Three reasons not to aim for mastery when competence will do

I know it sounds absurd to say “not to aim for mastery when competence will do,” but I have good reasons. After working in TV and radio for decades, I learned that you need three things to take you from competence to mastery, three things you better be sure you can give:

1 – Time

To be truly great at something, you need to say no to everything else.

It doesn’t take long to become competent at something, but to truly take that to mastery, it requires time to learn and then to practice, practice, practice.

When editing TV, I scraped by at the beginning, a little rough, but enough to make a story. But I was determined to master the craft. Let me give you an example of what I learned that you can verify with any real master:

Ask a competent editor and they’ll probably have enjoyed playing around with footage and made a few You-Tube videos. Maybe one or two long weekends or 48-hour film challenges.

Ask a master editor - someone that has fixed lame news footage seconds before it went to air, maybe even cutting the end while the beginning is playing out to a national audience, or someone that cuts trailers every day, trying to find a story in a film that frankly, has none - what it took to get as good as they are, and you’ll discover horror story after horror story, framed with overnighters, painful directors, useless reporters, even worse cameramen and bosses that have no clue just how hard this can get. And the truly great ones look so serene through the whole ting. Although, if they ever quietly order you out of the edit suite, you can tell your job is now hanging by a teeny tiny thread.

To get that good, though, the’ve had to sacrifice so much. Time, family, friends, sanity and other interesting things you might otherwise want to muck around with in that kind of environment.


2 – Work

Now, I’m one of those idiots that masters something and then feels it’s time to master some other thing I never had the time to master before. Beggar for punishment.

Radio Imaging (making the stuff that gives a radio station or brand it’s audio image - using beats, beds, voiceovers, stingers and the rest of the fun stuff) went from fun to an overdose of hard, hard work. Same as editing. 

Same went for writing. Only at school did I get the luxury of writing whatever I felt like and then stopping when I couldn’t be bothered any more. Except for one time when my teacher discussed my three sentence report (“We went for a three-hour walk to the top of the Pinnacles. We looked at the scenery for five minutes and walked down again. It was hideous,” or something like that) with my parents, who then made me write a thousand words over the weekend. (Even that didn’t go well, because all I did was take the same three sentences and surround them with verbs and adjectives. The reader learnt nothing more than they got from the first version.)

But after that, I gained mastery by writing and writing and writing. Almost like getting 30 years of punishment for the three sentence thing.

I wrote commercials, news stories, promos, documentaries, radio dramas, comedy, television series, reality shows, screenplays, government PR and marketing communications and now books. (Well, I still go government PR, and marcomms.)

But the point I have finally learned is that only choose mastery for the things you really can’t live without. The things that you will be happy to choose to live with for years and years and years at the hard work end of the craft.


3 – Focus

Being truly great at something requires sacrificing the things that are less important to your goal, mission or vision for life.

Think of it like looking at your life through a zoom lens. To make a truly great picture, you remove unnecessary clutter from the frame. Shoot only what you want the viewer to see. Same with your inner "eye." Keep it simple. In focus. Free of clutter or distraction.

That’s what mastery requires.

For the less important things - the things you don’t need to truly master - competence will do.

If you don’t know what you need to do, become competent at a bunch of things. Something will eventually consume you. That’s the one you pick to master.

Pick well,

Drew