This meme’s been making its way around the internet, in various forms.
For me, it represents the path from novice to expert. Sometimes, the novice and expert share the same wisdom, it’s the middle that gets confusing. The middle is where we learn and often overthink. The memes got me thinking about areas in my life where I’ve reached some level of expertise. While it’s taken some time to learn, I’ve reached similar conclusions as when I started.
Yoga and startup investing are two area’s I’ve seen this most acutely. In yoga, when I started practicing yoga, my body forced me to breathe! It was hard, I was out of breath, and I needed air. As I practiced more, I used tools to learn to deepen my practice. My physical body no longer needed the breathe as desperately, but my spiritual no did. With even more practice, I can sit and breathe, without too many other tools.
I’ve found a similar dynamic in early stage investing. When I first started in venture capital, I didn’t have the tools to assess companies, but I had a gut to assess people. I layered in tools and frameworks as I built more expertise. And now, with more learning, I confidently come back to the importance of team.
I appreciate the irony of the standard distribution of learning. Usually, I like to think of learning not as linear, but shaped like a cone. Both three dimensional and circular in nature. As we learn things in more depth, we can often reach similar conclusions as we started, but we have a more nuanced understanding of the why and the how. This circle continue to spiral deeper as we learn more.
The learning middle is crucial to have the felt, experienced, conviction that can come with wisdom. With it comes the humility that often accompanies learning (and nearly always accompanies wisdom). Approaching life with a beginners mind can bring wisdom more quickly. Novices start with fewer assumptions. Assumptions, when not confronted directly, can slow down learning. The middle section feels hard. We often overcomplicate it. I believe this comes from the fundamental insecurity that happens as we learn. We are uncomfortable when we don’t know something, and we are desperate to reconcile what we don’t know. We must actively push back against this compulsion.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler1. Wisdom, in part, comes from sitting with the complexities of the outside world and your understanding. At ease with the fact that you don’t know everything and never will. Understanding that things should be made simpler, but not too simple.
From Einstein, though he may have actually said, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”