Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

by George Leonard

If there is any sure route to success and fulfillment in life, it is to be found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery.

Seduced by the siren song of a consumerist, quick-fix society, we sometimes choose a course of action that brings only the illusion of accomplishment, the shadow of satisfaction.

There’s really no way around it. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it.

there’s perhaps no more dangerous time for any society than its moment of greatest triumph. It would be truly foolish to let the decline of communism blind us to the long-term contradictions in a free market economy unrestrained by considerations of the environment and social justice, and driven by heedless consumerism, instant gratification, and the quick fix. Our dedication to growth at all costs puts us on a collision course with the environment. Our dedication to the illusion of endless climaxes puts us on a collision course with the human psyche.

But the real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

But we had learned the perils of getting ahead of ourselves, and now were willing to stay on the plateau for as long as was necessary. Ambition still was there, but it was tamed. Once again we enjoyed our training. We loved the plateau. And we made progress.

I love this focus on practice for the sake of practice

But recognition is often unsatisfying and fame is like sea-water for the thirsty. Love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and good drink.

Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present.

There are some skills you can learn on your own, and some you can try to learn, but if you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.

What doesn’t work, despite a certain macho attitude to the contrary, is scorn, excoriation, humiliation—anything that destroys the student’s confidence and self-esteem.

The typical school or college classroom, unhappily, is not a very good place to learn. “Frontal teaching,” with one instructor sitting or standing in front of twenty to thirty-five students who are sitting at fixed desks, is primarily an administrative expediency, a way of parceling out and keeping track of the flood of students in mass education. It’s sad that over the past hundred years almost every aspect of our national life—industry, transportation, communication, computation, entertainment—has changed almost beyond recognition, while our schools remain essentially the same.

For one who is on the master’s journey, however, the word is best conceived of as a noun, not as something you do, but as something you have, something you are. In this sense, the word is akin to the Chinese word tao and the Japanese word do, both of which mean, literally, road or path. Practice is the path upon which you travel, just that.

But that’s not really the point. What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

The courage of a master is measured by his or her willingness to surrender. This means surrendering to your teacher and to the demands of your discipline. It also means surrendering your own hard-won proficiency from time to time in order to reach a higher or different level of proficiency.

Actually, the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.

Intentionalty fuels the master’s journey. Every master is a master of vision.

True for engineering orgs too :P

The problem is, homeostasis works to keep things as they are even if they aren’t very good.

Trivial change, bureaucratic meddling, is much easier to accept, and that’s one reason why you see so much of it.

The questions are: How do you deal with homeostasis? How do you make change for the better easier? How do you make it last?

1. Be aware of the way homeostasis works. This might be the most important guideline of all. Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing—just what you’ve wanted. Of course, it might be that you have started something that’s not right for you; only you can decide. But in any case, don’t panic and give up at the first sign of trouble.

The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa. It also demands a determination to keep pushing, but not without awareness. Simply turning off your awareness to the warnings deprives you of guidance and risks damaging the system. Simply pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the possibility of backsliding.

Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. We tend to forget that learning is much more than book learning. To learn is to change. Education, whether it involves books, body, or behavior, is a process that changes the learner.

Maintain physical fitness. We all know physically fit people who sit around shuffling papers all day. And we also know those energy demons who still maintain that when the urge to exercise comes over them, they simply lie down until it passes. But, all things being equal, physical fitness contributes enormously to energy in every aspect of our lives.

5. Set your priorities. Before you can use your potential energy, you have to decide what you’re going to do with it. And in making any choice, you face a monstrous fact: to move in one direction, you must forgo all others. To choose one goal is to forsake a very large number of other possible goals.

Make commitments. Take action. The journey of mastery is ultimately goalless; you take the journey for the sake of the journey itself.

How many times have you failed to try something new out of fear of being thought silly? How often have you censored your spontaneity out of fear of being thought childish? Too bad.