The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
##Expertise Closes the Mind
The expert’s trap is where you start thinking of yourself as having gone beyond the need to learn anything new.
Imagine a master chef in a restaurant with a once-great reputation that’s now on the slide. They’ve cooked that signature dish a thousand times. The knife work is flawless. Their timing is impeccable. But somewhere along the way, they stopped tasting. These days they plate up by means of muscle memory, not joie d’esprit. They season by formula. The dish is technically perfect but spiritually dead. This sense that it’s all been done before? That’s the expert trap.
Or consider a concert pianist. They play Chopin and Bach with a technical precision that sets critics agog, yet to the audience the performance feels mechanical and airless. Though they hit every note and these notes reach the ears, they just don’t make it as far as the heart. This is what happens when expertise goes rigid and calcifies – and this is the expert trap.
Suzuki warned: “In the expert’s mind there are few possibilities.” As we solidify our knowledge, the mind loses its inherent fluidity. We stop seeing what’s in front of us because we’re too busy recognizing patterns we’ve seen before. Conventional expertise becomes empty in the worst sense: not the fertile emptiness of Zen, but the closed system of someone who thinks they already know what there is to know. That’s the expert’s trap, right there.
Mastery Means Returning to Innocence
Skill in itself isn’t the problem. In Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters I introduced a time-honoured map of the learning journey: first you follow rules (Shu), then you break them (Ha), and finally you transcend them (Ri). You never abandon the rules, though. Instead, you internalise them. That’s why improvisation is bewildering. To a beginner, improv can seem like an impossible freedom from all convention. But a jazz musician must master scales deeply before they can improvise freely. Improvisation may sound like the free–expression of a beginner, but paradoxically only an expert can do it justice.
True expertise is the Ri stage. Technique becomes so ingrained that it disappears. And the expert returns to the spontaneous state of the beginner. They’ve travelled full circle. Their beginner’s mind is now informed by ten thousand hours of practice, but it remains open, curious and alive.
The master and the beginner see with the same freshness.
The master simply climbed a mountain to return to the valley.
That’s the journey out of the expert’s trap.
Why did Ikkyū Burn the Certificate ?
The ultimate expression of this came from the iconoclastic Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun. Last year, I visited Lake Biwa, the legendary location where Ikkyū heard the cry of a crow, which jogged him to attain enlightenment. Despite plenty of modern development on the lakeshore, the lake itself remains a vast, still place. And in many places it still looks much as it might have in Ikkyū’s day. It’s still a fitting backdrop for a mind stripping away illusions.
When his teacher presented him with the inka, Ikkyū famously trampled on it. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, he tore it to pieces and threw it in the fire. By burning the ‘proof’ of his mastery, he demonstrated the secret that true realization can’t be commodified or archived. It exists only in the living moment, in the quality of attention you bring right now. Despite how it might look to us, the burning wasn’t an insult to his teacher. Rather, it showed he understood at a deeper level.
I took this photo of Lake Biwa from the Eastern slopes of Mount Heiai. On this lake the maverick monk Ikkyū attained enlightenment - in legend at least.
Try This Today
OK, so what practical difference does this make? Today, choose one skill where you consider yourself proficient. Your profession. A hobby. Even something simple like how you make your morning coffee. Approach it as if you know nothing. Try performing it with your non-dominant hand. Or ask a child to show you their approach. Or read an introductory tutorial as if for the first time.
Notice what you’ve stopped seeing because you ‘already know.’ Does your expert ego resist? Does it feel foolish, a waste of time? Or do you catch a glimpse of the strange wonder of not knowing? The possibilities that only appear when you release your grip on certainty?
You might well be an expert. You might well posses certificates to prove it (that you haven’t burned), or you might have many hours of experience under your belt. Or maybe the evidence of your expertise lies all around, in the things you’ve built. But today remember this: The inka is just paper. The wisdom lies in burning it. Because expertise is just an opinion. Part of being able to do something really well is knowing how much better still you could become. The mastery is in the continual learning.
Further Reading
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki – A guide to the attitude of shoshin and the foundation for the ideas in this post.
Extraordinary Zen Masters: A Maverick, a Master of Masters, and a Wandering Poet by John Stevens – Includes the definitive biographical account in English of Ikkyū Sōjun’s wild, iconoclastic life.
Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters by Richard Griffiths – An exploration of the stages of mastery and how to move from rigid rules to spontaneous freedom.
Crow with No Mouth (translated by Stephen Berg) – A collection of Ikkyū’s own “crazy cloud” poetry that captures his visceral, non-institutional approach to Zen.
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And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.
Read more: What’s the future of creative work without human intent?
#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.
“When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it.”
Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes? These elements in time are all intertwined: the content of the book itself, the environment in which we read it in the first place, the environment of the place where the notes were made, the notes themselves, and the circumstances in which, later, perhaps much later, we recollect all these factors by re-reading the notes in a new context.
