Successful Career: 10 Strategies To Become A True Master Of Your Craft

When we get out of school, we often see it as the end of education and the start of a career and making money. This then leads to a focus on money and positions. We want to make more money and be promoted fast. Sometimes, we are lucky, and it happens. More often, we are dispirited and frustrated with the slow progress and jumping between jobs to get more money faster.

Embarking on a career journey is like navigating an uncharted sea. Amidst the waves of opportunity and the winds of change, one guiding star remains constant: the pursuit of mastery. In today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving job market, achieving mastery in your chosen craft is not just a lofty ideal. It is a necessity for those who seek to stand out and thrive.

Whether you’re a fresh graduate or a seasoned professional, the path to mastery is open to all who dare to tread it. So, let’s embark on this transformative journey together, unraveling the secrets to achieving mastery in your career and life.

Biggest Enemy Of Mastery

The biggest enemy of mastery is following what others are doing or selecting your field of interest for the wrong reasons, like fame or money. Don’t do that. It may sound like a great strategy when you are young and impatient. The prospect of instant fame or making big bucks is tempting, but you must understand that nothing is for free.

When you are fresh out of school and have two job offers, one that gives you a huge salary but limited opportunity to learn and the second that doesn’t pay that well but provides you a trove of learning opportunities, go for the second one.

By becoming good at what you do and doing what you are good at , the money will come eventually.

By focusing on money early on, you risk not having the foundations to build on later in life. Not to mention, you will be stuck in a high-paying job you may not enjoy and have no way to get out. You won’t enjoy it, you won’t give it your best, you won’t really become good at it, and you will be miserable.

Mastery Brings Freedom

By focusing on mastery, you are never stuck in a specific role or working for a specific company. It gives you the freedom to leave your past behind and move on. Your ultimate loyalty is to yourself and your reason for being, not to an organization or a specific career. You can easily switch careers as long as they support your life’s mission. That means being comfortable with change and truly owning your destiny.

You can’t rely on others to tell you what to do. You need to understand that the world keeps moving, and part of being a master of your craft is also understanding the trends and being willing to adjust to them. Only that way you can ensure that you won’t let the world pass you by left in the dust.

“Mastery brings you freedom. You are never stuck in a specific role or working for a specific company. Your ultimate loyalty is to yourself and your reason for being, not to an organization or a specific career.”

Flexibility, adaptability, and continuous willingness to learn are important. If you see that you turned right when you were supposed to turn left, and your path no longer leads you towards mastery and your life mission, make sure to get back on the correct track as fast as possible. You may find yourself in a high-paying, dead-end job. Realize what happened and make the necessary sacrifice to get back on the path that satisfies your reason for being. You may need to get a salary cut and adjust your lifestyle, but it will be worth it in the long run. It will pay off in satisfaction with your life.

Becoming Good At What You Do

Once you master your craft enough and emerge as a budding expert, you are at the creative phase of your career and faced with new challenges. You left most of the dreadful, boring basic learning behind, and you are now on your own, developing your own approach to the craft and your own reputation. And that brings challenges. Public scrutiny. Haters. Damaged ego. And it is not just that.

