‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in letting go of old ones’, said economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes. What we have done in the past plays a huge role in determining what we will do in the future. In western culture, dominated by rationality and reasoning, this often means that we follow or build on what went before. But for creative purposes, it is often more important to pivot and deviate from what we have done – to use it as a point of departure rather than a defining factor.
The most difficult things to let go of are our own ideas and opinions, our experiences and the knowledge we assume we have acquired because of those experiences. All too often what stands in the way of growth, change, innovation or creativity are not insurmountable, external factors, but interior assumptions, beliefs and opinions.
Human intelligence requires patterns, assumptions and projections to function. However, these shortcuts leave out information. To find new answers in any sphere, it is important to question these assumptions and patterns so you can discover additional and new information that requires a different response.
If you don’t distance yourself from what you know, what you are told or how you feel, it is hard to seek new answers, let alone accept them.
This is what John Maynard Keynes meant in the quote above. There are always plenty of new ideas out there in the world, waiting to make our lives better. But it is human nature to cling to the known and the comfortable. We need to work hard on letting go of these old notions so we can begin to accept new ones.
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