Losing the Beginner’s Mind: FIDM Recap

Last week, I had the opportunity to give a talk on product innovation at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM). While I think they called me in to share some of the things I’ve learned during my time consulting to The Estee Lauder Companies, it’s hard to say who got more value out of the talk: the students or me.

I’ve switched industries a lot in my (admittedly) short career. Over the past few years, I’ve worked in higher education, early education, ad tech SaaS, cosmetics, and alcohol. Because of that frequent switching, I’ve often been a beginner and forced to get up to speed in new industries quickly. However, during the Q&A portion of the talk at FIDM, I realized I had stopped looking at the cosmetics industry through a beginner’s eyes. The students (all of whom were about 20 years old) were asking questions about the industry, sales channels, and technology from angles I had never thought of but seemed obvious as soon as they brought them up.

For example: among millennials, beauty influencers have huge power to drive sales, simply by recommending a product or featuring it in a makeup tutorial video. Several students brought up the (valid) point of diminishing consumer trust in influencers because of all the undisclosed sponsored posts. In hindsight, this concern seems obvious but in all my time working with beauty brands, this point has either been completely avoided or jokingly brushed off. Yet these students were able to very easily see the long-term consequences of the current influencer trend: diminished consumer trust. Instead of working with influencers or celebrities, these students were interested in figuring out how to build better peer-to-peer recommendation systems that start and end with product effectiveness in a personalized way and can’t be gamed by larger brands. Amazing concept!

What surprised me the most about the FIDM Q&A session is how unaware I was of losing my “beginner’s mind“. I’ve only been in the beauty industry for two and a half years – which is nothing if you compare it to colleagues who’ve been doing this for twenty or thirty years. But those two years were more than enough to make me miss obvious concerns with the current trendy marketing strategy. This brings up an important question: at what point do people lose their “beginner’s mind” and is it possible to keep this creative state of mind for longer periods of time?

At this point, I don’t quite know what the best solution is but I suspect it has something to do with continually exposing yourself to others without much experience and limiting your interactions with so-called “experts”. While I’m sure there’s some value in having deep knowledge within a specific field, it certainly does seem like the more time you spend working on a given problem, the more difficult it is to see the tangential opportunities that might be obvious to a beginner.

I’ll be exploring this beginner/expert dichotomy further in future posts but in the meantime, let me know your thoughts or experiences with the beginner’s mind on Twitter or in the comments!