From Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-term Fulfillment by George Leonard:
“…I began to see more than a casual relationship between learning and the willingness to be foolish, between the master and the fool. By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, dignifying the fertile voice form which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows for new things to come into being.
“The theme of emptiness as a precondition to significant learning shows up in the familiar tale of the wise man who calmed to the Sun master, haughty in hi great wisdom, asking how he can become even wiser. The master simply puts tea into the wise man’s cup and keeps pouring until the cup runs over and spills all over the wise man, letting him know without da that if one’s cup is already full there is no space for anything new….
“How many times have you failed to try something new out of fear of being thought silly? How often have you censored your spontaneity for fear of being thought childish? Too bad. Psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered a childlike quality (he called it a ‘second naïveté ’) in people who have met an unusually high degree of their potential. Ashleigh Montagu used the term Netanyahu (from neonate, meaning newborn) to describe geniuses such a s Mozart and Einstein. What we frown at as foolish in our friends, or ourselves, we’re likely to smile as as merely eccentric in a world-renowned genius, never stopping to think that the freedom to be foolish might well be one of the keys to the genius’s success—or even to something as basic as learning to talk.”
“The freedom to be foolish”—what a gift! When we are relaxed and cheerful about making mistakes and willing to bring a childlike wonder to our work, then we are truly on the road to mastery! Write on!
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