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

The expert's knowledge is also the expert's constraint. They know what works, which means they also know what doesn't — and prune the solution space before exploring it. Sometimes the pruned branch was the right one.

This is why cross-domain thinking is valuable: someone who brings beginner's eyes to a field often finds the solution the experts ruled out ten years ago.

The skill is maintaining beginner's mind deliberately, which is paradoxically expert-level.

Related: [[constraints-are-creative]], [[@alice/the-collector-fallacy]]