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Last time, I wrote on how you can take your present knowledge and apply it to a new situation. Today I’d like to point out why that may not be the best thing to do at first.
Why Naiveté is good.
Let’s go back to the stocks professional who took a job in property management. She could bring in her skillset and adapt that way, but that comes with a heavy penalty: In adopting those patterns of thought she will aslo adopt those same mental filters. It’s unavoidable. In order for her system for dealing with things to work, she will have to interpret the raw data according to what she learned working with stocks. This can have disastrous consequences.
For example: She may have learned in the ultra-competitive arena of stock deals that everyone is in it for themselves. Depending on how strongly that pattern is felt, she may view the tenants as rivals. Perhaps even enemies. Far from helping her out, this will only increase friction. Furthermore, if a tenant discovers something wrong (like a broken water main), they may avoid informing her simply because of that bad relationship.
Seeing Everything.
How often has this happened to you: You’re sitting there wrestling with a nasty problem. You’ve thought it over and over and you still haven’t come up with anything. Someone who knows far less than you happens by and notices a key fact that you missed. Often, this will lead straight to the solution of the problem.
The reason it works is that the new person doesn’t have mental filters on. This allows them to actually see hear and perceive more than you are. The same is true for the new property manager. If she’s smart, she will put her old knowledge on hold for a while, and just experience and notice the new environment to the best of her ability.
You also see this when someone trains their replacement at work. Oftentimes the person coming in winds up with a carbon-copy “map” of how everything works. While this may be considered a good thing in some cases, it’s bad for innovation, expansion, or growth.
Learning How to Know Nothing.
In Mind Performance Hacks, Ron Hale-Evans explains the value of naiveté in terms of the Mentats from the Dune series. Being human computers, they could process huge problems, and one of the critical ways they did this was by maintaining a “naive mind”. He then goes on to compare this concept to the “Beginner’s Mind” concept from Zen.
While absolute objectivity is generally believed to be outside the realm of possibility, you can learn to “step back” mentally, and deliberately interpret only what you see and experience. One easy method, if you have adopted a hero, is to form the picture of the perfect newbie. Someone entirely new to the situation, with no preconceptions. Then wear your “newbie suit” for a while and see what you see. Try it out, and let us hear about your experiences in the comments.
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