“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
John Maynard Keynes
As we age, the new becomes harder. It’s not an easy matter to adopt a new mindset because of what our current mindset is built on. It’s a matter of deconstructing systems that have ingrained our thinking for decades.
One of my favorite authors likes to say, we are only as young as the last time we changed our minds, and there’s something to this.1
Changing our minds gets more difficult as we age. The ability to think in the abstract or consider the radical becomes a rigorous exercise because we’ve been influenced and shaped by societal norms, religion, authority figures, and law. These explicit and presumed teachings become our dogma.
It is good then, if you want to stay open to change—which is the only path to growth—to study alternative ways of thinking and behavior. If you vehemently disagree with someone, try learning the philosophy of your opponent. Sit and have a conversation with someone of another creed, religion, or political party.
It’s easy to despise someone until you sit down and recognize the shared humanity in their eyes, and only then can we be open to an understanding that leads to compassion.
As we age, we construct a world that is safe and known, a world that is black and white, an environment where we can easily distinguish threats. But the threats we are guarding against are usually nothing more than fears and preferences we’ve developed within our minds.
To get to the new, something worthy of passion, a frontier of growth, we first have to figure out how to escape the old.
George Bernard Shaw, one of only two men in history to be awarded both the Nobel Prize and an Oscar, may have said it best.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Excellent Advice for Living, Kevin Kelly.
Bits of Wisdom Podcast #40