If you are not willing to be a fool, you can’t become a master.
Jordan B. Peterson
The meaning of the quote
In 1963, Julia Child tried to flip a potato pancake on her TV show The French Chef and missed. Half of it landed on the stove.
The show was taped in one go with no second takes, so viewers saw everything. She scooped the pieces back into the pan with her hands and explained what had gone wrong.
“I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have.”
Child had been a beginner herself, and a poor one. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 1949, at 37, in a class of men training to be professional chefs, and failed her final exam the first time she took it. In 1961, 12 years after she started, she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the cookbook that led to her TV show.
The quote makes the same point about learning anything new, and so does Niels Bohr’s quote An expert is a person. You get good at a skill by doing it badly first, and doing it badly where others can see makes you look like a fool. Adults often find this harder than children, because they’re used to being competent at work and at home, and starting again at the bottom hurts their pride.
Peterson made this point on his 12 Rules for Life tour. At a lecture in Westbury, New York, in September 2018, he told the audience that to get better at something you have to become a beginner again, and a beginner does things badly. The lecture was later released as the podcast episode Risk Being a Fool. He came back to the idea in his book Beyond Order, where the Fool’s strength is that he’s willing to fall back to the bottom and start again.
Looking foolish also feels worse than it looks to anyone watching. Psychologists once asked college students to walk into a room full of other students while wearing a T-shirt with singer Barry Manilow’s face on it, a shirt they had already found embarrassing for that age group. The wearers guessed that half the room noticed, when only about a quarter did. Researchers call this the spotlight effect.
Action steps
You can practise being a beginner the same way you practise anything else, by starting small.
- Pick something you avoid because you’d be bad at it.
It could be a dance class, a new language, the sport your kids play or speaking up in meetings. Choose the one where the fear of looking silly is all that’s stopping you. - Learn it where people can see you.
Join a beginners’ class instead of practising alone in secret. Everyone in the room is as new as you are, and the teacher can only fix the mistakes you show them. - Ask the question you think is stupid.
Pretending to understand keeps the gap open. Asking closes it in a few seconds and often helps someone else who was too shy to ask.
Julia Child scooped the potato back into the pan and kept cooking on camera. That’s the kind of fool the quote asks you to be.
About the author
Jordan Peterson grew up in Fairview, a small town in northern Alberta, Canada, where his mother was a librarian and his father a schoolteacher. He studied political science and psychology at the University of Alberta, earned a PhD in clinical psychology at McGill University and taught at Harvard from 1993 to 1998 before moving to the University of Toronto.
His 2018 book 12 Rules for Life sold more than 5 million copies and made the psychology professor one of the best-known speakers in the world.
In 2019, after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, his doctor raised the dose of an anti-anxiety medication he was taking, and Peterson became dependent on it. Trying to quit left him so ill that in January 2020 his family moved him to a hospital in Moscow, where doctors kept him in an induced coma for 8 days.
He woke up strapped to a hospital bed with little memory of the 2 months before.
Peterson spent most of 2020 recovering, and in March 2021 he published Beyond Order, a book he wrote largely while his family went through one health crisis after another. In it you can read his longer take on the Fool, written by a man who had just been forced to start over from the bottom himself.
Resources
- Risk Being a Fool: A 12 Rules for Life Lecture (Podcast)
- Beyond Order (Book)
- 12 Rules for Life (Book)
- My Life in France (Book)
- An expert is a person (Article)
- Spotlight effect (Wikipedia)
- Jordan Peterson (Wikipedia)
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