Discovering the appeal of mastery
How to introduce children to the idea of the pursuit of mastery and what empowers them to pursue it.
Growing up I never thought about mastery. I am a results person - get to the envisioned endpoint as quickly as possible.
Cultivating skills did happen over time, but I never put any thought into how skills are honed or refined to top level. I was always a “Hacker”, as defined in the book Ordinary Mastery:
(Image from John Durrant’s substack Ordinary Mastery where he summarizes the book)
Only at the grand age of 40 did the pursuit of mastery come on my radar as something that could be relevant to me. I realised that just the act of doing a thing at a high level can be a form of joy in itself, without necessarily being driven by the result. I wonder what would happen if kids were exposed to this subject in their formative years.
Current society encourages us to focus on quick results and is submerged with distraction. It seems that the current culture is permeated with hackers and “dabblers”:
(Image from John Durrant’s substack Ordinary Mastery where he summarizes the book)
Nevertheless, when I have the inkling to whine about trash movies, trash institutions, trash fashion, ugly architecture and pollution, I remind myself that the world I perceive is connected to me at subatomic level, so if I am serious about the desire for a world with less trash and more quality, I better start cultivating mastery in myself. From the The Tao of Physics book:
“"The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated 'basic building blocks,' but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole."
There is a great opportunity here for conversation. Whenever a teenager starts to complain about some aspect of the world, one can introduce the idea of Hackers and Dabblers as an explanation of why the results are as they are.
One can turn the lens on the teenager: “Are you going to be any different? The world is a reflection of its participants, so if you want a prettier, cleaner world with more beauty, wisdom and more intelligent processes - you can be the change you want to see by pursuing mastery in something you care about. This is how we get more quality and less trash.”
The ingredients that make mastery happen
To better illustrate this, I am going to quote some passages from a book that is a great reference on the subject - Mastery by Robert Greene. I think the following are formative elements:
Find your uniqueness
“This uniqueness is not something merely poetic or philosophical—it is a scientific fact that genetically, every one of us is unique; our exact genetic makeup has never happened before and will never be repeated. This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words. With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish.”
The hints of that uniqueness are to be discovered in childhood, if one looks closely:
“These childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations—that of deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness. The importance of recognizing these preverbal inclinations is that they are clear indications of an attraction that is not infected by the desires of other people. Masters and those who display a high level of creative energy are simply people who manage to retain a sizeable portion of their childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood. ”
I track all the attractions and fascinations of the young child, in case he forgets. In case he is at risk defaulting to Conventional mind when he is 18, and needs a reminder of what made him feel alive:
“As the years pass, this intensity inevitably diminishes. We come to see the world through a screen of words and opinions; our prior experiences, layered over the present, colour what we see. We no longer look at things as they are, noticing their details, or wonder why they exist. Our minds gradually tighten up. We become defensive about the world we now take for granted, and we become upset if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked. We can call this way of thinking the Conventional Mind. Under pressure to make a living and conform to society, we force our minds into tighter and tighter grooves. We may seek to retain the spirit of childhood here and there, playing games or participating in forms of entertainment that release us from the Conventional Mind.
Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems. They are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over, but they have the rigor and discipline to follow their investigations all the way to the end.
Find and pursue the thing you really care for
Mastery requires high energy and perseverance. This cannot be maintained in pursuits you don’t care enough for.
“Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.”
Sometimes it is not an object or an activity but rather something in the world or culture that sparks a deep connection:
“When Thomas Edison saw his first demonstration of the electric arc light, he knew then and there that he had found the ultimate challenge and the perfect goal toward which to direct his creative energies. Figuring out how to make electric light not just a gimmick, but something that would eventually replace the gaslight, would require years of intense labour, but it would change the world like nothing else. It was the perfect riddle for him to solve. He had met his creative match. For the artist Rembrandt, it was not until he found particular subject matters that appealed to him—dramatic scenes from the Bible and elsewhere that conveyed the darker and more tragic aspects of life—that he rose to the occasion and invented a whole new way of painting and capturing light.”
If there is nothing you care deeply enough for: keep looking, dabbling if you wish, in a variety of things, make this search itself the thing you deeply care for. Just recognize the temporary purpose dabbling serves here.
