Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why people avoid learning new things: they tie their identity to competence and fear looking incompetent. He argues adopting a "5-year-old beginner's mind" rewires this. Your brain loves solving puzzles and mastering the unknown, so approaching unfamiliar tasks with childlike curiosity naturally motivates learning.
A lot of times our identity can be caught up in our competence because as we've grown up, we've been rewarded for being competent, whether it was in school or in business or as a physician or a family person or a father or husband or whatever. And it's our competence, it's our identity. And so we lose our ability to try something new where we may appear to be incompetent, right? Like for somebody who's competent and they say, oh, surfing's hard. Well, I'm not gonna try that because I'm gonna go out there and look like a fool. And I won't be able to do it. But that's not a reason not to try it. I think the better way to do it is to take on the 5-year-old beginner's mind and go out and try it, because I can guarantee you, you will learn the most that you can learn when you're doing something where it's a little bit of an enigma to you, right? Your brain loves that. It loves to be challenged. It loves to learn stuff. I mean, that's how you learned how to do everything. Think about riding a bike, right? It's how you learned it.
