The Secret to Mastering Absolutely Anything
The path to mastery isn't easy, but it is straightforward and you've probably heard it before.
I’ll start with some truths, because it’s a bit bold to come out the gates suggesting you know the secret to mastering anything.
The fact is in my lifetime I’ve probably ~only~ ‘mastered’ one thing, drawing and painting, and even then I dropped out of art school twice because I was such a nightmare of a youth. I certainly haven’t mastered everything I’ve ever tried or even come close, but I have gotten very, very good at a few things, and it was always the same approach that got me there.
The first truth is that none of this is secret or new, and coaches, trainers, teachers et al throughout time have known and espoused all of these ideas at some point.
The second truth is that most people are lazy.
People want quick fixes to long term problems, they want to fast forward to the results without putting in any work, and they aren’t willing to compromise or make sacrifices.
(Which is also to say that there isn’t much competition out there whatever you’re doing.)
It’s the only reason the diet and weight-loss industry exists, because people would rather hear the beautiful lie that they can lose weight quickly and forever just by drinking a milkshake a day, than the ugly truth that they need to eat a balanced diet of everything, less of the bad things they like, and they need to exercise a LOT more.
Every day for forever.
Skill acquisition and mastery is about building a habit of practice and maintaining it.
And that’s genuinely all it is, really. Developing a mindset and habit of learning through practice. ‘Beginner’s Mind’, the concept of ‘Shoshin’ in Zen Buddhism, is exactly this:
It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would.
Key to the concept of Shoshin is that the practitioner never thinks of themselves as an expert. To think of yourself as an ‘expert’ is to think of your learning and your skill as complete, whole, and this is never true.
There is always more to learn, and without diligent practice, skills fade.
The last truth is that this isn’t really about ‘mastery’, it’s really just about how to start doing something and practicing it in a way that leads to improvement, if that’s what you want to do, improve.
It also doesn’t boil down to a list of X things that some dude wrote on his blog, but if you’re struggling with learning a skill, and you really, really want to get better at it, I might have some pointers.
Pick something and dig yourself in for the long haul
This is maybe the hardest part, and you might have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your Prince (I am so very sorry for this awful metaphor).
You have to start trying things out, lots of things, and you need to look for something that’ll hold your interest for long enough to keep you going through the steep part of the learning curve, with all the failures and plateaus and frustrations and tantrums that come along the way.
It’s a bit of an odd thing to think, existentially, “I’m going to do a thing and I’m going to try to become good at it”, so it’s going to help if you can build an attachment to that thing. It needs to be enjoyable, ideally so enjoyable you dream about it.
As a bit of a guide I’d say you need to be looking at a 2-4 year time investment before you even start seeing results, and I guarantee you, year 1 will be humbling.
Get ready to try things and quit them, but when you hit something that works, be prepared to commit to it completely. It’s ‘your thing’ now.
For a short period of my life, I competed in archery, and I was lucky enough to train with two members of the Scottish national squad, who jointly gave me a piece of advice that kept me pushing through the first year of the learning curve.
When you’re a beginner, the barriers are almost all physical. You don’t know the movements, how to hold yourself etc, you’re struggling to coordinate yourself enough to just do the thing, and lots of beginners never make it beyond this phase. They get frustrated at their lack of immediate progress and they quit, when all they needed to do was stick in a while longer and build some muscle memory.
When you’re ‘practiced’ though(they never used the word expert), the barriers are almost all psychological. Because you’ve mastered the movements, because you can analyse and fine tune your mistakes, it becomes easier to get stuck in your own head.
So I knew to look out for that when it came.
Pick something and commit. It doesn’t need to be your lifelong passion, you just need to like it enough to commit to doing it regularly.
Talent is a term used by lazy people
There are obvious caveats here, like sportspeople who won the genetic lottery. If you come from a long line of tall, athletic people with perfect eyesight, hearing, balance etc, and you inherit all the same genetic traits, then as far as most athletic sports go you’ve got a gigantic head start on the competition.
In a kind of adjacent way, if your flavour of neuro-diversity is the same as mine, congrats (And hey bud!)!
We have a superpower, focus. I can put in more dedicated focus for more hours and weeks and years than most folks out there.
But that’s all it is, focus. I don’t have any special abilities, I’m not a genius, I’m not doing anything better than anyone else. I’m just doing it more, for longer.
So what do people mean when they say ‘talent’?
Generally they’re talking about someone with a skill that requires years of practice to acquire, but to the outsider the acquisition of that skill is so unknowable and complex that it’s simply easier to proclaim the ability behind that skill as ‘god given’ or ‘a gift’, a ‘talent’. Which is laziness.
“It’s not talent, it’s just work”
- Annie Dillon
This is the truest and only definition I know, it’s just work.
You have to turn up and do it.
Once you decide you’re going to do it, you keep turning up.
Every single day.
’Talent’ is just doing the work.
