When Pursuing Mastery, Move Toward Resistance and Pain.

The book Mastery by Robert Greene tells a story from the life of John Keats,?a prolific English poet and writer. Keats, in just a short period of his life, managed to accomplish an amazing feat with lasting dividends. And I wanted to share the story, and my takeaway, with you. *Please note, the first portion is taken, as written, directly from the book Mastery, for reference, with my own thoughts shared afterward.

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"When Keats was just 8 years old, his father died. His mother died just seven years later, essentially leaving Joh, his two brothers, and one sister orphaned and homeless in London. John, the eldest of the children, was taken out of school by the appointed trustee and guardian of the estate and enrolled as an apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary - he would have to earn a living as quickly as possible, and this seemed the best career for that.

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However, as fate would have it, while nearing the end of his schooling, Keats developed a love for literature and reading. To continue this education, he would return to his school in his off-hours and read as many books as he could in the library. Sometime later, he had the desire to try his hand at writing poetry, but lacking any kind of instructor or literary circle he could frequent, the only way he knew to teach himself to write was to read the works of all the greatest poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He then wrote his own poems, using the poetic form and style of the particular writer he was trying to model himself after. He had a knack for imitation, and soon he was creating verses in dozes of different styles, always tweaking them a little with his own voice.

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Several years into this process, Keats came to a fateful decision — he would devote his life to writing poetry. That was his calling in life and he would find a way to make a living at it. To complete the rigorous apprenticeship he had already put himself through, he decided that what he needed was to write a very long poem, precisely 4,000 lines. The poem would revolve around the ancient Greek myth of Endymion.?“Endymion,” he wrote a friend, “will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention… — by which I must make 4,000 lines of some circumstances and fill them with poetry.”?He gave himself a rather impossible deadline — seven months — and a task of writing fifty lines a day, until he had a rough draft.

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Three-quarters of the way through, he came to thoroughly hate the poem he was writing. He would not quit, however, willing his way to the end, meeting the deadline he had set. What he did not like about Endymion was the flowery language, the overwriting. But it was the only by means of this exercise that he could discover what worked for him.?“In Endymion",?he later wrote,?“I leaped headlong into the Sea and thereby become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and… took tea and comfortable advice.”

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In the aftermath of writing what he considered to be a mediocre poem, Keats took stock of all of the invaluable lessons he had learned. Never again would he suffer from writer’s block — he had trained himself to write past any obstacle. He had acquired now the habit of writing quickly, with intensity and focus — concentrating his work in a few hours. He could revise with equal speed. He had learned how to criticize himself and his overly romantic tendencies. He could look at his own work with a cold eye. He had learned that it was in the actual writing of the poem that the best ideas would often come to him, and that he had to boldly keep writing or he would miss such discoveries. Most important of all, as a counterexample to Endymion, he had hit upon a style that suited him — language as compact and dense with imagery as possible, with not a single wasted line.?

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This added up to perhaps the most productive two years of writing in the history of Western literature — all of it set up by the rigorous self-apprenticeship he had put himself through."

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*My thoughts and my takeaway: This story resonates with me so much, not because I consider myself a prolific writer, by any means, but because of the story of his self-guided apprenticeship and his self-imposed masterful challenge.

In my career, I had both the blessing and the difficulty of working at a family owned business. A blessing because it was an opportunity I never would have otherwise had, and it set me on a path there's no way I would have taken on my own. And a difficulty because it was my first real job (meaning after high school) and I had no one above me at the helm to teach, train, develop, and guide me. And I didn't go to college. I started there six months after highschool. And I can report that, while high school sports helps build some important life skills, being the captain of the high school baseball team your senior year doesn't even begin to prepare you for that level of largely self-guided, young professional development. While I didn't know what it was at the time, when I look back on it now I consider that period of my life as my self-guided apprenticeship. With a lot of mistakes made to learn from.

The second reason this story resonated with me is the way he felt he needed to create his own challenge. This wasn't something that was placed on him by external forces, or even by the necessities of life (disregarding his option to chose writing as his profession). But it was a challenge he was inspired to undertake, nonetheless, because he knew that he had to do something if he wanted to conjure the deepest parts of him, to test his strengths and develop resilience. So he came up with a task that would challenge his commitment and pull something out of him that only a self-imposed challenge could reveal. Without having committed himself to the challenge of writing Endymion - and in 7 months, no less - he never would have shaped his own writing style or learned the invaluable lessons he did; lessons that echoed throughout his entire career thereafter.

I was also drawn to this story because, if you have been blessed to have been born in our modern times and in a developed country, most of our lives are very insulated from the inherent difficulties associated with human survival. And in many ways, struggle doesn't challenge us in meaningful ways (and I say this with the exception and understanding of both illness and death, realizing they are both very real challenges that we are all still faced with. But perhaps the last?). It seems like invention after invention slowly erode every last challenge man has ever been faced with. And we often take for granted the state of ease of which we now exist. We have it pretty good, all things considered. This story validated a deeply held belief for me, which I try to practice and even sometimes succeed in practicing, and that is seeking out struggles, for struggles' sake. Because I believe there are some parts of us in this life that can only be developed through struggle and that there are some things about ourselves we can never truly know unless we are subjected to challenges. And Keats’ bold challenge he set forth for himself is, in my opinion, a beautiful case-in-point that validates what I believe to be true and, maybe even more importantly, justifies some of my more unorthodox self-imposed challenges.

I hope this story and my shared insights can somehow inspire you, too, in a new way as you pursue your own challenges. Or, at the very least, I hope that it encourages you during some of your own struggles that you may not have chosen.