And you do actually remember at least some of what you’ve read. Your reading, or a part of it anyway, sticks in your memory in ineffable ways. Without thinking about it, you have been engaging in what literary scholar Andrew Elfenbein calls ’the differential allocation of attentional resources.’ But how?
This cat has allocated his attentional resources, differentially.
Yesterday I spent a little while looking over the bookshelves in our house, reminding myself of some the books I’ve read and noticing what I haven’t read yet. It was an odd experience because what I remembered of each book varied widely.
I remembered many of the titles, and seeing their spines was a prompt to remember their contents. A surprising number of books I’d forgotten I had ever read, but seeing them again enabled my memories of their contents to come flooding back. A few books I had no memory of having read, even though I’m pretty sure I must have done. And a few more books I was convinced I had never actually owned and vaguely remember thinking I ought to buy a copy.
I suspect the memory-aiding features of the bookshelf itself are qualitatively different from those of a plain list of the books in that bookshelf. The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me. It might explain why I get frustrated when someone reorganises these books: they’re literally reorganising my memory.
Now I’m minded to take photos of these shelves, so that as I dispose of my books (it’s a working library after all) I can at least look back on how they used to be.
All this got me wondering: what does it mean to be ‘well-read’ when you can only partially remember what you’ve read?
Perhaps being well-read is really only something that can emerge in your writing, not as something you carry around with you in your memory. Or is it about the way you weave your reading into your conversation? These days it seems as though being well-read might just be a mark of someone washed up from a previous era, before there were mobile phones and AI summaries of everything.
Scan your own shelves today. Is there a book staring back at you that you have no memory of reading? Or one where the spine alone brings the whole story back? I’d love to hear about the books that have stayed with you, or about the ones that vanished entirely.
If our notes eventually replace the books themselves, we are essentially building a library of our own interpretations. Does this feel like a loss of the original work to you, or a necessary step in making the ideas your own? How do you decide what is worth ‘preserving’ in your notes, and what do you allow yourself to forget?
In an age of instant AI summaries, the slow act of reading and note-making feels almost counter-cultural. Do you find that digital tools change how you remember what you read? Or do you still find that the physical presence of a book, its size and colour, its place on a shelf, is what makes the memory stick? I’d like to know about your own ‘memory-aiding’ systems in the comments.
Meanwhile, here’s a podcast about what we remember, having first read:
What we remember after reading, with Andrew Elfenbein | How To Read Podcast
And here’s a podcast about the fallibility of memory, and why that might actually be a good thing:
Memory Lane | Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
I’ve written a lot on making notes, including:
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Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile).
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Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven’t got one.
Thanks for reading! If you like this kind of thing, why not subscribe to the weekly email digest?
And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
ADHD: not straightforwardly a dysfunction.
💬 “It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information”.
– Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Aeon.
💬 “We need to build digital worlds worth protecting.”
— Dr Krista Fisher, on the real manosphere. Womens Agenda
Tsundoku status alert.
My current mood is: Let me sleep, and only wake up after AI is done destroying everything worthwhile, so I can skip to whatever’s left without having to live through the intervening period of pointless turmoil.
What's the future of creative work without human intent?
Nicholas Carr has written about the prospects for creative work in an age of digital production.
He argues that the era where technology merely copies art has given way to one where AI generates it by stripping away human intent and replacing it with mathematical patterns. This results in a flood of “efficient” but hollow content, which forces creators into a relentless “dance marathon” to feed the digital platforms. He suggests that as machine-made “slop” becomes the norm, the true value of art will lie in its humanity. In other words the slow, intentional, and relatively inefficient activities that a computer can’t replicate will be recognised as worthwhile. They’ll literally be a measure of value.
He touches here on a couple of themes I’ve been considering too.
The first theme is what it means for everything to be turned into ‘content’, and for a whole class of ‘content creators’ to rise from nowhere, the way a gold rush would generate a legion of instant but mainly ersatz gold miners.
Carr suggests the ‘content’ doesn’t matter compared with the ‘buckets’ that contain it. As every MrBeast video attests to, it’s the form that matters now.
MrBeast is the brand-name of a prominent American YouTuber who gained worldwide fame for his high-budget videos which feature elaborate challenges and massive financial giveaways. It’s a winning formula precisely because it’s a formula. And the formula of the show makes the content of any individual episode, though still necessary, oddly irrelevant.
If we’re not just making content what are we making?
That’s the question I’ve been pondering for a while now. Online platforms are in the container industry. They all provide containers for other peoples’ stuff. And what do you call the contents of a container, if not ‘content’? This led me to wonder whether the way forward is a) to seize the means of containment and create our own ‘containers’ or b) to deny the entire paradigm and do something else entirely.
So I wanted to know what comes after content?
It’s hard to imagine but I intend to try. At the moment the obvious answer to what comes next is ‘more containers’. As I write this, plenty of writers (including Nicholas Carr) have been moving to Substack because it seems to have some writerly buzz to it (aka ‘organic reach’). The quality of the material there is quite high, and the recommendation engine appears to be working, at least for some.
