Amateur Be New <2024>

Expertise is valuable. We need skilled surgeons, pilots, and engineers. But expertise has a dark side: it can fossilize into rigidity. Psychologists call this cognitive entrenchment —the tendency for deep knowledge in a domain to make you less flexible, less creative, and more resistant to new information.

Think of a child learning to draw. They don’t worry about perspective or anatomy. They just make marks . And those marks are often astonishingly expressive—because they aren’t filtered through decades of “how to draw correctly.” When you allow yourself to be new, you recover that childlike permission to explore, fail, and surprise yourself. amateur be new