The Beginner's Mind

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.”

Bruce Lund is the owner/founder of Lund and Company Innovation, a toy design and product invention company (inventors of Tickle Me Elmo). His company is dedicated to the proposition that toys are profoundly important. Great toys teach, entertain, surprise, inspire and invite inquiry.

Mr. Lund wrote this blog and I thought it was so good, I wanted to share it with you. Normally, I post a brief quote and then comment on it, but in this case, I’m passing on his blog in its entirety without comment . . . there’s nothing I could say that would improve or clarify what he has written. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Bruce Lund on The Beginner’s Mind

In our work, we have to have the ‘Beginner's Mind’, that innocent state of mind - a way of thinking and believing that all things are possible. I had forgotten that term. The Beginner's Mind does not know what cannot be done, and thus all things become possible.

Typically, as we age and learn, we develop this acute sense of what can’t be done, what is impossible. We become clever, logical, and incisive in our thinking and we begin to start demonstrating to others how smart we are at perceiving what won’t work. Most all of the designers I have worked with over these last 25 years have been keen to explain to me why ideas I suggest will not or cannot work. I am always entertained by their explanations and often frustrated, I will admit. But of course, they are on the threshold of discovering the processes of invention. These processes make the unlikely possible, and on occasion, the impossible possible. But only if you can approach the work with the Beginner’s Mind.

When we take on a project that we do not believe can work, we will always be right - and it won’t work. It is a tribute to the designers, inventors, and tinkerers who have been successful contributors to our team that they have been able set aside their inborn, natural critic to undertake projects without pre-judgment of the likely outcome. In doing so, they are often surprised at what they accomplish.

There is a special joy in making something that one didn’t think could be made, in doing something one didn’t believe could be done. We do that time and again because we are willing to believe all things are possible with the innocence of thought, the absence of doubt, the suspension of disbelief . . . the Beginner's Mind.

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