Saturday morning I headed out for my weekly long run just after sunrise. It was one of those mornings when the ground was wet from overnight rain. There was a cool wind while the sky was overcast with low, gray clouds moving slowly but steadily across the horizon. In other words, it was perfect weather for an early morning jog. It’s somewhat common weather near our home in the eastern mountains of the Central Valley of Costa Rica. I often head towards the main highway just a couple of kilometers from our house to run along the frontage road, one of the very few flat spots near our house (let’s just say I run a lot of hills). This time, for some reason, I decided to cross the highway and run along the opposite-side frontage road. In nearly a year living here, I’ve never run down the other frontage road. I found myself noticing things I simply hadn’t paid any attention to on any of my more than 100 morning jogs along that same stretch of road. It felt like an entirely new experience.
As I brought new eyes to the same stretch of road, my thoughts turned to the previous day as I had found myself talking with our new Head of Technology. He had asked me some interesting questions. “How is the technology team perceived by the rest of the school?” “How would you describe the team dynamic?” “To what would you attribute the turnover of previous department leaders?” I shared some of my thoughts about our current situation and context. Then, as is often the case, I started talking about what the future might look like. I started sharing ideas about how his skills and experiences could help us strengthen aspects of our operations and institutional culture. At some point, I stopped future-casting, and grounded us with the immediate opportunities and challenges he would face. He responded that he was eager to join the team and contribute, and ensured me there was plenty of time to dig into the work together. “After all,” he said, “today is just my first day. I like to approach every day like it’s my first.”
That statement caught my attention. Approach every day like it’s your first day. For me, when you experience something for the first time you are opening up your senses to a broader set of inputs. You are paying close attention and listening a lot. Your first day often brings an extra dose of humility as you recognize that you don’t have all of the answers. In fact, you’re still trying to figure out what the questions should be. Your first day is filled with excitement and energy and a hope in what is possible. Yes, there is a bit more nervousness as you establish new relationships and learn new systems. But it’s an incredibly productive nervousness.
Like my well-worn jogging route, our work lives can become so familiar that we limit our senses and intellect from new ideas and possibilities. We can become overly reliant on our mental hueristics – the shortcuts our brains have developed to protect us from having to think about things too hard too often. I’m a big fan of Daniel Kahneman’s work, and his conceptualization of the brain as thinking in two modes – fast and slow. In summary, his Nobel Prize winning research in behavioral economics suggests that our brains create neural networks that allow us to automate and simplify a lot of thinking. This type of fast of efficient thinking is, frankly put, easier and requires fewer resources (like time and energy).
When you approach each day like a first day, you are deliberately interrupting effecient thinking and choosing to think more slowly. What is the benefit of slow thinking? Well, it’s creating new neural pathways and connections that you didn’t have before. Put another way, slow thinking is learning. I often find myself reminding others that while most adults say they like learning, if we’re completely honest it’s simply not true. We like our thinking as efficient and quick as possible. We don’t like being burdened with uncertainty or complexity so we dismiss new ideas and new learning out of hand, assuming we already know or have the right answer.
I like the idea of treating every day like it is your first day. It’s a reminder that sometimes you’ve got to take a different track down the familiar road, ask more questions, listen more and better, and assume that your perspective might be incomplete.