Rethinking Mastery

As part of my chess journey, I ran across an amazing little book entitled "Mastery" by George Leonard. The book left a significant mark on me beyond chess (in fact, the book doesn't mention the word chess once!). I think the concepts outlined in the book are quite deep and directly applicable to our vocational journeys, so wanted to share a couple of raw gems rather than a polished prose. The insights in most of these quotes could serve as enough content for a standalone article!

The Concept of Mastery in General

Leonard frames the concept of mastery as a journey of consistent practice (for practice's sake) spent mostly on a plateau where manual processes become intuitive. A couple of key quotes for me related to this portion of the book:

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.

Why does learning take place in spurts? Why can't we make steady upward progress on our way toward mastery? . . . Karl Pribram, professor of neuroscience and a pioneering brain researcher at Stanford University, explains it in terms of hypothetical brain-body systems. He starts with a "habitual behavior system" that operates at a level deeper than conscious thought. . . . This habitual system makes it possible for you to do things. . . without worrying just how you do them. When you start to learn a new skill, however, you do have to think about it, and you have to make an effort to replace old patterns of sensing, movement, and cognition with new. This brings into play what might be called a cognitive system . . . and an effort system. The cognitive and effort systems become subsets of the habitual system long enough to modify it, to teach it a new behavior. To put it another way, the cognitive and effort systems "click into" the habitual system and reprogram it. When the job is done, both systems withdraw. Then you don't have to stop and think about [the skill you are learning'. In this light, you can see that those upward surges on the mastery curve are by no means the only time anything significant or exciting is happening. Learning generally occurs in stages. A stage ends when the habitual system has been programmed to the new task, and the cognitive and effort systems have withdrawn. This means you can perform the task without making a special effort to think of its separate parts. At this point, there's an apparent spurt of learning. But this learning has been going on all along.

The achievement of goals is important. But the real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

If our life is a good one, a life of mastery, most of it will be spent on the plateau. If not, a large part of it may well be spent in restless, distracted, ultimately self-destructive attempts to escape the plateau.

Recognition is often unsatisfying and fame is like sea-water for the thirsty. Love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and good drink.

Goals and contingencies, as I've said, are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

Five Pillars of Mastery

Leonard then outlines 5 pillars of mastery:

Pillar 1: Instruction

There are some skills you can learn on your own, and some you can try to learn, but if you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.

Pillar 2: Practice

A practice (as a noun) can be anything you practice on a regular basis as an integral party of your life-not in order to gain something else, but for its own sake.

For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey. Ultimately, the master and the master's path are one. And if the traveler is fortunate-that is, if the path is complex and profound enough, the destination is two miles further away for every mile he or she travels.

There is another secret: The people we know as masters don't devote themselves to their particular skill just to get better at it. The truth is, they love to practice, and because of this they do get better. And then, to complete the circle, the better they get the more they enjoy performing the basic moves over and over again.

The master of any game is generally a master of practice.

To practice regularly, even when you seem to be getting nowhere, might at first seem onerous. But the day eventually comes when practicing becomes a treasured part of your life. You settle into it as if into your favorite easy chair, unaware of time and the turbulence of the world. It will still be there for you tomorrow. It will never go away.

Ultimately, practice is the path of mastery. If you stay on it long enough, you'll find it to be a vivid place, with its ups and downs, its challenges and comforts, its surprises, disappointments, and unconditional joys. You'll take your share of bumps and bruises while traveling, bruises of the ego as well as of the body, mind and spirit-but it might turn out to be the most reliable thing in your life.

What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path."

Pillar 3: Surrender

If your mind immediately went to Karate Kid, then our minds think alike. And, in fact, Leonard does use the example in the book to illustrate the concept.

The courage of a master is measured by his or her willingness to surrender. This means surrendering to your teacher and to the demands of your discipline. It also means surrendering your own hard-won proficiency from time to time in order to reach a higher or different level of proficiency.

The early stages of any significant new learning invoke the spirit of the fool. Its almost inevitable that you'll feel clumsy, that you'll take literal or figurative pratfalls. There's no ay around it. . . . After all, learning almost any significant skill involves certain indignities.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

Surrendering to your teacher and to the fundamentals of the art are only the beginning. There are times in almost every master's journey when it becomes necessary to give up some hard-won competence in order to advance to the next stage.

Perhaps the best you can hope for on the master's journey-whether your art be management or marriage, badminton or ballet-is to cultivate the mind and heart of the beginning at every stage along the way. For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.

Pillar 4: Intentionality

The last two pillars become significantly less concrete, so I will summarize what I understand the concept to mean at a high level rather than providing quotes/gems to meditate on. He begins the chapter by comparing the concept to "character, willpower, attitude, imaging and the mental game."

Intentionality, with all of those ideas combined, is the ability to engage deeply (and increasingly so) on the mental plane in connection with one's discipline. That is, the ability to engage in one's discipline in a state of flow, clarity of mind, focused and intense calmness, deep belief and positivity.

Perhaps this quote is helpful:

Intentionality fuels the master's journey. Every master is a master of vision.

Pillar 5: The Edge

"The Edge" is also quite vague. I think these quotes capture its essence:

Now we come, as come we must in anything of real consequence, to a seeming contradiction, a paradox. Almost without exception, those we know as masters are dedicated to the fundamentals of their calling. They are zealots of practice, connoisseurs of the small, incremental step. At the same time-and here's the paradox-these people, these masters, are precisely the ones who are likely to challenge previous limits, to take risks for the sake of higher performance, and even to become obsessive at times in that pursuit.

The trick here is not only to test the edges of the envelope, but also to walk the fine line between endless, goalless practice and those alluring goals that appear along the way.

Playing the edge is a balancing act. It demands the awareness to know when you're pushing yourself beyond safe limits. In this awareness, the man or woman on the path of mastery sometimes makes a conscious decision to do just that.

Tips for the Journey

Finally, he provides some tips for those seeking the path of mastery. While some of this part of the book didn't hit home with me, I thought these quotes were insightful:

A human being is the kind of machine that wears out from lack of use. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy. Often the best remedy for physical weariness is thirty minutes of aerobic exercise.

Before you can use your potential energy, you have to decide what you're going to do with it. And in making any choice, you face a monstrous fact: to move in one direction, you must forgo all others. To choose one goal is to forsake a very large number of other possible goals.

Indecision leads to inaction, which leads to low energy, depression, despair.

Ultimately, liberation comes through the acceptance of limits.

It's easy to get on the path of mastery. The real challenge lies in staying on it.

It's fine to have ambitious goals, but the best way of reaching them is to cultivate modest expectations at every step along the way. When you're climbing a mountain, in other words, be aware that the peak is ahead, but don't keep looking up at it. Keep your eyes on the path, And when you reach the top of the mountain, as the Zen saying goes, keep on climbing.

Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.

Without laughter, the rough and rocky places on the path might be too painful to bear. Humor not only lightens your load, it also broadens your perspective. To be deadly serious is to suffer tunnel vision. To be able to laugh at yourself clears the vision.

Consistency of practice is the mark of the master.

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

Putting It All Together

One of my professors used to say that the secret to being great was being average every day. I first hated that quote and have grown to love it. It is definitely in the same spirit as Leonard's take on Mastery. I hope that these quotes/insights are as helpful for you as they have been for me. As I continue to reflect on them (which is what doing this article was all about), they continue to have a greater impact.