With the new year under way in all its dark and dreary Januaryness, some of you might already be losing the motivation to follow through on the promises you made just a few days ago — to become healthier, wealthier, wirier and altogether more impressive versions of yourselves in 2023. If you haven’t already given up on them, 80 per cent of you are likely to have abandoned any resolutions you might have made by the second week of February.But before you are tempted to abandon this column too, allow me to offer you something a little more hopeful. You might not be managing to jump merrily out of bed every morning at 4am, or to make much progress on the 10,000-hours-to-mastery thing, but there are less arduous ways of tackling self-improvement that could end up having more impact.
In fact, sometimes being a “master” at something can be a disadvantage, taking you further away from enlightenment, not closer to it. So rather than trying to become the world’s greatest expert in whatever it is that you have decided is necessary to justify your existence this year, you might focus instead on something a little simpler: cultivating a “beginner’s mind”.
A translation of the Japanese term shoshin, this is a concept that comes from Zen Buddhism. The idea is that everyone — no matter how advanced or experienced they are — should try to approach things with the same openness, curiosity, flexibility and desire to learn that characterises the attitude of beginners. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s, there are few,” wrote the Buddhist Monk Shunryu Suzuki in his 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.