Newsletter #33

The Willingness to be a Fool

Hi there,

I read a book this week by George Leonard called Mastery. It’s a pretty good book. I like the way he talks about mastering any aspect of life (business, relationships, martial arts, knitting) as a journey that is made possible by employing 5 master keys. These are the keys that unlock the doors to mastery. They are instruction, practice, surrender, intentionality and the edge.

But it was the epilogue that really struck a chord with me.(As an aside, I sometimes stop reading before I reach the epilogue. This is evidence why you should always finish the book you start reading. You never know where the gold is hidden).In the epilogue he describes a trip he made to the Californian spiritual educational institute, Esalen, having just finished writing a book on learning. There he encounters a ‘mountain man’ - a sculptor who lived rough in the hills above Big Sur. The man is pretty gruff and more or less demands that Leonard tell him how to become a learner again. He'd lost his ability to explore new things and learn from them. His creative spark had gone out, and he wanted it back.

Leonard thought about is and gave the mountain man artist his honest and simple answer. To learn anything, you have to be willing to be a fool.

Mmmm. That’s interesting! What could he mean?

He means the fool in the older sense. Not stupid or idiotic. But in the sense of the sharp court jester. The figure in the tarot deck who carries the number zero. Because the person who isn’t afraid of jumping into the unknown isn’t afraid of the fertile void from which everything new emerges. Emptiness is the precondition for anything new arriving at all. And the fool willingly jumps into the emptiness.

I love that idea. And I think it highlights something that most of us lose as we get older, more responsible and also more serious.

If you watch a small child learning to walk or talk. They fail constantly. They make sounds that mean nothing. They have no dignity to protect, so they learn at a rate the rest of us can only envy. Somewhere along the way we trade that in. We get good at things. Or we think we get good at things. And so we tend to become people who know. Who know better. And the better we get, the more we have to lose by looking like we don't.

This is pride. And it’s why so much learning stops as we get older. Not because we lose the capacity learn. Or even the motivation. But because we don’t have the willingness to make a fool of ourselves when we do it wrong.

I’m pretty sure you’ll recognise this pattern. If not in yourself, you’ll notice it most in people around you who think they’ve got life ‘cracked’. The ones with the big job title, the track record, the reputation that took decades to build. They've earned a kind of authority, and authority and foolishness don't sit easily together. So they stop asking the obvious (or even the unobvious) question in the meeting. They stop trying the thing they might be bad at. They protect what they've become, and in protecting it, they stop growing.

It's a subtle type of decline that goes pretty much unnoticed. Nobody decides to stop learning. They just slowly become unwilling to be seen not knowing.

The good news is that the way back isn't complicated. That doesn't make it easy. All that is required is the willingness to say “I don’t know” and be open to the idea of being a beginner again. Oh and you need to let yourself be bad at it for a while. In front of people, if it comes to it. Who may well snigger at your ineptitude.

So what if they do?

Don’t take yourself so seriously. Join them in the sniggering. At least you’ll be learning something new. As well as embracing humility.

Jigoro Kano, who founded judo and reached the highest ranks of it, gives a great example of learning and humility in action. He reportedly asked to be buried in a white belt. That’s the belt of the rank beginner. At the top of everything, he still wanted to be remembered as the one with everything to learn.

So here's the question worth asking yourself. Where in your life have you stopped learning? Where has pride come in? And what might open up if you let yourself play the fool again?

Are you willing to to be seen wearing your white belt?

Until next time,

Simon