Beginner's Mind

Johnson and Wes

This article is a challenge for a number of reasons. The two subjects are folks who do not prefer attention. Both are at the extreme high end of the “Competent” range, in that they possess most or all of the skills I’ve already described and the others I haven’t gotten to yet. Choosing what to write about them is challenging. Both would heartily deny all of that, because they are absurdly humble. To cap off the difficulty, both like to present themselves to the world as grumpy and intimidating, which doesn’t appear to jibe with the fuzzy, caring collaborators many of my examples so far have been. (Of course I also can’t give you innumerable examples of their gentleness, cheer, or consideration lest it ruin their images. Don’t tell them I said that.) But as quite different kinds of people than the prior examples, these two will well-illustrate that Competence comes in many styles. These two illustrate a completely different way to manifest it.

I’m not entirely certain Mr. Johnson and Wes appear in the same part of my martial-arts timeline, but frankly, y’all don’t care and neither do I. This isn’t a biography. Instead I’ll tell you an early memory I have of each just to set your impression.

If you are not a martial artist, you are still probably aware through movies and such that hierarchy matters a lot to us. Rank exists for many good reasons. Addressing senior folks with respect, titles, etc. is the culture in most martial arts, including the one I practiced with these two. These individuals are senior to me. I don’t train on the mat with them anymore, but they will always be senior to me in that context. They are also both close friends, and we have informal camaraderie. I’m referring to them here by names I’m comfortable with, not always titles of respect. But this context matters for what I’m describing. If what I’m describing seems at odds with how I refer to them, it is odd, you’re not wrong. My use of names rather than titles here isn’t meant to suggest equality (they are senior to me and I know it) and doesn’t reflect any lack of respect.

I almost certainly met Wes first. He was connected with our school almost since its origin, and I only remember him as a black-belt. He trained mainly with my instructors, but he was around. The adult students knew him, and we were uniformly intimidated by him. Intimidated in a good, healthy, appropriate, and totally realistic way. Wes is the real thing. Wes engages with others as if we all have the potential to be the real thing too. To give you some bio, Wes is a master mechanic who owns his shop (one of the best in our region). He is strong, smart, and of all of the people I know, he’s one of the most capable of handling whatever comes up.

The early memory of Wes that sticks out best for me is the best black-belt class I’ve ever attended anywhere. I, importantly, was not a black-belt at the time. I had a habit of being very slow to change after my class, and would just sit quietly on the bench watching the black-belts train. Tacitly allowed, though not invited.

This memorable class, most of the people attending had an event to prepare for, leaving Wes with no partner. The instructor looked around, saw me in uniform, and said “go attack Wes with a knife.” (A wooden one, fortunately for me.)  I did that. For ninety minutes. I gave it every last bit of determination and skill I could muster (I have plenty of determination at least). In that ninety minutes I recall getting the edge of that wooden knife to connect at most three times, none seriously. I couldn’t begin to count how often I was deftly disarmed and stabbed though. Wes was just that good. He took my full-speed, full-power, determined attacks, and just handled them.

Wes has always treated me with the respect due someone of lower skill who is nonetheless training hard. Which is to say that he held back only enough to keep from injuring me, but left enough intention in his responses that I could learn something. I took that as my model of how a senior/more-skilled person should behave to someone junior, in martial arts or anything else. Helping them work to the very limits of their strength and ability, ensuring they don’t come to harm, and demonstrating skill to let them learn it. You can see many of the Competence skills in that one example.

Mr. Johnson I met a bit later. I knew who he was, he had founded our school, but when I attended he was not there other than for occasional visits. He served in the Army for most of that time. He was visiting during one belt test (for non-black-belts). I was helping that evening as an attacker in the free-response part of the test. Because I appreciate good, “realistic” attacks, I’ve always tried to learn how to deliver them to be a good training partner. That’s harder than it sounds. After the test, Mr. Johnson came up to talk with me. He’s a very large, silent, and extremely intimidating person. This isn’t a reputation he tries at all hard to dissuade. I don’t recall any conversation with him before that. So I assumed I was in trouble and probably looked like a deer in headlights. But he just came to say “you attacked very well, you should show the others how to do that.” It was a little while before I realized I’d survived that encounter.

Both of these folks have over time had a unique responsibility in our school, overseeing a grueling physical sort of “spirit test” for our black-belt candidates. Without going into a lot of details, that’s set them both up with a scary sort of reputation. As an observer over many years, it showed me their astute grasp of just how far individuals can be pushed in a way that will make them stronger rather than weaker. That’s a position of trust requiring great skill. It really needs Competence.

