Shoshin - beginner’s mind in product management and business

Shoshin is the Zen Buddhism concept of the beginner’s mind. A beginner’s mind is open, unexplored, and free from preconceived notions. More than a factual circumstance, a beginner’s mind is a mindset you can cultivate and mold over time. Aligned with the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, a beginner’s mind can be a portal to innovative ideas and solid human connections.

The opposite of a beginner’s mind is the jaded sensation that “you already know it”. It is the implicit competing commitment that if you don’t signal your expertise to the people around you, you lose your identity because your intellectual accomplishments define you as an individual. This may be a cognitive distortion, I propose. As professor Nic Voge posits in this Ted Talk, self-worth theory is the tendency of some students to associate their human value with their school grades. When you leave school, you may tie such a tendency to your work, or the money you earn.

And if your self-worth is predicated on the work you do, the knowledge you have acquired over time, and the money you earn, you may naturally pursue the path of least resistance: wearing your armor and distancing yourself from the unexplored territory. In truth, there are an infinite number of things you don’t know. Maybe you don’t even know you don’t know them. Or maybe you do, and that’s why you wear the armor in the first place—to avoid confronting your own oblivion. Yet, you’ve built your whole existence on mastering some specific field such as carpentry, accounting, business management, leadership, or whatever it may be. Your ego—the force of resistance against a beginner’s mind—gets in the way.

And the way to let go of resistance may be found in internalizing the truth of your finitude, as Oliver Burkeman suggests in his book 4,000 weeks. Memento mori, as the Stoics would phrase it. In the grand scheme of things (i.e., world history), your life is finite and not that long. And everyone around you is stuck in that same boat. Is it worth it to get into egoic fights and constant status-seeking games, after all?

An example of the beginner’s mind relevance is product management (i.e., building new products or innovation). You can’t create new rules of the game if you are not capable enough to descend down into the humbling recognition that you don’t know most things in life. In product management, for example, you build new products based on your users’ inputs. A beginner’s mind lets you genuinely listen to the users, and use the facts plus your natural, child-like intuition to build the product, rather than your own baggage of beliefs cultivated over a lifetime. The facts are friendly, as Carl Rogers put it in his book “On Becoming a Person.”