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Becoming A Master
Posted on March 6, 2011 by dan
Mastery by George Leonard is a slim book packed with profound wisdom. I first read it years ago, but still find myself pulling it off the shelf for a “refresher” read.
The book discusses the principals of becoming a master. It doesn’t matter what field you are in or what your given task is – the principals of mastery don’t change. They are timeless and universal.
According to Leonard, when most people try to develop a new skill-set, they come at it through one of the following personalities:
1. The Hacker
2. The Dabbler
3. The Obsessive
The Hacker attempts to steal other people’s work in effort to gain an unearned level of competency. Without exception, this type of person always fails, because long-term success cannot be built upon lies and deceit.
The Dabbler practices the given skill-set only when it is convenient. They approach practice as a burden and as soon as things become too difficult, as soon as their development plateuas, they quit and move on to the next thing.
The Obsessive takes to the development of a new skill-set with gusto. They practice doggedly, but lack the necessary perspective to monitor themselves. They are unable and unwilling to make the necessary adjustments to advance to successive levels of competency and excellency.
Leonard goes on to describe how a Master approaches conquering a new skill-set. The Master’s approach is markedly different from the approach of The Hacker, The Dabbler and The Obsessive.
Primarily, a Master focuses on the fundamentals, the details, the non-sexy aspects of a given craft. From there, a Master seeks proper coaching in the form of a mentor – someone who can teach them and monitor their progress objectively. Also key to a Master’s development are things like discipline, practice and delayed gratification.
Delayed gratification is particulary interesting to me. I believe it the fundamental difference between Masters and non-masters.
Most people are focused on short-term gratification. If they have a headache, they want someone to give them a pill to make the headache go away right now. If they have a sweet tooth, they want junk food laden with fat and sugar to satisfy their cravings right now. If they want a 60 ” HD TV but can’t afford it, they buy it on credit card so they can have it in their living room right now.
If they want to sell a screenplay, they want the 1st draft they write to do the job.
Basically, the vast majority of people do not pay any mind to how their behavior today will affect their life tomorrow, next week, next month or next year. They don’t seem to realize that success is built upon thousands of thankless hours practicing and honing their craft.
They do not know how to delay gratification.
And the irony is that the things that feel good to us in the short-term are usually horribly detrimental to us in the long term.
Michael Jordan often says the when he was playing basketball and was the biggest sports star on the planet, that the only thing people noticed about him was that he had a shoe deal, had his face on Wheaties boxes and on giant billboards, and at the end of every season, he hoisted a Championship trophy over his head while champhange bottles exploded around him.
In other words, they saw the glitz and glamor, but not the work it took to get there.
No one saw Michael Jordan working out at 6am, or staying up all night with his knees on ice, or saw the dozen other difficult, behind-the-scenes things it took to succeed.
A few years back, first time screenwriter Michael Arndt won the Oscar for his script “Little Miss Sunshine”. If you read any of the trade papers at the time, they were all about Arndt’s overnight, meteoric rise to the top.
“Look at this! With his first screenplay, Arndt won an Academy Award!”
But what no one saw was the 30 other screenplays Arndt wrote in the space of a single year, just to find a decent story. Nor did they see the 50 + rewrites he made of “Sunshine”, and the various people guiding him with advice and suggestions for improvement along the way. Nor did they see the years that went by before the movie actually got made.
The masses want instant gratification. The Masters understand that delaying gratification is key, and that laying the not-always-glamorous groundwork is what “over night success” is built upon.
- Dan Reilly
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