I’ve had many years to know both of these folks now, and could say a whole lot about each. But they wouldn’t appreciate that, and you don’t need to know much more as background. So on to what puts them in this series.

There is a concept in many martial arts called various things, but I’ll use “white-belt mentality” or, as in the title, “Beginner’s mind.” It’s foundational in our training. Being very good is, paradoxically, one of the things that gets most in the way of being outstanding. It’s true of any skill, but martial artists try hard to prevent that. Most of us know it’s coming and still it gets in our way. It’s all mindset.

You might think if you are very good that means there’s less for you to learn or that what’s left to learn is actually harder so learning slows down. Easy to believe it’s lower “ROI” to go from very good to outstanding. But not really. What most impedes improvement at many skills are things in your head that come from already being good.

It’s a funny thing, sometimes you get a person walking in the door of a martial arts (or any) school already thinking they know things. Maybe they studied a different martial art. Maybe they watched a lot of movies where everything looks effortless. Maybe they just think they’re fabulous. Those folks, if they don’t have those misconceptions dismantled by a competent teacher, are likely to either be terrible and think they aren’t, or get frustrated when training doesn’t match their vision of it and leave. Thinking they’re good gets in the way of learning anything at all.

With people who train long-term it’s more insidious. All it takes is believing that you’re good to become rapidly less good. It’s an ego thing, yes, but sometimes it’s just believing too hard in something truthful. It might be very true that you’ve trained for X years and you “know” Y techniques, and you’ve accomplished and acquired skill and knowledge. You might be objectively very very good. But if you start thinking too much about that acquired skill, the parts of the mountain you’ve already climbed, and lose focus on how much much higher the mountain still rises above you, you might as well hang up your belt. Until or unless you can regain “white belt mentality” you’re done.

For some folks who think “black belt” is a destination, that’s a given. It is. They get there, think they’re at the top of the mountain, and they’re finished. Maybe leaving, maybe just staying on in “maintenance mode” forever, but not really improving or learning.

Others know the risk, and hang on with teeth and toenails to their beginner’s mind, but you’ll still find very senior folks, who should know better, believing their own press...and stagnating accordingly. It is supremely hard to maintain the realistic confidence in ability, the objective truth that you are good at something, alongside the gut-level awareness that there is an infinite amount still to learn, that “better than I am now” is a permanent possibility.

“Black belts are just white belts who haven’t quit” is the pithy phrase. Black belts need to be white belts. Like they started training and their white belts just got dirty from training so much.

Competent people of all kinds seem to have a visceral knowledge that the amount they don’t know is much, even infinitely greater than the amount they do. The result is that they’re unstoppable vortices sucking in new knowledge, they have a perpetual huge capacity to improve their skills. In martial arts and other skills, a hallmark of that is a love of “the fundamentals.” Competent people can be good at something and still know they’re just beginners at it and so the return to beginner practices. Reviewing, asking for feedback. Training repeatedly as if it was the first time.

Wes and Johnson are supremely good at things. Both are deep and effective thinkers. They seek knowledge and skill in many domains, particularly in their specific lines of work and interests. These two are who you go to when a situation is extremely bad. In their areas of expertise, they are among the best anywhere. In at least two areas I can think of, Wes is the best skilled and most knowledgeable person I know. Johnson is more than that. He’s got some areas of specialization, but it’s more that he has vast knowledge, and that he can simply figure out what’s needed even when dropped into a situation with little or no prior knowledge or experience.

At one point a few years ago, my workplace needed someone to do some organizing work. Johnson happened to be available, and I asked if he might take the role for a while. It wasn’t at all squarely in his wheelhouse, but in another sense it really was. Johnson had fundamental skills (being hyper organized, detail-oriented, persistent, and goal-oriented among others) that he could assemble into an optimal skill-set to fit this role. He laid a foundation in a few months that we’re still using years later. Looking a bit below the surface, it was “beginner’s mind” that made him exactly the person to drop into chaos to create order. The combination of believing he had everything to learn, along with decades of practicing those fundamental skills gave him the ability to rapidly grasp what was going on, find information, learn it, and implement new organizational strategies.

Johnson and Wes apply precisely the same strategies to martial arts training. Walking onto the mat constantly alert for new things to learn, knowing they need to practice fundamentals as if it’s always new. That’s what beginner’s mind looks like.

