In his book The Creative Act, author and producer Rick Rubin writes about the idea of beginner's mind:
“We tend to believe that the more we know, the more clearly we can see the possibilities available.
This is not the case. The impossible only becomes accessible when experience has not taught us limits."
He uses the example of AlphaGo, an AI
trained to play the ancient and notoriously complex board game Go.
Reflecting on it's famous defeat of the reigning Go grandmaster in 2016, Rubin posits:
"Did the computer win because it knew more than the grandmaster or because it knew less?...
It wasn’t necessarily its intelligence. It was the fact that the machine learned the game from scratch, with no coach, no human intervention, no lessons based on an expert’s past experience.
...And so this wasn’t just a landmark event in AI development. It was the first time Go had been played with the full spectrum of possibilities available. With a clean slate, AlphaGo was able to innovate, devise something completely new, and transform the game forever.”
I loved this part of the book, not just because of the strength of the example, but because it taps into something central to creativity. We need to be able to suspend our preconceptions in order to see the full field of possible solutions.
But it's not just super-intelligent
AI that has access to this form of openness.
Writing of her time teaching poetry to fourth-graders, poet Hannah Gamble was stunned by the expressive capability of the children in her
class.
They used language in a way that newly revealed its possibilities. She reflects on the purity of the students' naive creativity:
"These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…
...and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader.
The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn't been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way."
How are your pre-conceptions getting in the way of great solutions?
Can you approach your problems and projects with greater naivety?
Is there a way to be more blind in the way you explore the solution space?
Or, as I closed with in the back matter of Natural Orders:
"...to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees." – William Blake
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