Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

by George Leonard

What we call intelligence comes in many varieties. Howard Gardner of Harvard University and the Boston University School of Medicine has identified seven of them: linguistic, musical, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, and two types of personal intelligences that might be described as intrapersonal and interpersonal. We vary in our giftedness in these seven at least.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.

The achievement of goals is important. 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.

This isn’t to say that we didn’t practice hard. The Hacker gets on a plateau and doesn’t keep working. As I think back on that period, I realize that in spite of our many flaws we were definitely on the path of mastery. Unlike the Hacker, we were working hard, doing the best we could to improve our skills. 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.

My father’s colleagues later told me that he was among the best in his field. Still, the public recognition he might have wished for never materialized, nor did the fame. 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.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar launching his “sky-hook” basketball shot over the hand of an opposing player, his face a revelation of inner delight. Abdul-Jabbar is not a man of small ego. I’m sure he loved the money, the fame, the privileges his career brought him. But he loved the sky-hook more.

I listen carefully when Wendy Palmer, one of my partners, tells me that teaching beginners and slow students is not only fascinating but pleasurable. The talented student, she believes, is likely to learn so fast that small stages in the learning process are glossed over, creating an opaque surface that hides the secrets of the art from view. With the slow student, though, the teacher is forced to deal with small, incremental steps that penetrate like X rays the very essence of the art, and clearly reveal the process through which the art becomes manifest in movement.

between what you would call change for the better and change for the worse. It resists all change. After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as “normal”; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat.

Just let it be said that the resistance here (as in other cases) is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one. If an organizational or cultural reform meets tremendous resistance, it is because it’s either a tremendously bad idea or a tremendously good idea. Trivial change, bureaucratic meddling, is much easier to accept, and that’s one reason why you see so much of it. In the same way, the talkier forms of psychotherapy are acceptable, at least to some degree, perhaps because they sometimes change nothing very much except the patient’s ability to talk about his or her problems. But none of this is meant to condemn homeostasis. We want our minds and bodies and organizations to hold together. We want that paycheck to arrive on schedule. In order to survive, we need stability.

These questions rise to great importance when you embark on the path of mastery. Say that after years of hacking around in your career, you decide to approach it in terms of the principles of mastery. Your whole life obviously will change, and thus you’ll have to deal with homeostasis. But even if you should begin applying mastery to pursuits such as gardening or tennis, which might seem less than central to your existence, the effects of the change might ripple out to touch almost everything you do. Realizing significantly more of your potential in almost anything can change you in many ways. And however much you enjoy and profit from the change, you’ll probably meet with homeostasis sooner or later. You might experience homeostatic alarm signals in the form of physical or psychological symptoms. You might unknowingly sabotage your own best efforts. You might get resistance from family, friends, and co-workers. And you can consider yourself fortunate indeed if you don’t find yourself on that old, familiar slide back to the ways of the Dabbler, or the Obsessive, or the Hacker. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide if you really do want to spend the time and effort it takes to get on and stay on the path. If you do, here are five guidelines that might help. While these guidelines are focused on mastery, they could also be applied to any change in your life.

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.

Bear in mind that an entire system has to change when any part of it changes. So don’t be surprised if some of the people you love start covertly or overtly undermining your self-improvement. It’s not that they wish you harm, it’s just homeostasis at work.

2. Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. So what should you do when you run into resistance, when the red lights flash and the alarm bells ring? Well, you don’t back off, and you don’t bull your way through. Negotiation is the ticket to successful long-term change in everything from increasing your running speed to transforming your organization. The long-distance runner working for a faster time on a measured course negotiates with homeostasis by using pain not as an adversary but as the best possible guide to performance. The change-oriented manager keeps his or her eyes and ears open for signs of dissatisfaction or dislocation, then plays the edge of discontent, the inevitable escort of transformation.