With all of that going on, metaphorically speaking these two ought to have very big heads. They do not. (It was pointed out by one that the other has a very physically big head. Being Competent does not preclude being obnoxious.) But on the inside of their heads, they always know they have more to learn. They have a visceral grasp that what they don’t know is far greater than what they do.

I could use Johnson and Wes as examples of any of these Competence skills, but they epitomize how beginner’s mind operates. It is simply not possible to be as excellent at things as these two are without staying “white belts.”

Having beginner’s mind doesn’t mean pretending you don’t know things. When Wes or Johnson are teaching or performing their work, they bring powerful capacity, knowledge, and skill to bear on every problem. They will learn from anyone though. Rank doesn’t matter, only that someone has genuine information or technique to offer. (Neither has any patience for hot air or nonsense. They have real skill and they recognize real skill. But they respect real skill, whoever has it.) Beginner’s mind makes them willing to be wrong in a way that displays strength rather than weakness. Being wrong offers the opportunity to become informed and less wrong.

I think that’s something people find intimidating about both Wes and Johnson. Anyone with too much “Fake it till you make it” would be intimidated by “real.” In a martial context, that’s people of much greater rank knowing instinctively that either of these two could wipe the floor with them. Technically speaking, my belt rank is higher than Wes’ these days, and I topped-out just shy of Johnson’s rank. Not-technically speaking, that’s only because neither one chose to focus on the specific curriculum for belt advancement after a certain point. Also not-technically, they will always be senior to me. Their capacity to think as a beginner is a big part of why.

Let me address the “intimidating” thing a bit. Competence comes in so many forms that I couldn’t possibly describe “a Competent person comes across as _____.” Wes and Johnson are ferocious thinkers who look like the bodyguards you use if you’re a wealthy misanthrope, maybe a Bond villain. They don’t encourage familiarity. When they want to be seen at all, the word that pops to mind is often “menacing.” On the surface, not people who seem like team-building, other-people-developing, empathetic, energetic fountains of grace and unicorn rainbows.

But actually they are all of those things (except the unicorn rainbows). Wes runs a shop that retains mechanics who could work anywhere but who choose to work for him. He’s got fiercely loyal customers. People who know him uniformly respect him. He keeps his word, and has more integrity than any dozen normal people. He would do anything for a friend, and a whole lot for a stranger. (And Wes’ “anything” is a good bit more practical than most people’s.) Wes is slow to anger, but formidable and implacable as a hurricane once riled. Anything fragile would be safer with him than almost anywhere else. He’s an astute businessperson. As an instructor he can bring the best out of his students. But he can handle people as well as any extrovert, and when you meet him, you know it.

Johnson made a career of effective teamwork in his military service. He could choose to be the scariest boss, but as a civilian manager he’s the one figuring out how to get his team what they need. He actively learns how to treat everyone with respect and equity. He’s the one accepting people where they are and challenging them to rise. He’s the one constantly seeking new ways to be better at what he does when others might “retire in place.” With decades of experience under his belt(s), he started training in a different martial art a couple of years ago. Hearing him talk about it is like hearing a kid describe a candy store. Unlike the old insecure martial artists who start a new art and drag their baggage with them, inflicting it on their new school, Johnson sees it as all new and learns accordingly. Johnson assumes competence (not in a being-fooled way, in a believing people have great capacity sense). He actually might be able to produce a unicorn rainbow or two if one was required. But only an abject fool would intentionally get on the wrong side of him, or ask him about the unicorns.

If you tick through the list of Competence attributes, you would find Wes and Johnson shining in almost all of them. I believe the foundational skill for both is that Competent people know they don’t know anything. While the rest of the world is astonished by how much these people do know, they brush aside that piddling beginning in favor of the infinite amount there still is to learn. (Of course they have each other, and other solid friends to remind them that they don’t know anything. It’s always good to have that kind of “help.”)

In the last article I introduced a weakness some Competent folks have not believing in their own worth as a result of some of these traits. Beginner’s “knowing they don’t know anything” white-belt mentality can have a corrosive effect of that kind at times. It does have to balance with healthy awareness of skill. It takes a certain kind of mind to balance the needed cognitive dissonance of “I am good at X, Y, and Z” with “I’m a beginner at X, Y, and Z.” But when it’s healthy and strong, it’s like a dragon with a skill-hoard who knows there’s infinitely more still to acquire while valuing every bauble they already have. That’s beginner’s mind.