Chances are that either now or in the months ahead you will start something new—a job, a career, a semester at school, a creative project, a post-retirement phase, or a new chapter in life.

While that can be hopeful and exciting, the idea of beginning can also be daunting, frustrating, and stressful. Much as we like the excitement of something new, none of us welcomes the mistakes, disappointments, or growing pains that usually accompany it. And some people feel that the term beginner is patronizing and off-putting.

Reframing how to feel about and approach being a beginner is congruent with the work of Peter Drucker, the father of modern management. What is entrepreneurship if not a beginning, one that is considered admirable, valuable, even cool. In his classic book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published in 1985, before there were many books on the topic, Drucker saw entrepreneurship as a way of exploiting change as an opportunity for innovation. In his own bible of beginnings, The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki cites Drucker as “the dean of entrepreneurial writing.”

Entrepreneurship: A State of Mind

Although he was not an entrepreneur as we know the term, Drucker believed that being an entrepreneur is a state of mind and a way of operating in life, one he very much possessed. “Everyone who can face up to decision-making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait, he agued in the book. Drucker’s wife of 68 years, Doris Drucker (who died at the age of 103 in 2014), after years of working as a physicist, patent agent, and editor, became both an inventor (of a sound amplification device) and entrepreneur in her 80s.

Zen Buddhism—an interest of Drucker’s—embodies the the reframed approach to beginnings in its concept of beginner’s mind. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” explained Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the pioneering San Francisco Zen Center and author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970).

Applying beginner’s mind means we are less likely to drift into autopilot, more likely to remain open to possibilities and new ways of doing things, and ready for new knowledge. It carries with it a sense of potential, anticipation, even excitement.

Adopting a beginner’s mind means applying self-compassion and giving ourselves a break while trying something new. The British-Australian author Tom Butler-Bowdon, writing about Suzuki’s book in 50 Spiritual Classics, posits that “the beginner’s mind goes beyond me to the realization that it is just an expression of the larger universal Mind, and this naturally produces compassion.” Suzuki’s book is also cited by Tom Vanderbilt in Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, an ode to the nobility of beginning and inspired by a one-year project of learning chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling.

Vanderbilt writes that he wants to encourage ”the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions—the unencumbered beginner’s mind.”

Minimizing Prejudgments and Prejudices

Applying beginner’s mind means that, whether or not we already know something about a particular endeavor/project/subject, we remain receptive to learning how to do things better and differently. We try to minimize prejudgments and prejudices. Drucker applied the principle throughout his life. As he once told an audience, one of the first things he did when starting a consulting assignment was to ask the librarians in the organization what he needed to know about the company and its industry.

The Primal Mark

The sense of beginning something is inherent in creativity. Artistic creations in visual art, music, and other art forms all have to start somewhere. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Justin M. Berg refers to the primal mark: “An artist’s first brushstroke on a blank canvas anchors the artist to that mark, and all subsequent strokes flow from this initial movement.”

It is an echo of the sixth century BCE wisdom enunciated by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.”