Saturday, February 09, 2008

Gleanings from Magazine: Beginner's Mind

Every month I buy a few magazines and I subscribe to a few more. I don't always manage to read them thoroughly though. Right now I'm just catching up with the January 2008 issue of Shambhala Sun.

Here's Frances Moore Lappé on the importance of "Beginner's Mind":

A student comes to assume that the foundational questions have all been settled and that to advance knowledge—and get ahead in your chosen field—you have to break ground at the frontier, not go "backward" to fundamentals. The discipline itself becomes the frame through which we see—or fail to see. I recall Jane Goodall saying that archaeologist Louis Leaky chose her to observe chimps precisely because she has not been trained. Leaky's hunch was that Goodall would see what professional anthropologists gave missed. He was right.

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