A few notes and thoughts. Rigid thinking is a real enemy of success and experience. No one is proposing throwing the baby out with the bathwater, with your past processes and learnings. But this is truly a place you can have the best of both worlds. Openness is simply the willingness to consider things beyond one’s own perceptions and experiences. People who are open are more willing to try new solutions to problems, listen to the perspectives of others, and participate in new experiences. This directly goes back to the problem of over-experienced. It is astounding to me how many successes happen to the people “too stupid to know better”. Rigid thinking prevents us from trying many things as we know we can’t succeed. But success is rarely a straight path, and the problem is the rigidity prevents us from even starting something which with a little more mental flexibility actually would lead to success — just not in the straight line as we originally looked at it. We use the term “youthful minds”, as it is not a tabula rasa — an empty slate — but one which approaches problems in the context “I’m like a kid, I love a challenge”. When a youthful mind engages a problem is tends to be with purpose, passion and meaning. When you take that perspective and apply it to your current problems, the sky’s the limit. Think about it, what was your dream job when you were a kid? Putting in more standard terms, it goes back to mindset. Many people work from a perspective of a “fixed mindset” rather than a “growth mindset”. A fixed mindset believes that our character and creative abilities are the result of inherent intelligence which are static. A growth mindset thrives on challenges and sees failures not as evidence of unintelligence but as a groundwork for growth and increasing abilities and intelligence.