9 Out of 10 Experts Agree

That’s kind of the problem with experts—they agree. They coalesce around common wisdom, and fail to see the uncommon, unpredictable world emerging right before their eyes.

I don’t mean to downplay the importance of experience. Too often, our youth-obsessed culture treats hard-earned wisdom as a quaint, nostalgic OK-Boomer self-congratulation. But we can’t afford to let the wisdom we gain through experience become fossilized into stone, impervious to new experiences and new conditions.

We should take a lesson from evolutionary biology. We once thought that evolution was a steady, incremental process, but more recently, that version has been turned on its head. It seems that evolution is characterized by long periods of relative stability, interrupted by sudden, cataclysmic extinctions and bursts of new species. When conditions are constant, organisms can rely on previous adaptations to help them survive. But when the world changes quickly, as with a massive asteroid strike or volcanic eruption, those old adaptations aren’t so adaptive anymore.

That’s how it is with our lives. We can go for a long time relying on past experience and the common wisdom of experts to guide us through our days.  But then, in times of sudden change, decisions that were rational and useful when we made them no longer serve us so well. In order to gain control of our fate and thrive again, we need to evolve more rapidly. We need to make a quantum leap. 

The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said: “To the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind, there are few.” When the world is spinning out of control, it’s tempting to entrench ourselves in established habits, or cling to the comfort of common wisdom, but in truth, we should do the opposite. We should become beginners again, and get curious about what’s actually unfolding right in front of us.