The Power of Being an Amateur

In today’s business culture, expertise is currency. We celebrate mastery, reward pattern recognition, and prize leaders who can quickly distinguish signal from noise. But in doing so, we’ve created an unexpected trap for ourselves: The more you become “somebody” in your chosen field (recognized, accomplished, authoritative), the more your thinking tends to calcify, limiting your flexibility and creativity. The management scholar Erik Dane has called this problem “cognitive entrenchment,” and the researchers Huy Phan and Bing Hiong Ngu have documented it widely across professions.

The antidote to this problem is surprisingly simple: Consistently put yourself in situations where you are a complete beginner. Consider taking up a new pursuit outside of work, whether it’s learning a language, playing an instrument, trying stand-up comedy, or exploring ceramics. Seek out situations in which you have no prior knowledge to leverage, no past successes to fall back on, and no external achievement metrics to chase. Those are conditions that will allow your brain to rewire itself for agility and innovative thinking.

Neuroscience suggests that this practice, which I call strategic amateurism, is essential to becoming a dynamic leader. Researchers have shown that when we try something unfamiliar, the brain’s reward system activates, releasing dopamine and forging fresh neural connections, which are the building blocks of neuroplasticity. Experiencing novelty doesn’t just stimulate the brain; it pushes it to reconfigure itself in real time, expanding cognitive flexibility. Other studies suggest that new challenges can not only accelerate skill development but also sharpen the range of thinking leaders draw on in their day-to-day jobs.

In a landscape of accelerating global change, tapping into this trait is emerging as an advantage for leaders. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report highlights creative thinking, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning as skills future employers will prize most. It also shows that by 2030 almost 40% of workers’ skills will need to be updated. As AI takes on more technical and pattern-recognition tasks, the human edge will come from creativity and adaptability, reinforcing the value of developing this kind of mental plasticity over static expertise.

But keep in mind that strategic amateurism isn’t about fundamentally reinventing yourself. It’s about temporarily escaping from your established leadership persona to expose your mind to conditions it rarely encounters: novelty, uncertainty and productive discomfort. These experiences don’t just challenge you, they naturally cultivate creative qualities such as openness, humility, curiosity and wonder. When you have no expertise to lean on, your mind flexes in directions your day to day rarely demands. And if you engage in that practice actively and consistently, you don’t just reconnect with those qualities—you strengthen the cognitive agility you carry back into your regular job.

Escaping the Proficiency Plateau

I discovered the value of strategic amateurism accidentally, in my role as the chief marketing officer of Intuit Mailchimp. I had been in the job long enough to have reached what’s known as the “proficiency plateau”—the point where skills that you’ve spent years mastering now deliver consistent results, but the thrill of discovery has begun to fade. It’s not burnout, but something more subtle: practicing reliable excellence with a tacit acceptance of repetition and routine.

I hit this plateau at a high point in my career. The work I was doing with my team was sharp—strategically sound, rich with insight and delivering strong results. Two years earlier getting those kinds of results in similar projects would have filled me with delight and pride. But now I couldn’t help but feel that the creative leaps my team and I were making were becoming incremental and predictable. We weren’t recycling work, but we were recycling our ways of thinking. I knew we had the talent and vision to push further; we just needed to break out of a familiar groove.

During that period, I had coffee with a mentor who recently retired. He shared advice he’d been given as he went through this transition: Say yes to everything new for a year. I liked the idea. But why wait for retirement? I decided to throw myself into a couple of pursuits outside of work where I had zero expertise: watercolor painting and karaoke. Doing each made me highly uncomfortable at first, but that was precisely the goal, so I stuck with them—and over time I sensed a new kind of energy in myself. Freed from the weight of being “someone who knows,” I discovered the alertness and absorption that mastery often dulls, and I felt more curious and more receptive to new ways of thinking and working.

I didn’t expect much, just that these pursuits would make my personal life feel a tad more expansive. But what happened next surprised me. At work, my team noticed a subtle shift in how I approached creative reviews. When my internal agency brought an unexpected reference or an out-of-left-field idea, instead of immediately trying to fit it into our usual framework, I gave it more space to breathe and develop. Dabbling in art made me more receptive when our designers pushed for bolder color choices on our assets. My late-night singing sessions reminded me how freeing it can feel to create without judgment. That carried over into how I treated rough early-stage ideas and hypotheses. Together, these changes helped my team and me create the conditions for some of our most distinctive work. We challenged B2B conventions, delivered meaningful business results, and earned industry recognition.

From Nobody to Somebody

Strategic amateurism doesn’t require major life changes, but it does require intention. As the economist John Maynard Keynes put it, “The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” Here’s a three-step approach to operationalize that shift:

1. Choose one or two activities with no professional relevance for you.

The further from your expertise, the better. The goal is to escape the weight of competence and let your brain form new connections.

2. Commit publicly.

Share your new pursuit with colleagues, friends, and family—and frame it as a commitment to learning, not performing. Sharing will help make you accountable and stick with your new pursuit, and that framing will remove the pressure to achieve.

3. Embrace “productive discomfort.”

The feeling of being out of your depth is the point. Learn to recognize it not as a sign of incompetence or failure but as an opportunity for growth. If the challenge starts to feel easy, or you start to get comfortable, raise the bar.

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If you stick with something long enough, you’ll naturally improve, of course, and that progress will feel rewarding. But your goal as a strategic amateur is not mastery. It’s the mental flexibility that emerges from repeatedly stepping into beginnerhood. For high performers, holding back the instinct to measure, compare, and outperform is difficult. But that restraint is what makes this process powerful. Paradoxically, by regularly making yourself a “nobody” in new contexts, you’ll become a more effective “somebody” in your leadership role. So the next time you feel you’ve arrived at the proficiency plateau, don’t double down on what you know. Step into something you don’t.