The Art of Not-Knowing

Learning to Be a Student

“It ain’t the things you don’t know that get you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” –Josh Billings, American Humorist

I’ve been teaching one thing or another for over thirty years now, and the single greatest barrier for people learning anything still seems to be the old cliché that we all learned about in The Empire Strikes Back, that was clearly inspired from Zen’s ancient “Empty Your Cup” story. There’s so much in this scene.

Luke’s X-Wing sinks entirely below the surface of the swamp.

Luke: “No, we’ll never get it out now!”

Yoda: “So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say?”

Luke: “Master, moving stones around is one thing, but this is totally different!”

Yoda: “No. No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Luke, sighing: “Alright, I’ll give it a try.”

Yoda: “No. Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

Luke sighs again, and tries to lift the X-wing out of the swamp using the Force, and fails.

Luke: “I can’t, it’s too big.”

Yoda: “Size matters not. Look at me; judge me by my size do you? Hmm? And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. It’s energy, surrounds us, and binds us. Luminous beings are we! Not this crude matter. (touches Luke’s arm) You must feel the Force around you. Between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship.”

Luke stands up to leave: “You want the impossible.”

As Luke walks off, Yoda closes his eyes and reaches out to the X-wing through the Force. R2 beeps excitedly as the X-wingfloats up out of the swamp, and sets down next to Luke.

Luke: “I don’t believe it!”

Yoda, solemnly and with a sigh: “That… is why you fail.”

A beginner’s mind is one of the most important components of being an effective student. Most of our school conditioning is unfortunately poor preparation for real learning. As children, we’re forced to learn a lot of things that we’re promised will help us in life as adults that just don’t.

This is a betrayal. Mainstream education is a tragedy in content, and one of the consequences of this in context is that it sours most people’s relationship to learning. We learn that teachers are people who at best ostensibly care about us and force us to learn what someone else decided is important.

Many students learn to do the minimum to get by because they clearly see that school is largely a waste of time. This is a reasonable strategy, a kind of compensation mechanism. The problem is that we always get better at what we practice, so if you didn’t learn discipline, follow-through, and academic rigor in school, that can and will hurt you as an adult.

I see these patterns in adults often. People wait until the last day to do the work, don’t do the work at all, or do it incompletely as if they were in a Pass/Fail class they do for the credit rather than the learning. But you’re no longer in high school history cramming for a test. You’re an adult, but you may not know how to learn like one yet. If your work habits look at all like a rebellious teenager who hates school, you won’t get what you want. So it’s okay if you haven’t yet learned to be an effective student, but eventually you will probably want to learn.

You may notice qualities on the other side of the spectrum: perfectionism, desire to “perform well,” over-doing things, etc. As child-students without real choice, typically we erred on one side or the other. We either learned to play the game to please the authority or hated them for it. Both of these are ineffective ways of relating to learning that can be worked through to arrive at learning based on your own self-authority, rather than organized around an external authority.

We learn to care about looking good as teenagers and some of us never stop polishing our self-image, unfortunately. Beginner’s mind means your fidelity to reality is more important than your self-image. It means you don’t have a problem saying, “Wow, I suck at this,” “I feel totally stupid,” and/or “I’m lost.”

Out loud.

That’s when the deepest learning can begin.

“The problem with most failing businesses I’ve encountered is not that their owners don’t know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations—they don’t, but those things are easy enough to learn—but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know. The greatest businesspeople I’ve met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.”

–Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited (Foreword p. xiii)

Let me put a fine point on it: Truly intelligent, aware, and/or skilled people have the ability to own, explicitly and for anyone to see, where they’re clueless. That’s how you become great at anything. Own the suck.

I understood this mentally for years before I really got it. I studied Jujitsu in college and earned my black belt at the end of my senior year, but I was already looking for more. I had talent and skill, but I sensed I needed to change on the inside (I had no idea how much) and became fascinated by what are known as the “internal” arts.

At 22, when I began training Aikido seriously in San Francisco, I wore a white belt because that’s what you do. You start over, at the bottom. This was humbling, particularly when I trained with a consummate martial artist named Gregory. Gregory had black belts in Kenpo Karate, Jujitsu, and Aikido. He was and always remained better than I was. He was fitter, faster, and more skilled. In particular, his expertise in Jujitsu was instrumental in deconstructing my robust self-image.

