Mastery

Most of us feel like we are always a little below what we need to know; after so much experience and practice these masters feel like they are above the battlefield, looking down. With this perspective, they make better decisions. This superior vision and intelligence resulted from a process one that transcended their field and related to how the human brain operates.

Knowing this process could be of immense benefit to almost anyone. It would help us take the right career path, make better choices, and go through an ideal apprenticeship in which we understand how to gain and combine skills. Mastery was not something genetic, or for a lucky few. It is something we can all attain if get rid of some misconceptions and gain clarity as to the required path because we are living in unusual times.

On the one hand, with the unprecedented accessibility of information we have incredible opportunities for knowledge and the power it can bring. On the other hand, we are all more distracted than ever. It is harder for us to think long term, to be clear about the direction we are heading, to be focused and disciplined. To have some clarity and direction, and to gain mastery of our field would help us manage the complexity of our times and the pressures of a highly competitive, globalized work world. This superior intelligence is well within their reach.

The secret ingredients are desire and time. We all know how much more deeply we learn when we are motivated. If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in. If we find ourselves in France needing to learn the language, or suddenly in love with a French woman who speaks little English, we can learn more in a few months than four years of French classes, no matter how good the teacher. In other words, our level of focus will determine the depth of our learning.

If we multiply such deep concentration over enough time, we can master anything. There are dozens of incredible historical examples of this: Darwin and the development of his theory of Natural Selection, Einstein and his theory of Special Relativity, Thomas Edison and the development of the electric light bulb, Henry Ford and the Model T, John Coltrane and the revolutionary music he came to produce, Martha Graham and the creation of modern dance, etc. In all of these cases, these masters were impelled not by a desire for money or fame, but an intense interest in problems, ideas, and the nature of their work.

A great contemporary example would be Steve Jobs. What fascinated him since early childhood was the intersecting point between technology and design, how technology interacts with people and changes their way of thinking. This subject obsessed him. He went through a lengthy apprenticeship with his first period at Apple and then with NeXT. He had many failures and learned invaluable lessons. By the time he returned to Apple in 1996, he had accumulated an incredible depth of knowledge about the design of technology. It was the function of close to twenty years of experience and thinking on the same problems. He had come to master something almost intangible: the ability to sense trends well before others. This formula of desire x time can be applied to artists, athletes, chess players, inventors, biologists, and any other field.

Not only do passion can turn into expertise or mastery, it is absolutely essential. To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness. Most often people choose career paths that diverge from what really interests them because of pressure from parents and peers, or motivated by the desire for money. What ends up happening is that in our twenties and maybe even in our thirties, we can do pretty well in our work, even though it is not a passionate interest. We are young and have energy; we get satisfaction mostly outside work. But eventually our lack of deep connection to the field catches up with us, often in our forties.

We feel increasingly disengaged and not challenged. Our natural creative energies have gone fallow. We fail to pay attention to the changes going on in our field because we are disconnected. People younger, more creative and less expensive quickly replace us. We find that we cannot shift or adapt because we have not built up the proper learning skills or the requisite patience. It is funny, but the people in life who are primarily motivated by money or security often end up losing whatever they gain, whereas those who follow their passion end up making far more money than they ever desired.

To really become an expert or master requires the infamous 10,000 hours, or even 20,000 hours: perhaps the difference between being a chess master and a grandmaster. To apply yourself to a field or to a problem for that long a time means there will inevitably be moments of boredom and tedium. Practice, particularly in the beginning, is never exciting. To persist past these moments you have to feel love for the field, you have to feel passionately excited by the prospect of discovering or inventing something new. Otherwise, you will give up. Known as the primary law of the creative dynamic, your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work.

If you go at it with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results, in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and has no connection to you. You may not see this but you can be sure the public feels it and will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit you created it in. If you are excited and obsessive in the hunt, it shows in the details. If it comes from a place deep within, the authenticity of the task will be communicated. There is no getting around the law. There is no mastery or power without passion. This is not to say that money and fame are never considerations for masters. For many of them it has relative importance. But it is almost never their primary motivation.

Everyone is made to do something exceptional. Biologically, we have all inherited a brain that is more or less the same size, configured in slightly different ways. This brain is a miracle of design, the work of millions of years of evolution. It is built to bring us in deep contact with reality, with our environment, making us able to see things not immediately visible to the eye. Through focused attention on a problem, we can pierce to more and more profound levels of understanding. The human brain is a dual processing organ. It constantly takes in information and compares it to other information, finding connections between ideas and sensations.

At the highest levels of intelligence, at the level of an Einstein, we are witnessing a brain that is making rapid connections between an incredibly wide range of ideas and thoughts. This dual processing brain is latent with creative energy. We all sensed this creativity as children; our minds were much more open then as we were hungry for knowledge and we would intuit all kinds of interesting associations between ideas. It is our greatest need and desire to somehow express our natural creative energy, and the highest form of expression of this energy is in our work, whether in the arts, business, politics or science. In general, we use only a small percentage of the potential power of the human brain. Masters are those who go further with this potential. If we follow the mastery process long enough, inspired by a profound interest and curiosity we cannot fail to achieve something exceptional.