But attractive as it may seem, isn’t Substack really just the latest in a long line of platforms that seemed great then turned into mush? Blogger, Medium, and now Substack. here today, gone tomorrow. Buzzing along for now, but soon to be ensh_ttified by the venture capital money that feeds it. It’s been observed that the Substack business model is inherently unstable, so before too long the mush cycle will kick in and users will move onwards to the next shiny platform. If you don’t get this you should read John Gruber’s critique at Daring Fireball. What do I mean by an unstable business model? In brief, you can’t meet a billion dollar valuation by taking 10% of the proceeds of a bunch of bloggers. Therefore, adverts and lock-in will follow, as surely as night follows day.
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human, not necessarily because that’s fantastic but because being human is what we’ve got.
The second theme Nicholas Carr raises in his article is what it means when the automation of this machine formalism becomes so pervasive it undercuts the professional and existential self-confidence of a whole generation. Carr sums it up this way:
“In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines.”
Which is a neat summary of the philosophy of German philosopher Günther Anders, whose ideas I’ve been reflecting on. In fact, fear of AI is nothing new.
Decades ago Anders said:
💬 “Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is: “without us!".” — Günther Anders, ‘The Term’.
In some respects this is the leitmotif of this entire Writing Slowly website - the observation that from now on, by most metrics, all humans are writing slowly, that in relation to the machines, we’re second best. Coming to terms with this ironic de-centering of the human is one of the great moral and cultural challenges of our time. It’s ironic because, as Anders pointed out, we are the creators of the technologies that now confound us, and so, as he also pointed out, it’s weird that they’re now leading us by the nose.
One possible way forward is to challenge the slippery use of “us” and “we”, as in the sentence you just read. It masks some important detail, especially the detail of who benefits and who pays for technological innovation. For example, as I write this, nameable individuals are directly profiting from the use of AI to identify targets for missile and drone strikes in Iran. This targeting is horrendously error prone, even on its own terms. I’m not profiting from the killing of schoolchildren and you may not be either. The victims of these attacks aren’t profiting either; they’re dying. Perhaps if there’s to be a ”we" in this context, it might be me, the victims of this automated violence, and you. Because when they’re blowing up children just because the algorithm told them to, you can be sure their code will be coming for you and me rather than for its owner. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. It’s merely speeding up the kill chain.
Conversely, if it’s true that “we all benefit” from AI, then, as philosopher Rod Tidwell said, show me the money.
Well, piece by small piece I’m addressing the question, What must I do now? My provisional answer to this question is that you’ve got to choose your own race and finish it.
But you might also notice that I’m doing my best here to form and maintain my own little container, a slightly eccentric bucket in which to mix my own ideas, which I’m still not calling content.
That got a bit heavy so here’s an adorable cat in a bucket, courtesy of marwool.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the handy email format that never goes out of fashion.
Compare like with like
When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement.
For example, here’s the final version of a well-known voiceover:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But here’s an early draft of that famous start to Star trek. tl;dr it sucks too. [Neatorama.com]
The lesson? If your terrible draft lacks sparkle, it might just be because almost everyone’s does, at first. So if you can’t compare like with like, then don’t compare at all.
Unless you really are planning to regulate commerce and so on.
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
—-
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the classic email format that never gets old and never goes out of fashion.
Notes about notebooks?
Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the history of laboratory notebooks.
Aghayeva, U. “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/52wg-76ye
Source: Scott Nesbitt’s The Monday Kickoff - well worth subscribing to.
#notetaking #notebooks #historyofscience
I find writing on the train works well. It helps that there’s a good view. Anyone else do this?
#writing #notetaking #writingcommunity #photography
Every Zen garden is unique, but recognizable patterns recur too.
Perhaps it’s the patterns that enable the diversity.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if this article piqued your interest you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest, where you’ll find yourself in an exclusive club whose privileged members just get a weekly email.
The real science behind Project Hail Mary
Yes, there is some real science behind 📚 Project Hail Mary.
It’s an enjoyable and successful sci-fi novel and film, but the science fiction is frankly quite a bit more fiction than science.
It would hardly give away the plot of Project Hail Mary to mention that it has a lot to do with the microbial contamination of experimental research. I mean, that’s what the story is about – in the same way Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, was all about potato farming.
If this floats your spaceship (microbes I mean, not potatoes), you might enjoy a fascinating article about the real science of microbial contamination in experimental contexts. Apparently there’s a bacteriophage called Φ80 and it’s running amok.
How Φ80 infiltrates research labs.
Scary stuff! Perhaps someone will turn it into a movie.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.
💬 “For good or ill, a new generation, though raised in the lap of AI, will not be speaking or writing anything like the ‘intelligence’ that raised it.” - Notes on the artificial style of writing.
#Zettelkasten #LLM #AIPhilosophy #Writing #Notemaking #AIWriting