3. Develop a support system. You can do it alone, but it helps a great deal to have other people with whom you can share the joys and perils of the change you’re making. The best support system would involve people who have gone through or are going through a similar process, people who can tell their own stories of change and listen to yours, people who will brace you up when you start to backslide and encourage you when you don’t. The path of mastery, fortunately, almost always fosters social groupings.

4. Follow a regular practice. People embarking on any type of change can gain stability and comfort through practicing some worthwhile activity on a more or less regular basis, not so much for the sake of achieving an external goal as simply for its own sake. A traveler on the path of mastery is again fortunate, for practice in this sense (as I’ve said more than once) is the foundation of the path itself. The circumstances are particularly happy in case you’ve already established a regular practice in something else before facing the challenge and change of beginning a new one.

5. 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. It doesn’t have to end at college graduation or at age forty or sixty or eighty, and the best learning of all involves learning how to learn—that is, to change.

out from lack of use. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy. Often the best remedy for physical weariness is thirty minutes of aerobic exercise. In the same way, mental and spiritual lassitude is often cured by decisive action or the clear intention to act. We learn in high school physics that kinetic energy is measured in terms of motion. The same thing is true of human energy: it comes into existence through use. You can’t hoard it. As Frederich S. (Fritz) Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, used to say, “I don’t want to be saved, I want to be spent.”

1. 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.

Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, and perhaps the nation’s top management consultant, speaks of “an almost spooky similarity of language” among the managers of America’s most successful companies. To a man and a woman, they stress the value of a positive attitude and the effectiveness of praise and other forms of positive feedback. “The most successful managers,” Peters told me, “are those who are unwilling to tolerate the negative stuff.” Peters cites one study’s findings that very successful people had had “an obnoxiously high level of praise piled on them in childhood—praise to the point of embarrassment. It seems you can hardly overdo it.” Is it possible to be too positive? Only if you deny the existence of negative factors, of situations in your life and in the world at large that need correcting. Some Eastern philosophies as well as certain Western religions and quasi-religions do just that. Their insistence that evils and ills are nothing more than illusion comforts the converted but often leads to a harmful denial of personal reality and a callousness toward the injustices in the world. Generally, denial inhibits energy, while realistic acknowledgment of the truth releases it. Even serious blows in life can give you extra energy by knocking you off dead center, shaking you out of your lethargy—but not if you deny the blows are real. Acknowledging the negative doesn’t mean sniveling; it means facing the truth and then moving on. Simply describing what’s...

3. Try telling the truth. “There’s nothing more energizing to a corporation than for people to start telling one another truth,” says Dr. Will Schutz, who popularized truth-telling encounter groups in the 1960s and is now a corporate consultant. “One of the first results we got after our sessions with corporate executives was that their meetings were shorter than before. One company reported that hour-and-a-half meetings now take twenty minutes. ‘We just say what we want to say. We don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy not saying something.’ Lies and secrets are poison in organizations—people’s energy is devoted to deceiving and hiding and remembering who it is you don’t want to tell what to. When people start telling the truth, you see almost immediate reductions in mistakes and increases in productivity.” Truth-telling works best when it involves revealing your own feelings, not when used to insult others and to get your own way. All in all, it has a lot going for it—risk, challenge, excitement, and the release of all of that energy.

4. Honor but don’t indulge your own dark side. God knows how much energy we have locked up in the submerged part of our personality, in what Carl Jung calls the shadow.

But the energy we’ve hidden away can still be available to us. And putting those forbidden parts of our personality to work doesn’t involve indulging ourselves and literally acting out the submerged part. Anger, for instance, contains a great deal of energy. If we’ve repressed that emotion so effectively that we can’t even feel it, we obviously can’t use the energy that goes along with it in any conscious, constructive way. But if we take our anger out of the bag simply to indulge it, if we let anger become a knee-jerk response, we dissipate its considerable power. There are times when it’s appropriate to express anger, but there’s also the possibility of taking the fervid energy of indignation, even of rage, and putting it to work for positive purposes.