Realise the potential value of mastery to you personally, how it connects you to the transcendent.
One way is getting exposure to the inner lives of people who you admire, who pursued mastery. Reading about what kind of zest and absorption into flow is possible.
A benefit many (including you) can get from pursuit of mastery is the connection to the transcendent: intuitive, miracle like coincidences, serendipity, ideas and connections that seem to drop out of nowhere. The world becomes more enchanted and you feel more of a wizard:
“ As William James expressed it, the mind “transitions from one idea to another … the most unheard of combination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity.” A kind of mental momentum is generated, in which the slightest chance occurrence will spark a fertile idea.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (pp. 184-185)..
When describing Goethe:
“His mastery was not over this subject or that one, but in the connections between them, based on decades of deep observation and thinking. Goethe epitomizes what was known in the Renaissance as the Ideal of the Universal Man—a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (p. 309).
On the pleasure that comes with the pursuit:
“We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality—to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behaviour, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming. We are Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves. Although it involves much pain, the pleasure that comes from the overall process of creativity is of an intensity that makes us want to repeat it. That is why creative people return again and again to such endeavours, despite all of the anxiety and doubt they stir up. It is nature’s way of rewarding us for the effort; if we had no such rewards, people would not engage in such activity, and mankind would suffer irreparably from this loss. This pleasure will be your reward as well, to whatever degree you pursue the process.” ~Greene, Robert. Master (pp. 204-205).
A path of mastery is a road less travelled in a world of Dabblers and Hackers. One has to get comfortable with often walking alone:
“Most people don’t have the patience to absorb their minds in the fine points and minutiae that are intrinsically part of their work. They are in a hurry to create effects and make a splash; they think in large brush strokes. Their work inevitably reveals their lack of attention to detail—it doesn’t connect deeply with the public, and it feels flimsy. If it gets attention, the attention is momentary.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (The Robert Greene Collection) (p. 293).
But stifling the natural creative force can become a source of misery:
“Understand: we all possess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveals such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.” ~ Greene, Robert. Mastery (The Robert Greene Collection) (p. 177).
Dispel the myth and belief that “genius” cannot apply to you
Friedrich Nietzsche expressed it well:
“Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvellous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high.
Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us…
But aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics.
All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.
Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.’”
A pitfall a young adult might encounter is the conspiracy against “showing off” excellence and mastery. There is an undercurrent where one might not want to appear too excellent as that would feel unfair to the others . Sticking out with your accomplishments becomes looked down upon.
The internet is filled with stories of people getting rich or famous quickly or with personal struggles, failures and drama. Where a person is excelling and achieving mastery, it just doesn’t go viral as much. When it does, it's seen as a one-off , viewed as a form of rare genius that is deemed inaccessible to mere mortals.
But the truth is that guy just cared more about his activity more than we do. There is something else you care more about than the next person. And that is where the doors of mastery can be open for anyone.
“Don’t be the best in the world at what you do; be the only one in the world who does what you do.” ~ Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead
Now this, I think, would sound sexier and more relevant to a teen eager to differentiate himself, than the good old snooze: “You got to become good at X so you can get on the career ladder and secure your future.”
A little disclaimer
There are many ways to entice a child to explore mastery, but a little Taoist disclaimer is in order: Every subject discussed, for it to “arrive”, you cannot be too attached to it arriving. If you are going to go on about mastery as something that is a requirement to get ahead in life, if there is an unspoken whiff of it being linked to your approval… it will just cause unnecessary resistance. Everything I talk about with my son usually comes with something to the effect of “Don’t have to believe or agree with me (or anyone for that matter). These are just my observations in the limited context of my experience. Look around as you go through life, see for yourself what works and explore if it's true.” He knows I don’t care what he does in life, I just have a mild preference that he feels truly alive living it.
P.S. Exploration of any deep subjects better flows during walks, trips, playing badminton or any other moving activity as opposed to “let’s sit down and talk”. Especially for active boys.
Resources:
Robert Greene’s book Mastery is enticing and would be very interesting to read for anyone 15+.
A good Substack on Mastery :