One of the masters is Temple Grandin, a professor of animal studies at Colorado State University, the world’s leading designer of livestock facilities and expert on autism. Temple herself was born autistic. At the age of three a doctor had suggested she be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Through the help of speech therapists, she was able to avoid such a fate and attend regular school. She slowly developed an intense interest in animals and in autism itself. This led to a career in the sciences. With her exceptional reasoning powers, she has been able to throw light on the phenomenon of autism, and explain it in a way no one else has been able to. If a person like Temple Grandin can achieve mastery, with so much against her from the start, then certainly almost all of us have the same capability.

The key to high level achievement in any field is to connect with the Life’s Task, our vocation, what we are meant to do in this short time we have to live. We all experience in early childhood an attraction to certain activities, usually called primal inclinations. This could be physical activities (sports), games of strategy (chess), visual patterns or mathematics, music, words, and so on. These are indications of what is unique about us. This uniqueness can be expressed by our interest in several things that we want to combine. Most of us lose touch with these inclinations as we get older. We listen more and more to parents; we enter career paths that seem cool or lucrative. Masters stand out by their ability to stay true to their earliest inclinations; they have an exceptional connection to what they were meant to do in life.

This does not mean that we quit your jobs and take up the guitar because we love music. We have to be practical and earn a living. What we need to do is find ways to adapt our career path, slowly direct it towards fields or problems that spark our keenest interests and curiosity. It’s an evolution. But if we take the time, and eventually find our way to the right path, we will know it is right by how it feels. Work will come easier because we are engaged and committed. We rarely feel bored. We experience momentum, as we see and seize one opportunity after another. There are countless stories of masters that demonstrate this idea in action.

Do not consider anything you have done in the past as a waste. Even the most menial jobs will teach you lessons and skills you can later exploit and combine. In one writer's career, he worked for years as a writer in journalism and then in Hollywood. In the film business, he also carved out a niche as a high–level researcher for feature films and documentaries. This work really helped him develop organizational skills as well. When he had the opportunity to write books, he could now combine the skills he had cultivated as a researcher, to write books that are different and play to his own strengths. You need to diversify and always be thinking of expanding your skill base.

AN EXAMPLE OF TOP THREE PIECES
OF ADVICE ON HOW SOMEONE CAN 
BECOME A MASTER AT CHESS


1. Look inward. You have to think deeply whether the games or skills you are learning are suited to you. If you feel only half interested, if you find yourself more excited by your leisure time, then most likely you have not chosen a field that engages you. Think about the subjects out there that stir your curiosity, bring you back to that feeling in childhood in which you wanted to learn. The games, opening, middlegames or endgames you are mastering have to in some way stir your interest and make you excited about the future. If not, you need to slowly shift direction. You need a plan for five years down the line, how you can combine the skills you already have with something new. For instance, if you studied Sicilian and you discover that it bores you to tears, you do not simply turn your back on the skills you have developed. You find your way to something in which you can use what you learned as a Sicilian player in a direction that appeals to you more: French, English, Benoni, etc. Build and expand on the skills you have, but move in the direction that ultimately suits your interests.

2. Have faith in the learning process itself. A lot of people start out excited and motivated but when it comes to the practice or hard hours that are necessary in the beginning, they seem to lose interest. In fact, they are losing faith in the process itself. They no longer believe in the great rewards down the road, the powers and skills that will come to them through practice and discipline. It is a critical life skill to be able to postpone your need for immediate pleasures and satisfaction, keeping your eye on the future. There is a US Air Force fighter pilot Cesar Rodriguez. He is nicknamed “The Last American Ace” because he had the highest number of kills in air combat since the Vietnam War. Cesar was not a golden boy. He was not a natural at flying. In fighter pilot training school he had to practice twice as hard as others to master the same maneuvers. He saw a lot of more talented pilots fall out of the training program because they became discouraged at all of the criticism they had to endure. Cesar had played quarterback for his high school football team and knew that through practice and repetition the human brain can learn almost any skill. With this faith, he outworked the others, even the golden boys. As the golfer Ben Hogan put it, “I always outworked everybody. Work never bothered me like it bothers some people. You can outwork even the best player in the world.”


3. Develop as many skills as possible. The future belongs to those who can combine forms of knowledge and different skills. All of the modern masters exemplify this. For the entrepreneur Paul Graham it was visual arts and computer science; for Santiago Calatrava it was engineering and architecture; for Freddie Roach it was using his experience as a boxer and combining it in a new way with his work as a trainer; for Yoky Matsuoka it was mixing neuroscience, with robotics, and the design of green technology. The reason for this is simple: we now live in an era of incredible access to information. Mining the area between various fields will allow you to carve out a unique career path, one that is custom fit to your own interests and inclinations. Even if you are forced to specialize for whatever reason, you must continually explore other areas and expand your knowledge.