Expertise ≠ New Ideas
This is a part of a series I’ve decided to launch for myself in which I attempt to write 1 paragraph (3–10 sentences) about something a day. It will not be perfectly curated or articulated, and there will certainly be punctuation problems. You’ve been warned.
2/9/21
While researching the Japanese idea of “Beginner’s Mind” shoshin, it was written than expertise doesn’t equal high intellect or new ideas. This struck me, as much of what I must do in my daily work as a designer is emphasize the value of my expertise and ideas to the public. If it is true—that expertise is simply a fixed knowledge—then I feel the need to explain how one can potentially be both an expert and a thinker of new ideas at the same time.
An expert is someone who is an authority, or has extensive knowledge of a subject. It isn’t a casual collection of information (more than a serious hobby), but a rigorous focus and study of something. It can be defined by credentials (ie. a college degree, or a certificate claiming X has studied Y for Z amount of time, or even tested accordingly). What this means though is that there is a quantifiable understanding of a literal subject, which you could consider the groundwork for real thinking.
By contrast, shoshin is about an approach to thinking not unlike the way a child’s mind works early on. It is centered around being open minded and receptive to the new—free of bias that comes with experience and understanding.
The ability to balance both being an expert and shoshin is NOT common, as the two are at odds with one another: Becoming an expert requires a controlled focus in one area, assuming a system of organized ideas or rule about a topic. Shoshin is centered on having no rules or guide rails—freedom to observe, explore, and play.
To be an expert alone is only telling part of the potential larger value. As an expert, one can tell you the state of things as they are at present, but can only think the unthinkable—have new ideas—by also channeling shoshin. I imagine a conversation between the two to go like this:
Expert: “The apple fell to the ground because there is gravity. So anything that you drop or anything that goes up, must fall down to the ground.”
Shoshin: “Does gravity always apply to all things, everywhere in the universe, at all times? If so, how do we know that it will?”