• Insecurities – If you are not careful, your self-confidence can take a hit by taking the things that others say about your work too personally. Getting discouraged by the opinions of others can be a real problem preventing you from getting to the next level.
• Good enough – One of the most common reasons people don’t reach true mastery is that they settle once they get good enough at something. Good enough is simply good enough for them. The additional work to get even better isn’t worth the effort. We already feel superior to others as is, and so our skills plateau. We won’t become true masters of our craft.
• Boredom – After many years of hard work that got us where we are, we may get to a point where the things we are doing are not exciting anymore. It is often at the plateau when we get stuck and don’t seem to be making any more progress. Things start to be too routine and boring. And so we settle and stop trying to grow more.
• As always – Being good at something brings with it the danger of feeling that you already know everything and that what worked for you in the past will work in the future. No need to learn new things, experiment, or try new approaches. We stop taking risks and again settle for what we have and for what worked.
• Dependency – It is important to have a great mentor and to be surrounded by others who can help us out, but we should never rely on them so much that we become dependent on them. You may build a great career at one company, but if you are dependent on the team around you and they leave, or you leave without them, you will be lost. Your insecurities may emerge, your self-confidence gets a hit, and you will struggle.
• Impatience – We all want to get things done efficiently and move on to the next thing, but that often brings a danger of not finishing what we set out to do. The quality of your work may then suffer. You settle for good enough and move to the next thing. But the results of your efforts are then suboptimal. You are not a true master. Others will see that you are not giving it your best. It may also be visible from the excessive reuse of ideas, so all your work starts feeling like copies and not true masterpieces.
• Attention addiction – As you get better at your job, you will hear more and more praise coming from others. It feels nice being praised, but don’t get used to it. It is sometimes better to dismiss the praise internally and keep reminding yourself that you can always do better. Seeking praise is even worse as then everything starts to be about your ego, and instead of focusing on doing a great job, you will shift your focus to the need to get attention and praise. Always keep reminding yourself that it is not only your brilliance but also the environment, the work of others, or pure luck that helped you along the way.

True Masters Do Things Differently

While there might be a standard way to get to the top of your field and become really good at your job, true masters often do things differently. It makes a common sense. If the average person takes a specific route that leads them to the destination, then it stands to reason that the destination is average.

True masters may start following the standard path they learned from their mentors, but when they get the most out of it, they will forge their own path going forward. One that leads to a better path than the average person’s. Once you get good enough at your craft, feel free to experiment and develop your own unique way to grow and become truly great.

Consider These 10 Strategies To Become A True Master Of Your Craft:

1. Focus On Your Strengths

When you know what your strengths are, you know where to focus. It is both your mental and physical strengths and your skills. Don’t pay too much attention to your weaknesses unless they are preventing you from becoming great at what you do. Get the minimum effort to the weaknesses so they are not a roadblock, and then put all your focus on your strengths and use them to get to the next level. Strengths help you to build momentum and move faster and farther.

Keep in mind that others can often label your strengths as weaknesses. True excellence is idiosyncratic. For example, you might have ADHD and consider it a weakness as you get distracted easily, but the intensity of focus on things you deeply care about that comes with it is a strength.

2. Use The Brain’s Plasticity

Repetition, focus, and discipline lead to mastery. When you repeat the same tasks often enough, your brain builds the right connections, so the activity comes naturally to you with time. You may have heard about plasticity. Our brains have an incredible power to learn and change. Use it. You may think you don’t have a talent for playing piano, but with enough practice, you will learn that talent. Talent is nothing more than the results of enough effort and deliberate practice.

3. Embrace Lifelong Learning And Curiosity

Get comfortable with the notion that your learning will never stop . Never settle just for the superficial. Always dig deep and understand how things work below the surface when learning and doing the work. Pay attention to every single detail. It will not only allow you to learn faster but also understand the inner workings of things and help you come up with better and more creative ways to get your job done. You will learn more, and you will produce better-quality work.

4. Focus On The Big Picture

Focusing on details is important, but you shouldn’t ignore the big picture either. Understanding the wider environment and how things interact and influence each other is important so you know what direction to take. The big picture is important for strategy. Focus on details is important for tactics. Keeping your mind open to the wider world, adjacent fields of work, changing needs of the market, and innovations done by others will allow you to stay relevant and will positively impact your own work.

5. Cultivate Growth Mindset

A fixed mindset is based on the idea that abilities are fixed. Some people are superior to others. And therefore, they need to keep affirming that they are between the superior ones. Their ego takes precedence over the good of the organization. They don’t want to be surrounded by great people. They want to be surrounded by less skilled people who will acknowledge their greatness. Take the other approach and adopt a growth mindset . You need to want to keep learning and growing, which means surround yourself with people you can learn from.

6. Get A Mentor

How do you define mentoring? It is a process of informal transmission of knowledge, psychological support, and even social capital that enables the recipient to increase their professional success, being it both work-related tasks and personal development. The mentor is someone significantly more experienced in the area of interest and should be a level or two above the mentee. The mentee is someone who wants to receive professional mentoring in an effort to accelerate his or her growth.

