The more one leans towards ego, the further one is from mastery.

By Sam Yang - Get similar updates here

Shoshin (初心) is the beginner's mind. Derived from Zen Buddhism, it is the quintessential mindset for learning. It is openness, eagerness, and the lack of preconceptions, no matter the level of study.

The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Left to its own devices, it gets distracted and cluttered. To discard the clutter, one must surrender their ego and their fixed identity and become formless. (In education, this is known as growth vs. fixed.) Surrendering of oneself does not mean the loss of autonomy, it means being challenged to grow — growing through humility, learning through service, becoming a student and figuratively (and sometimes literally) bowing to another. To keep the clutter (心猿 "monkey mind") at bay, one must replace it with shoshin, the devoted student. Removing the clutter brings focus, but the beginner's mind maintains it.

Becoming a student is a skill in the same way resilience is a skill; it grows stronger the more you are challenged. For leadership to be democratic, one must voluntarily allow another to lead. This challenges one's ego, but this ability to pull back is not weakness but quiet strength, it is the same quality an award-winning actor uses in a supporting role. Pushing ahead to be heard when one's knowledge is lacking, or when inappropriate, is the false facade of insecurity. To give up one's control is frightening, but also liberating — this is the duality of learning.

In the Mind of a Child Is Freedom

Nearly everyone is a master to a child. The "monkey" has yet to hijack their minds with confusion and arrogance. One can compare the monkey mind to the behavior of a child, restless and confused. Yet how is the behavior of a model student also like a child?

A child is raw and formless; it can be many things, used in many different contexts. It is the classical analogy, much like water is the perfect metaphor. However, whatever the child is, is yet to be deeply rooted. In the West, one would say they have no "baggage." A child does not have the luxury of a textured past to get in the way of their learning. They are children: they play, learn, move, and think. There are few obstacles for a child. A child wants to hear, the adult wants to speak. A child wants to learn, while the adult has already made up his mind — leading to the same repetitive mistakes. A child acts like a monkey but her mind is serene; an adult may act calm but his mind is like a monkey. The monkey mind is a disease of adolescence — where monkey behavior becomes monkey thinking. If growing up and experience were enough, there would be no bad adult drivers, and we would only become kinder as we grew older. Yet that is not the case, it is not about the age but about the mindset, and we made the most forward leaps as beginners.

Discipline requires humility. Change happens through adaption from imposed demands. Do not cherry-pick the learning process, yield to it. In the example of diet, the classical response is, "I already know what to do, I just need to do it" — this is the rejection of learning and the embracing of anti-knowledge. Through the service economy, there are no more students, just customers — never giving up control, the priority on being right rather than making beneficial changes. Then the "customer" must continuously look for a service provider who can not only do it the way they want, but still create different results than what they have gotten. This behavior is not exclusive to diet/ exercise; it is an observation of a greater system of thinking (or the avoidance of thinking). But many refined diners have learned, sometimes their experience is best when it is omakase (お任せ) "chef's choice."

One can learn martial arts from a book, but the effectiveness of the book won't nearly be that of a good teacher's. One's ego will sabotage one's happiness, one's personal life, one's educational life, one's financial life, one's professional life, one's spiritual life, and the legacy one leaves behind. It's not rational, it doesn't care about the best outcome or the most return for time and energy. Ego and mastery exist on opposite ends of the same continuum. The more one leans towards ego, the further one is from mastery.