Mastering Personal Agility: Brilliance from Another Era
Bill Jensen
Seasoned Strategist and Proven Problem Solver: Expert in strategy, leading complex, tech-driven, global, enterprise-wide transformations and change programs.
The Keys to Mastery
In 1987, Esquire magazine published a brilliant piece titled The Keys to Mastery. If you jump to the full article, it’s filled with motivational sports references, but as its intro makes clear: Mastery’s “principles can be applied to anything in life that involves learning and development — including business and love.”
Excerpted from Esquire’s article are Five Keys to Mastering Personal Agility, and multiple Important Mastery Insights. Of all guiding ideas below: Select the two or three that are most relevant to your AI Era journey, and incorporate them into your daily rituals...
The Five Keys to Personal Agility Mastery
Instruction
“What form of teacher? The alternatives, from least promising to most, are:
“Instruction either gives feedback or it doesn’t. We learn fastest when we get responses. Ideally, then, for the precious feedback, an experienced teacher is best.
“What do you look for in a teacher? If you feel a lift of the heart at the prospect of working together, the electricity that is like falling in love, there is a chance you’ve found the right person.
“A good teacher may be hard on you, even brutal, in holding you to the expectations that the two of you share. Don’t expect to hit it right the first time. If you choose an instructor who turns out wrong for you, be willing to get a divorce and return to the search.”
Surrender
“The ability to surrender to your art is a mark of the master. The tricky part is learning to lose your ego without losing your balance. The stronger you are, the more you can give of yourself. The more you give of yourself, the stronger you can be.
“We’re talking about two major kinds of surrender:
“As the familiar fable of the wise man and the Zen master reminds us, there is no need ever to stop learning. (Wise man visits Zen master. Master pours tea. Fills cup. Keeps pouring. Cup runs over. Master looks at wise man, who gets the point: Don’t think you’re ever full of knowledge.)
“Wholeheartedness does not mean giving up your intelligence, or your ability to question what is going on. You come to know which techniques are best for you and which aren’t. You take the teaching, and you make your own decisions.”
Practice
“Practice [involves] a certain steadfastness, an ability to take pleasure in the endless repetition of ordinary acts.
“The word practice has a couple of uses. You might call one a verb and the other a noun. The verb is what we all know as practicing — doing your scales, running intervals, grooving your stroke, throwing the ball — literally rehearsing your moves over and over. Effective practice means going over the details until they become part of your strength.?
“The noun is having a practice as a life’s path, what the Japanese call do, ‘the way’—practicing for nothing in particular, simply because, in some way, your practice defines you. Having a practice means having something you do regularly, without fail, for its own sake. You do it just to do it.
“Having a practice will certainly improve your performance. It will. But that is not why you have it. You have a practice because it resonates with your inner pulse. It almost becomes you—just because you do it.”
Mental Discipline and Development
“Mental toughness — (the ability to focus on a problem or a goal) — combined with openness and imagination — (the ability to see options and visualize outcomes) — can be applied” to all things… sports, arts, business, relationships, personal development.
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Playing the Edge
“Playing the edge involves a deliberate negotiation with your abilities. It is an exercise in controlled abandon. It is not the equivalent of foolhardiness; anything but. Pushing the edge of the envelope, as the Chuck Yeager school of test pilots liked to say, is something you do only when experience has taught you all you can learn about the envelope. …Listen to your body [and your spirit and emotional needs]. You respect [their] messages. And you negotiate.”
Additional Important Mastery Insights
Respect for Experience
“Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers are fascinated with tricks and shortcuts. Masters talk about experience. Chuck Yeager, the man who broke the sound barrier and who is the hero of Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, is considered by many to be the best pilot who ever lived. “If there is such a thing as the ‘right stuff in piloting,’ Yeager tells us, ‘then it is experience.’
“It would be foolish to deny the importance of such factors as aptitude, opportunity, and even luck. But the disproportionate weight given to experience by those known as masters should catch the attention of all of us, especially those who are still looking for the quick fix. There’s a saying in the martial arts: ‘The master is the one who stays on the mat five minutes longer every day than anybody else.’”?
Enthusiasm
“Those we call masters are shamelessly enthusiastic about their calling. Like everyone else, they might at times complain, but they actually can’t imagine anything else they’d rather be doing. This helps account for the unusually long hours they put in. It works both ways. Having a great deal of experience at something worthwhile makes you enjoy working at it. Enjoying what you work at results in your wanting to get more experience.”
Generosity
“The word generous comes from the same root as genial, generative, and genius. Some of those known as geniuses might be selfish, vulgar, cruel, and generally obnoxious in other aspects of their life (witness the lives of some of our musical geniuses), but insofar as their own particular calling is concerned, they have a remarkable ability to give everything and hold nothing back. Perhaps, in fact, genius itself can be defined in terms of this givingness.”
Zanshin
“This wonderful Japanese word translates roughly as “unbroken concentration” or ‘continuing awareness.’ One who has zanshin is alert, aware, and focused, not just when the play is going on, but also between plays, all the time. Experienced pilots can tell a lot about how good another pilot is simply by the way he or she gets into the pilot’s seat and straps on his or her safety harness. There are some people who are so obviously on that they give us a lift just by walking onto the field or into the room.”?
Playfulness
“Obsessives are dead serious; those on the path of mastery are willing to take chances, to play the fool. A high school physics teacher is likely to be more somber about physics than an Einstein. Ashley Montagu has written about ‘neoteny,’ a certain childlike quality that is often associated with genius. Psychologist Abraham Maslow identifies a ‘second naiveté’ or a ‘wise naiveté’ in those masters of living he calls Self-Actualizing people. The most powerful learning is that which is most like play.”
The Perennial Student
“The nineteenth-century samurai, Tesshu, a master of swordsmanship, has the last word on this subject:
Do not think that
This is all there is.
More and more Wonderful teachings exist —
The sword is unfathomable.
The best thing about the path of mastery is that it never ends. It offers all the challenges and adventures, all the wonderful teachings, that a life could hold.”
Bill Jensen is a seasoned strategy and transformation executive, advisor to C-suite execs, globally-known keynote speaker, and author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including Simplicity, Disrupt, Future Strong, and The Day Tomorrow Said No. Reach him at [email protected].