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. A friend of mine, twenty-nine and still looking for a cause, a purpose in life, said, “Our generation has been raised on the idea of keeping your options open. But if you keep all your options open, you can’t do a damned thing.” It’s a problem: How can any one option, any one goal, match up to the possibilities contained in all others?

6. Make commitments. Take action. The journey of mastery is ultimately goalless; you take the journey for the sake of the journey itself. But, as I’ve pointed out, there are interim goals along the way, the first of which is simply starting the journey. And there’s nothing quite so immediately energizing on any journey as the intermediate goal of a tough, firm deadline—as is well known to anyone who has faced an opening-night curtain, a business-deal closing date, or a definite press time for an article or book.

7. Get on the path of mastery and stay on it. Over the long haul, there’s nothing like the path of mastery to lead you to an energetic life. A regular practice not only elicits energy but tames it. Without the firm underpinnings of a practice, deadlines can produce violent swings between frantic activity and collapse.

Adequate rest is, of course, a part of the master’s journey, but, unaccompanied by positive action, rest may only depress you.

1. Conflicting way of life. The path of mastery doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It wends its way through a landscape of other obligations, pleasures, relationships. The traveler whose main path of mastery coincides with career and livelihood is fortunate; others must find space and time outside regular working hours for a preferred practice that brings mastery but not a living wage.

2. Obsessive goal orientation. As pointed out numerous times in this book, the desire of most people today for quick, sure, and highly visible results is perhaps the deadliest enemy of mastery. It’s fine to have ambitious goals, but the best way of reaching them is to cultivate modest expectations at every step along the way. When you’re climbing a mountain, in other words, be aware that the peak is ahead, but don’t keep looking up at it. Keep your eyes on the path. And when you reach the top of the mountain, as the Zen saying goes, keep on climbing.

But to learn something new of any significance, you have to be willing to look foolish. Even after years of practice, you still take pratfalls. When a Most Valuable Player candidate misjudges a ball and falls on his duff, he does it in the sight of millions. You should be willing to do it before your teacher and a few friends or fellow students.

Even without comparing ourselves to the world’s greatest, we set such high standards for ourselves that neither we nor anyone else could ever meet them—and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences. To put it more starkly, it has robbed us of countless hours of the time of our lives. We awaken in the morning and hurry to get dressed. (Getting dressed doesn’t count.) We hurry to eat breakfast so that we can leave for work. (Eating breakfast doesn’t count.) We hurry to get to work. (Getting to work doesn’t count.) Maybe work will be interesting and satisfying and we won’t have to simply endure it while waiting for lunchtime to come. And maybe lunch will bring a warm, intimate meeting, with fascinating conversation. But maybe not.

Intentionality. To cultivate a positive attitude is to take a large step on the path of mastery in relationships. In addition, mental toughness (the ability to focus on a problem or a long-term goal) combined with openness and imagination (the ability to see options and visualize desired states) can be applied to relationships as well as to sports, or anything else.

mastery can guide you, whatever skill you seek to develop, whatever path you choose to walk. In the words of Chinese Zen master Layman P’ang (c. 740–808 A.D.): My daily affairs are quite ordinary; but I’m in total harmony with them. I don’t hold on to anything, don’t reject anything; nowhere an obstacle or conflict. Who cares about wealth and honor? Even the poorest thing shines. My miraculous power and spiritual activity: drawing water and carrying wood. Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered a childlike quality (he called it a “second naivete”) in people who have met an unusually high degree of their potential. Ashleigh Montagu used the term neot-any (from neonate, meaning newborn) to describe geniuses such as Mozart and Einstein. What we frown at as foolish in our friends, or ourselves, we’re likely to smile at as merely eccentric in a world-renowned genius, never stopping to think that the freedom to be foolish might well be one of the keys to the genius’s success—or even to something as basic as learning to talk. When Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was quite old and close to death, the story goes, he called his students around him and told them he wanted to be buried in his white belt. What a touching story; how humble of the world’s highest-ranking judoist in his last days to ask for the emblem of the beginner! But Kano’s request, I eventually realized, was less humility than realism. At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts.