Mastery

 

Each of us holds the potential to become great in whatever we want to achieve. However, this is easier said than done and the sad reality most of us won't achieve this high level...to achieve Mastery. In his book, Mastery by Robert Greene, the author explains in detail the steps to follow to gain mastery in your field. Mastery is a stage where very people get let alone stay at. It is the result of dedicated practice in your field. Below are some of the insights that I gathered while reading the book.

Find Your True Calling

“Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.” -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

This echoes back to Ikigai and having a purpose to live. Robert Greene says we all have a voice inside us that guides us towards our path. By listening to that voice, we will be able to find our purpose on this earth. However, life gets in the way and parents, relatives, friends etc tell you how to live your purpose and what you should do. They all mean well but no one knows you better than yourself. If you follow the path set by your people, you will often end up unhappy and even depressed even if you end up successful. Finding your purpose is the most important thing to do. I find that by thoroughly sampling a variety of interests and hobbies early on helps as we are able to get a feel of what we like and often times we like a lot of things. This can lead to mixing knowledge from various pools of interests to come up with creative solutions for the modern day problems. Robert Greene also suggests we should return to our origins and explore what really made us tick when we were young. What did we do that made lose the sense of time aka enter that flow state.

Apprenticeship

The lost art of apprenticeship should come back. In the old days, to get work, you had to be taken under someone's tutelage for 7 years where you acquire the skills of your sensei and can come out confident in your skills.

In the modern day, we should practice self-apprenticeship and seek out mentors be it from books, YouTube etc. You should seek a person who is doing what you want to do and absorb their ways. From the way they think, observe stuff etc. We have a short life and a shorter youth where we have immense energy and less risk. We should then look up to people who we aspire to be as this will provide a 'shortcut' to getting where we want to be. So instead of trial and error for 10 years, you can achieve what you want in 5 years under the careful guidance of a mentor.

Stages of Apprenticeship

Deep observation

This is the first stage where you observe what your mentor is doing. You keep an open mind and return to a state of inferiority as the author states. This is a state where you know nothing and feel like a child seeing an adult at work. This lets you absorb as much as possible and you can progress as quickly as possible

Practice

This is the stage where you get to practice what you have observed. In this stage, it is best to fail fast and learn from your mistakes. There is no shame in failure of doing something to the best of your level. It's better to try, fail, learn than it is to not attempt learning the skill at all.

Experimentation

After thorough practice, you know venture onwards in exploring what you can do with what you have learnt. Can you tweak a certain skill and making even more efficient? Can you add more or remove less to a certain activity? Can you combine one and the other to make something new? This is the best stage in my own opinion as it allows you to come up with something of your own and contribute to society.

Mastery

After going through the stages of apprenticeship successfully, you venture out on your own and see what you can do. Over the years, you add skills, refine some, discard others all the while becoming better in your craft. Mastery is a process that never ends because you can always become better at something. Ultimately, true mastery means you have learnt and applied everything there is to know and that is a stage we will never reach. This is a great thing because you always want to be learning, applying what you learnt and tweaking your skill to become better. 

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. I hope you find this information useful and if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know in the comment section below.