Five books of stupid

Steven Kotler has written 14 books, a shelf of them bestsellers, all on peak performance. His secret weapon is feeling like an idiot.

When Kotler enters a brand-new field, he buys five books on it, arranged from beginner to brutally technical. Then he reads all five under one strict rule: no judging his own confusion. Jargon washes over him. Whole chapters make no sense. He keeps going anyway.

By book five, something has changed. The patterns start assembling themselves. Terms that were noise in book one are load-bearing by book four. His brain, given enough raw material and zero shame, organised the field on its own.

Five books of stupid

Here's the uncomfortable bit: expertise kills creativity. The better you know a field, the harder it becomes to see it fresh. Your expensive knowledge is a rut.

Richard Feynman, already a Nobel-level physicist, wandered into biology seminars at Caltech and asked the "stupid" questions the biologists had stopped asking. He ended up publishing genuine research on gene mutation. The outsider's confusion was the advantage.

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." — Shunryu Suzuki

When did you last let yourself be a total beginner at something? Properly lost, no idea what the words mean?

Schedule some stupidity. Pick a field you know nothing about and read past the confusion.

Feeling dumb is the sensation of your brain rewiring. Don't interrupt it.

— Dan

P.S. What field would you study if feeling stupid didn't sting? I'll go first: quantum computing.