Shoshin: 7 Beginner's Mind Experiments to Make Life Exciting Again

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki, a Soto Zen priest who founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962, said this in talks that were gathered into Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (published 1970). The Japanese word he was pointing at is shoshin, and it is a decent cure for the flat feeling of a life you have already figured out.

Short answer: shoshin means approaching something as a beginner, even when you are not one. You do not need a new city or a new job to practice it. You need small, deliberate first-time experiences, and a person who will hear how they went.

What is shoshin, and why does it make life feel more exciting?

Shoshin (初心) literally combines “beginning” and “heart” or “mind.” Suzuki’s point was that experience hardens into assumptions. Once you know what a commute, a meal, or a conversation is “like,” you stop looking at it.

Psychology has a parallel. In 1942 Abraham Luchins gave people water-jar problems where a learned method worked every time, then presented problems with a simpler route. Many kept using the old method anyway. This is called the Einstellung effect: the solution you know blocks the better one you could see.

The same drift affects how a week feels. The oddball effect describes why identical days blur together in memory. Beginner’s mind is a way of putting a few non-identical days back into the week.

Below are seven experiments, ranked from cheapest to most demanding. Each has a single rule so you cannot negotiate your way out of it.

The 7 first-time experiments, ranked by cost

1. Turn onto a street you have never used

Cost: zero, five extra minutes.

Rule: at the first junction on your usual walk, take the turn you have never taken.

This is the entry-level version because nothing can go wrong. You will see doors, trees, and a bakery you did not know was there. It works for the same reason a tourist’s first hour in a city feels vivid: everything is unfiltered.

2. Order the dish you cannot picture

Cost: the price of a meal you were buying anyway.

Rule: ask the person serving what they would pick, and order that, no questions about substitutions.

You are handing the decision to someone with fresh information, which is the opposite of your usual order. Worst case, you have a mediocre dinner and a story.

3. Ask the obvious question out loud

Cost: a flicker of embarrassment.

Rule: once a day, ask the question you would normally nod past.

Experts hide their gaps. Beginners just ask, and the answer is often something three other people in the room also wanted to know. The spotlight effect research from Thomas Gilovich and colleagues suggests people notice your slips far less than you expect, so the price is lower than it feels.

4. Take a twenty-minute first lesson

Cost: a free tutorial and a timer.

Rule: stop when the timer ends, and keep the worst take.

Juggling, three ukulele chords, a hand-lettering alphabet, a card trick. Twenty minutes is long enough to feel the awkward-to-slightly-less-awkward curve and short enough that you cannot decide you are bad at it forever. Keeping the worst attempt matters, because it is the proof you started.

5. Describe your own street as a tourist

Cost: your phone camera.

Rule: photograph three things on your regular route that you could not describe from memory.

This one is shoshin in its purest form, since it is a re-look at something you know. People tend to discover that “I know this street” meant “I stopped looking at this street.”

6. Show up to the beginner session alone

Cost: an hour and a little nerve.

Rule: go to the class marked “intro” or “first timers,” not the one you could fake your way through.

A climbing gym orientation, an open-mic signup, a pottery drop-in, a language meetup. Being the least skilled person in a room is uncomfortable in a way the first three experiments never are, and that discomfort is where most of the aliveness is. If the thought of starting badly stops you, the essay on Anne Lamott’s shitty first drafts is a gentle case for doing it anyway.

7. Let a friend teach you something you are bad at

Cost: an evening, plus admitting you are a novice.

Rule: for one full hour, you are the student and you do not say “I know.”

This is the hardest because it asks you to be a beginner in front of someone who matters. It is also the most rewarding. Your friend gets to be the expert, you get a real first-time experience, and the two of you have a new shared reference point. If you are looking for more low-effort ways to spend time together, the hygge friend night ideas list has weeknight-sized plans.

Why do small experiments fade without a witness?

Novelty is cheap to start and expensive to repeat. The first walk down a new street feels great, and by the fourth you have a new route that you no longer see. Most “I should try new things” resolutions die in that gap, because nobody else knows they existed.

There is a plain social reason this changes things. When a friend knows you said you would try the beginner pottery class on Thursday, Thursday has a small amount of weight. When you tell them how it went, even an awkward result becomes a story rather than a private non-event.

That is the idea behind DontSnooze, an iOS app where you post a short video or photo as proof of something you said you would do, and your friends can see it and react. It was built around waking up on time, but the same mechanism fits a first-time experiment: post the worst take from your twenty-minute lesson, or the photo of the street you never turned down. Watching is free; posting needs DontSnooze Pro. You can find it at the App Store.

How do you choose which experiment to try first?

A simple filter:

1. If you have 10 minutes this week, do number 1 or 5.
2. If you want a story by Sunday, do number 2 or 4.
3. If life has felt stuck for a while, do 6 or 7, because they carry real stakes.

Pick one, write down the rule, and send it to one person today. A partner in the experiment helps a lot, and the Year of Yes rule for friend invitations is one way to find that person: say yes to the next invitation you would usually dodge.

A caveat on beginner’s mind

Shoshin is a practice inside a long tradition, and Suzuki was talking about sitting meditation, not about collecting activities. Treating it as a novelty checklist is a loose borrowing. It also will not do much if the real problem is exhaustion, grief, or depression; in those cases, rest and support come first, and a professional is the right call.

What is the street near you that you have walked past a hundred times without turning onto?