Newborn Wisdom

A friend asked me

"If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?"

And I took it quite seriously, and gave it some thought. (We have to follow the sense of the question – even though we cannot communicate with a newborn, we can give him/her a medallion with an inscription and explain it later.)

"Follow your dreams" was the first saying that hit me. But what kind of advice is that? Sometimes you should follow your dreams, and sometimes not. I have several dreams I am glad that I didn't chase. So it doesn't really say anything. Let us try something else,

"Appreciate what you have", "Don't do unto others that which you do not want done unto you" (the golden rule), "Search for your own happiness, not other peoples unhappiness", "The meaning of life is to be happy and useful". All of these are quite common, and you will hear them several times, from all kinds of people (except the last one from Ghandi – somehow people tend to forget it). But if I could offer some advice, and only one thing, I would want it to be something that most people don't know, and that they don't know that they don't know. And it would also need to carry a lot of information, unlike the "follow your dreams"-quote.

"Give yourself and the world room to fail and be mistaken," is what I ended up with. This originally comes from an understanding of what limits the learning and intelligence of my students when they embark on a university education. They often think that the goal is to be right, that those who give correct answers are the smartest people. So they keep their inquiries inside their sphere of knowledge, they don't ask or answer questions where they might seem stupid, they show the world how much they know, not how much they would like to learn. If someone wins an argument by convincing the other party, that person gains some measure of respect, or as I said, he wins. The feeling of changing your viewpoint (after being convinced) is a crappy feeling of loss. But if you look at the outcome of the dialogue, the "loosing" party learned ten times more than those who won. The looser should be proclaimed the winner.

This doesn't apply only when you loose the argument (you should loose with gratitude), but also when you win an argument. People who are correct and convincing often see themselves as all high and mighty, superior to the other party. If you feel this, and let it shine through (for example via body-language) you destroy much of the potential in future dialogues, including your own potential for learning, and, of course, you diminish the current outcome.

So far we have only looked at what I mean by saying "Give yourself and the world room to be mistaken." But what about the part with "failing"? Why is it important to fail, and to give the world an opportunity to disappoint you? If you always succeed at what you do, or have a high rate of success, it is a sign that you are working entirely within the box. If you only ever stretch your comfort zone a tiny bit, adding just a grain of sand, the probability of failure is small. To think outside the box is to allow for failure, to be creative is to allow for poor results.

If you never let the world disappoint you, you ask too little of it. If you don't want to be denied a job, so you don't even apply for it, you fall into this trap. If you never tell the people around you about your dreams because they might laugh at you instead of helping you, you do not give them the opportunity to disappoint you, and neither do you give them the opportunity of helping you succeed.