We are all beginners
Would you rather be a beginner or an expert? I have been working in design for almost 15 years. You probably wouldn’t call me a beginner.
Still, I like to see myself as a beginner. First of all, for the simple reason that I am always learning. I have to, because our profession is constantly changing. Design isn’t the same as it was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago. We have to learn to work with new tools, new requirements and new technologies all the time.
Whether you are a designer, an accountant or a school teacher – if you think about it, we are all beginners. Everything we do in life, we do for the first time. That meeting you had today, it was the first time. You may have had meetings with those people before about the same topic, but you never had today’s meeting. The design you made this week, you made it for the first time. Maybe you made a very similar design before, but the one you made today was the first.
I think it’s good to adapt this beginner’s mindset now and then. Being insecure about your skills and abilities makes it easier to empathize with others who are in the same position. A junior designer, fresh from school. Or a user of the app you designed, who is trying it out for the first time.
Today I definitely felt like a beginner. I just came home from my first swimming lesson to learn the front crawl. I already learned the breaststroke over 30 years ago, but I never learned the front crawl. I want to be able to swim like people on TV, but in the pool I was confronted with my total inability to swim this way. Even though I was in a beginners’ group, around me I could see others who clearly already had the hang of it. I felt like a total noob. But as the hour progressed and I tried the different exercises, I could slowly feel a tiny glimpse of my future self who is able to do the front crawl. I saw the possibility.
This quote by zen master Shunryu Suzuki nicely captures ‘the beginner mindset’:
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”
So, would you rather be a beginner or an expert?