Discipline outperforms inspiration and motivation
I don’t know what ‘inspiration’ is, beyond a strong desire to do something, and I can’t really imagine getting anything done if I had to sit about waiting for that desire to surface. (This is just how my brain works, I’m not trying to sound like a big tough guy)
I think of motivation in the same way, a strong desire to accomplish something, and likewise, I can’t imagine getting anything accomplished if I was to sit about waiting to get motivated.
Feelings aren’t reliable, they aren’t consistent. If I only did things I felt like doing I’d be in all kinds of trouble, so I prefer to use discipline. Routine.
You have to turn up every day and keep turning up, every single day, whether you feel like it or not. You have to build a habit of daily practice and maintain it until it becomes an unconscious part of your everyday routine.
“Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”
- Chuck Close
Can’t think of where to start? Start anywhere, just start.
Don’t feel like doing it? Too bad, do it anyway.
Scared? Do it scared.
That’s discipline. Discipline doesn’t care about your feelings, it just goes to work.
Practice isn’t enough. Practice deliberately
I was introduced to the practice of ‘deliberate practice’ by my archery coach, who had the actual title ‘Master Bowman’. Next up would be ‘Grand Master Bowman’ which is effectively impossible to attain unless you’re a superhuman. I’d been deliberately practicing things my whole life, but hadn’t known it was a ‘thing’.
Anyway, one day at practice he quietly pointed out that the majority of people there were walking up to the line, casually shooting a few arrows, chatting to the people beside them, and wandering back without keeping score. Some had been shooting regularly for years, some for decades, and in the politest way imaginable my coach pointed out that they were all terrible.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
- Albert Einstein (allegedly)
Although they were turning up and ‘practicing’, they weren’t changing anything in order to get better or paying any attention to what they might be doing wrong. When they asked for advice, they’d try it once and reject it. And that’s all I was I doing differently.
My practice was deliberate, not casual.
Over a 3 hour practice session, we’d average about 12 ‘ends’ or rounds, and most people would shoot 3-6 arrows per end.
At best, a casual shooter would average about 72 shots in a practice session.
At worst, they’d manage to get about 36 shots off and spend the rest of the session chatting to their wee pals.
I’d shoot 12 arrows per end, equalling 144 shots per session. Everything was systematic, noted down, catalogued. I recorded foot position, head position, shots scored, shots missed, which arrows I used in which order, how long my beard was that day, everything. Every single shot.
If I changed something and my score changed for the worse, I knew what to change back, and the only folks I talked to when I was practicing were the ones there grinding just like me. Anyone trying to socialise with me when I was in training mode was a time thief.
Even if I just put in the same amount of hours that my peers were putting in, my work-rate was 4x theirs, and that’s what everyone who was training for performance did.
After 3 years of shooting I was competing in national competitions, and for a very short time (about 2 weeks between comps one year) I was 14th in the rankings in Scotland for mens indoor recurve. I never became a Master Bowman, but I was pretty good.
What about a different example that isn’t sport? Drawing is something I do constantly, reactively. I’ve done it ‘deliberately’ since I was about 8 years old.
It’s become reflexive for me to scribble a doodle instead of writing a note, because I think visually, in pictures. But if I don’t feel like sitting down and drawing or painting ‘something’, a ‘piece’, I practice. Really boring, repetitive practice.
I’ll draw patterns, or I’ll hatch an entire sheet of paper, just to practice hatching, or I’ll scribble automatically without looking, just to feel the pen or pencil or brush moving in my hand, reacting to the paper, testing what it feels like to shift the pressure from finger to finger to palm. I’ll draw whole sketchbooks of parallel lines with different hardness pencils in sequence. I don’t care what it ends up looking like.
So don’t ‘just’ do it, do it and analyse it, adapt it, improve it.
Find mentors and be a good mentee
Stand on the shoulders of giants, learn from those that have done it before, all those cliches are true I’m afraid. Unless you start analysing your own performance, it’ll flatline, and eventually you’re gonna need someone who’s better than you to analyse it from an outside perspective.
No matter what I’ve chosen to do in my life, when I decided to take it seriously I sought out people who were better than me at that thing, and asked them for help.
It’s always required a couple of things on my part, first of which is humility. My ego and my attitude need to go away when I’m learning something new, and if I’m performing badly, I have to take the tough love and accept why.
Whenever I’ve gotten better at whatever ‘thing’ I’m focussed on, it means letting my mentors into my head, which has never been easy for me, but again, it’s helped me overcome my biases and bad habits, in a much bigger way than just learning a skill.
To end this section on another cliche, the best way to get somewhere is to ask someone who’s been there and knows the way, and don’t be a dick if you don’t like the directions.
And that’s all I’m telling you kid. Mastery definitely takes way more than 5 things described in a rambling manner by a man who’s only kind of good at some stuff, but it IS almost all in your head.
Once you dial into that mindset though, and you learn how to build a habit of practice and maintain it, you will get better at whatever you put your mind to, and that, in and of itself, will make other people want to do it too.