7. Get A Coach

At the heart of coaching is the idea that people have the resources to help themselves, and you, as a coach just need to trigger this hidden power. The best coaching session is the one where, at the end, you get up with a clear mind and objectives that you own because they come from your heart. A coach can also help you with deliberate practice as they can provide feedback, observations, and critique on what you are doing and where you need to improve.

8. Become Gritty

Daniel F. Chambliss ran a study of competitive swimmers and postulates that exceptional performance is a confluence of many small skills and activities that have been drilled into the habit. You don’t need to be exceptionally talented to perform at an exceptional level. You just need to do the right small things correctly, consistently, and with perseverance to produce excellence.

Continuous improvement is a critical part of developing mastery and any new skill. It is how gritty people differ from others. They continuously improve their skills and are never satisfied; they never get to a plateau. The way to do it is deliberate practice. Anything can be developed by deliberate practice. Even the most complex of activities can be broken down into some basic elements that can be developed one by one.

9. Take Advantage Of Your Environment

Your circumstances are unique to you. Therefore, it makes sense to see how the environment you are in and the people you are surrounded with can help you in some unique way to become better at what you do. It requires observing and analyzing your surroundings to figure out how to take advantage of them. This also means understanding that the wrong environment can hold you back and prevent you from achieving mastery.

10. Become Your Customers

If you want to truly understand another person so you can create work relevant to them, you need to become them. You can never understand what the other person feels, how they think, and what they truly need just by observing from the outside. Only when you start living like them will you understand their needs, desires, and belief systems. Only then can you adapt your work so it truly fulfills their needs.

If you want to build a product for people in a different culture from your own, you should go and live with them for a period of time. Asking isn’t enough. You need to live it. Otherwise, you will be an outsider who is just guessing what they truly want.

Putting It All Together

The journey to mastery is much more than a quest for financial gain or external validation. It’s a deeply personal endeavor rooted in a commitment to continuous learning, adaptability, and understanding your unique strengths. Mastery is not a static state but an ongoing process of growth, exploration, and refinement.

It requires navigating challenges such as complacency, boredom, and external pressures. Mastery demands a balance between focusing on the minutiae and keeping an eye on the broader perspective. It’s about being open to change, resilient in the face of setbacks, and proactive in seeking new opportunities for growth.

“True mastery transcends the confines of a specific job. It is about developing a set of skills and a mindset that enables you to navigate various roles, continually evolving and adapting to new challenges.”

True mastery transcends the confines of a specific job. It is about developing a set of skills and a mindset that enables you to navigate various roles, continually evolving and adapting to new challenges. This adaptability not only makes you more marketable but also ensures that your career remains fulfilling and aligned with your personal values and passions.

To achieve mastery, focus on cultivating a growth mindset, seeking mentorship and coaching, and embracing the concept of lifelong learning. Be patient and persistent, recognizing that mastery is a journey, not a destination. It’s about the satisfaction derived from the process of learning, growing, and excelling in your chosen field.

“Mastery is about owning your destiny, shaping your path, and contributing uniquely to your field.”

Ultimately, mastery is about owning your destiny, shaping your path, and contributing uniquely to your field. It’s about making a difference in your own life and the lives of others through your work. As you embark on this journey, remember that the pursuit of mastery is a deeply rewarding and transformative experience, one that enriches not just your career but your entire life.

More on the topics of Career and Personal Development:

Mastery And Career: 14 Strategies For Successful Internship

Why Positive Thinking Doesn’t Work And What To Do Instead

Feeling Like a Fraud? How to Conquer Impostor Syndrome

Mastering Skills with Deliberate Practice

Why Dedication And Perseverance Outweigh Talent

How To Analyze Your Career By Using Logical Levels

What Are Your Highly Valued Accomplishments?

Defensive Pessimism As A Winning Strategy

Unraveling the Myths of Ego Depletion: A New Take on Willpower

Passion Is The Key To Happiness, Or Is It?

Originally posted on my blog about management, leadership, communication, coaching, introversion, software development, and career The Geeky Leader or follow me on Facebook and Twitter: @GeekyLeader