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Life Arts    H4'ed 9/28/13

Thoughts on Mastery

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Steven Barnes
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In a few hours I climb into the truck and start driving back to Cali.  Tonight, I'll sleep in a little town called Monroe, Louisiana.  Tomorrow, Maybe Abilene Texas (as long as they have AMC.  I'm not missing Breaking Bad!).

I'll be listening to Sherlock Holmes short stories, and the multidisciplinary Big History audios (my favorite Teaching Company lessons, covering the history of the entire universe.  Yow!) and thinking. A lot.

Who am I now?  What do I want to do with my life?   What do I want to teach?  Write?   If I was emptying myself out, the most important 20% first, what would that be?  What is the most important gift I can give the world, as a way of saying "thank you" for giving me everything I ever wanted as a child? 
So strange.   As a boy I wanted to master martial arts and writing, and the art of loving and living with another human being.

To do that, I had to define what "mastery" was.  Tricky subject, because of the media images we accept in such arenas.    But having been around people considered in the top .1% of various fields, people totally committed to their crafts, people who other experts consider "masters" I began to compare what they were saying about it, this sacred thing, this holy grail of human performance.

Because that was what I wanted.  And a few things kept cropping up in common between all arenas of human life, things said by these "masters" and more importantly"by the people who were clear and powerful enough to lift others up to this almost mythical level.

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/7400937@N07/9924240333/
by David W. Siu

1) Mastery isn't a noun.  It is a verb.  It is a path, and those who are committed to that path, wherever they are upon it, may be masters.

2) Mastery isn't about complicated skills.  It is about simple skills, drilled to the point of unconscious competence, such that they can be re-combined into complex patterns even under stress.
3) Mastery isn't a mask, not something you "put on".  It is a natural expression of who and what you are.   You write the way you talk.  You fight the way you live.   You love others as you love yourself.  It isn't a big deal.  It's just what you are.

4) Mastery isn't a matter of learning something new.   It is more a matter of cutting away the inessential.  In that sense, in life there is a point of gathering together, and another point of throwing away.   And while masters continue to learn their entire lives, it isn't that they are learning "more stuff".  They are seeing deeper and deeper connections within and between the things they already know.

5) Masters see the path, not themselves.   They know that the concept of "mastery" is a joke if it is supposed to mean you are complete.  Hell, in martial arts, most beginning students think a black belt is the end of a process.  Yeah, the process of being a beginner.  It is analogous to "touch typing"--you know where your fingers and thumbs go on the keyboard, but that doesn't make you a writer.

6) Masters don't compare themselves with other people.  Not often.    When they do, they are slipping out of that state, and into ego.  Mastery comes from the real you, the hidden you, the unconscious you.  Oh, you can certainly piss a master off and get that ego going, but they often are somewhat embarrassed afterward.  They know that no matter how far or how fast you go, everyone is the same distance from the horizon.

7) Masters are somewhat embarrassed by the term "master."    They know what it meant to them when they began the process.  And now that they have surpassed their original dreams, all they see is how much more they don't know.

I remember years back, after a morning martial arts class, I went to breakfast with my classmates, and was grousing about my performance. One of the other students, a black belt in another system who thought highly of my skills, stopped me.   "Steve, don't say that," she said. "If someone as good as you are still feels insecure, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

And I got it.  While the process of growth is endless, and the labels without ultimate meaning, the concept that someone can spend forty years practicing a discipline with all the heart and energy you have, and still feel like a beginner can be depressing to someone who is not learning the inner game.  Who is building a wall around their insecurity.

About thirteen years ago I was teaching a martial arts workshop with a fine young black belt.   Afterwards, we were talking, and he got very quiet.   "When will I stop feeling like a fraud?" He asked.  "When will I believe in myself?"

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Steven Barnes is a NY Times bestselling author, personal performance coach, and martial artist. He has lectured on creativity and human consciousness at UCLA, Mensa, and the Smithsonian Institute. Steve created the Lifewriting system of (more...)
 

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