessible when experience has not taught us limits,” writes Rick Rubin, a Grammy-winning co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, in his book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”¹ Rubin, who has produced The Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Adele, Metallica, LL Cool J and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is a semi-legend in the industry for his reputation for focusing artists on their creativity and authenticity.

“If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress,” he writes. “Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.”

The power of naivete and ignorance: AlphaGo and the Ramones

In his chapter on beginner’s mind, Rubin gives two great examples: AlphaGo and The Ramones.

AlphaGo, the AI program that in 2016 beat the reigning human grandmaster at Go, the oldest continuously played board game in human history, won because it taught itself how to play, using more than 100,000 past games without any human teachers involved. The absence of human influence on its learning process allowed AlphaGo, in move 37 of the second game against the human grandmaster, to make a move that no one, in 3,000 years since Go was invented, had ever made.

The Ramones, Rubin says, started out in 1974 intending to become another bubblegum rock band. Their lack of any knowledge or context, he says, spawned their unique brand of stripped-down, rebellion-based music that ignited the British punk movement. “Of all the explanations of The Ramones,” Rubin writes, “the most apt may be: innovation through ignorance.”

Our own examples of winsome creativity and ignorance

Closer to home, we’ve all accomplished things that would have been impossible had we been less naive or better informed. One personal example: In 1993, I rode my mountain bike 1,200 miles through Vietnam (see photo below), before the U.S. re-established diplomatic relations and when most Americans thought of Vietnam as a lost war more than a country of 70 million people. It was incredibly difficult.

I’d never been to Asia, or ridden more than 15 miles.

Somewhere near Da Nang: Had I understood how hard cycling alone on a shoestring from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City would be, I wouldn’t have done it.

But embracing childlike ignorance or creativity doesn’t require big moves. It can be practiced in small daily or weekly doses. Some examples:

• make impromptu conversation with someone you don’t know — a waiter, shop owner, janitor, grocery clerk, anyone whom you can make eye contact with.

• invent stories on the fly. My daughter and I sometimes pick a New Yorker cartoon and, ignoring the text, take turns making up a backstory.

• take a different route home, or leave at a different time. Something, anything, to give the world a new vector into your daily routine.

• say yes to something or someone you normally would say no to.

• invent new words while you’re peeling carrots or boiling pasta. My latest is schmick-schmack: what I imagine an annoyed Brooklyn deli counter guy says instead of “bullshit.” My daughter’s favorite is “wibbly,” a word she created to describe feeling out of sorts.

• invite 10 people whom you really, really would love to have coffee with but are intimidated to ask, to have coffee. What do you have to lose?

Research shows a child-like mindset, characterized by curiosity, openness to new experiences and a sense of wonder, can have profound psychological effects on mid-life adults, including:

• Reduced stress and anxiety

• Greater optimism

• Better social connections

• Increased physical activity (children call this playing)

• Higher levels of creativity and novel problem solving

The science is still formative, but the evidence suggests that putting oneself in positions that require openness and creativity makes humans, even already successful ones, happier and, therefore stronger for longer (7.5 years longer, according to one study).

Three great quotes and the takeaway

“The Earth laughs in flowers,” Emerson told us. Rubin, in his book, aptly contributes, “Humanity breathes in mistakes.” To which we now can add, “The cookies were good.”

The takeway: Most of us can afford to make a few more childlike mistakes, in service of living more often in beginner’s mind.

1. Thanks to Cack Wilhelm for putting me onto Rubin’s extremely worthwhile book.