Decades back, I read the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
Two ideas from the book stayed with me.
The first idea is about the Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern.
The second idea is below:
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Habits create the foundation for Mastery and have the potential to transform your life.
How?
Habits
Habit is a regular act of doing something, especially one that is hard to give up.
Habits compound like compound interest. For example, if you get 1 percent better each day, you will end up nearly 37 times better after one year.
You are what you repeat. You are not what you do once in a blue moon. Habits, when they stick, become your identity.
True behaviour change is an identity change. Every action becomes a vote for the person you wish to become. Every cup of coffee in the morning strengthens your identity as a ‘coffee’ person. Whatever you repeat, you reinforce.
With identity-based habits, we start by focusing on who we wish to become. For example, you become a ‘reader’, or a ‘smoker’ or an ‘athlete’.
Habits are automated decisions. They take away the cognitive load of the decision-making from day to day actions. For example, your choice to have tea instead of coffee, or the route you take to work every day. How often have you started from home and unconsciously taken the route to work?
The key with habits is that they will form whether you want them or not.
Success is the product of daily habits – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
Read James Clear‘s masterpiece Atomic Habits if you want to consciously acquire new habits or get rid of bad habits.
Mastery
Mastery is comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular subject and activity.
Mastery is being world-class. Mastery is Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps.
Mastery is being without competition, being a monopoly, being the ‘one’ as Peter Thiel refers to in Zero to One.
Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure.
We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mould the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
– JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Robert Greene has written a book, Mastery, on this subject. The key takeaway being “Mastery is an acquired skill.” He goes on to outline the process of acquiring Mastery in a field.
How to achieve Mastery?
1. Choose the area that you seek to master.
2. Journey through three phases. Three phases below provide a conceptual framework. They are not water-tight distinctions, meaning the phases will overlap.
- Apprenticeship – Learn by doing.
- Creative-Active
- Mastery
Apprenticeship
The practical education after formal education is the Apprenticeship.
When you are aiming at Mastery: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, or a title, but the transformation of your mind. Choose places of work and areas that offer the greatest possibilities for learning.
Don’t go for easy choices. Seek challenges that will toughen and improve you, and where you will get the objective feedback on your progress.
There are three steps in an apprenticeship:
- Step one: Deep observation – Observe how to do something.
- Step two: Skill acquisition – Implement what you learned through observation.
- Step three: Experimentation – Start experimenting with doing them differently after you are comfortable doing what you are doing.
Creative-Active
As you get comfortable with the skills acquired and the rules of your field, you will actively seek to use the knowledge.
As you use the knowledge and your thinking process matures, you will question the rules you have acquired and start shaping them to suit yourself, to reflect your true instincts.
This originality and creativity is the stepping stone to mastery.
Mastery – Fusion of the Intuitive with the Rational
By deeply immersing ourselves in our chosen field we develop the intuitive ability to see the world clearly, we start understanding the causal relationships between events and things. These causal relationships enable us to anticipate the future and respond to them with speed.
When we combine this intuition with rational thinking processes, we develop the instinctive behaviours commonly observed in animals, and also in humans when they are in danger.
The mind and body combine to impart fluidity to your actions and that’s when you start hearing ‘she is so natural at it‘ comments.
These intuitions will be vague to start with, but over time, as you to act on them and verify their validity, they will start pointing to insights.
Habits Create the Foundation for Mastery
Mastery requires practice. Repetitions. Iterations.
Repetitions are the secret to mastery – re-making things already made, re-doing things already done.
Bruce Lee knew this when he said,
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once.
I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
The greatest threat to Mastery is boredom. The more you practice something, the more tedious and routine it becomes. But repetition is boring, not glamourous. It takes tremendous willpower to practice a kick 10,000 times.
The human mind seeks novelty and variety every single moment. Sticking with one thing to achieve Mastery is the exact opposite of what your mind desires. Those who patiently work through the boring and often mindless repetition will attain Mastery.
Habits that become second-nature – where you do something without realizing you are doing it, where the habit has become instinctive, automated – provide a natural foundation for developing Mastery.
Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.
Each habit unlocks the next level of performance.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery.
– James Clear, Atomic Habits.
The journey from mediocrity to Mastery is simple:
Do.
Learn.
Refine.
Repeat.
Repeat 10,000 times. It doesn’t need to take 10,000 hours.
There is no particular secret to mastering something. Just repeat the same practice every day.
Adopt a sober, steady, continuous routine.
– Shunmyo Masuno, Zen: The Art of Simple Living
Look at your own life. You will find that things you have become good at or mastered, have gone through a similar process.
Recommended Reading on Habits and Mastery:
The Art of Decision Making and Judgement
I haven’t written a summary of Mastery by Robert Greene. But you can read a short summary here, or a longer one here.
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