When I worked with Gregory, he saw my comfort-zone Jujitsu habits in Day-Glo orange. As soon as he figured me out, and it didn’t take long, he wouldn’t let me move an inch in the direction of where Jujitsu would dictate. Jujitsu goes with the opponent’s energy just long enough to manipulate. Aikido requires a much deeper, longer, and more sincere blend. It’s more like a dance and I didn’t know how, but didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to do Aikido movements (content) with a Jujitsu energy (context), and with most people I got away with it.

But Gregory forced me to dance, and if I did anything else he turned into a refrigerator I couldn’t budge. It takes real awareness and skill to be able to do that, I would later learn.

I became so frustrated I would literally start to tear up, because the immense sense of control I had with Jujitsu he could easily neutralize. He made me feel like the white belt that I was, when a part of me was still trying to ride high as the big man in the Jujitsu dojo. It was profoundly embarrassing, but after a few months of this seeming torture, I lost my Jujitsu habits and begin learning Aikido quickly. His rigor, discipline, and attention to detail probably saved me two years of faking it.

He wasn’t a teacher yet. He wasn’t getting paid. He cared about the art and me enough to not accept anything less than my best and he took his role as a senior student seriously. He wouldn’t let me create my own diluted version of the art out of comfort, habit, and misplaced confidence. That’s the kind of mentor you want.

Or do you?

Do you want want a mentor like Gregory? Many people think they do. They say they want honesty, excellence, and someone who challenges them. What they usually mean is that they want those things as long as they remain comfortable, which is a “cake and eat it too” play. It’s the self-image of being a real student.

Gregory did not make me comfortable. He made it impossible for me to continue pretending. Every habit I relied on, he exposed. Every shortcut I took, he blocked. Every place where I thought I knew more than I did, he revealed. At the time, it made me crazy.

Today I recognize this as one of the greatest gifts I ever received. The developmental question was never whether Gregory knew more than I did. That was obvious. The developmental question was whether I was willing to stop defending what I thought I knew so I could learn something new. Could I be great at Jujitsu and suck at Aikido at the same time?

That sounds simple, but it’s not. Many people spend years searching for great teachers while quietly rejecting the conditions that make great teaching possible. A great teacher eventually collides with your self-image. A great teacher eventually exposes a limitation you would rather not see. A great teacher eventually demonstrates that something you are certain about is incomplete.

At that moment, learning and self-image pull in opposite directions. Most people imagine that development requires intelligence, and it certainly helps. But what it requires even more is the willingness to discover that you do not understand what you think you understand.

The student who cannot do that cannot be taught, not because the teacher lacks skill, but because the student’s false confidence has become more important than reality.

That was the lesson Gregory taught me.

Not only Aikido, but more importantly epistemic humility. Not the performative humility of saying, “I could be wrong.” The deeper humility of being able to stay in an embodied, “I do not yet get what the teacher does.”

Without that, development slows to a crawl. With it, years of growth can happen in months. In my experience, the willingness to not know is often the doorway through which all meaningful learning enters. It’s not something you learn once, either; you keep learning it, layer after layer.

It takes a lot of work to know something: to learn how to read, speak another language, build a house, etc. Knowing stuff is great. Know what you know. Embody that. Own that.

But most people don’t get that the other place is not-knowing. That’s a different kind of work. When reality shows you that you don’t know something, own that too.

Embody that.

Know what you know.

Don’t know what you don’t know.

Don’t confuse the two.

Finally then I went to the hand-workers. For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing, but I knew I should find that they knew many fine things. And in this I was not deceived; they did know what I did not, and in this way they were wiser than I.

But, men of Athens, the good artisans also seemed to me to have the same failing as the poets; because of practicing his art well, each one thought he was very wise in the other most important matters, and this folly of theirs obscured that wisdom, so that I asked myself in behalf of the oracle whether I should prefer to be as I am, neither wise in their wisdom nor foolish in their folly, or to be in both respects as they are. I replied then to myself and to the oracle that it was better for me to be as I am.

– Socrates, from Plato’s The Apology