I was reading a passage in Wherever You Go, There You Are about mastery: becoming so good at something that you can do it flawlessly without thinking. To master something you have to practice a lot, but you also have to practice mindfully. That means being aware of what you’re trying to achieve and monitoring your progress.
To put in the time and effort mastery requires, you have to love what you’re doing. It has to be part of who you are. It’s always a creative, competitive, or athletic pursuit, and it’s probably the reason you were put on this earth.
Have you heard about Steve Martin’s book Born Standing Up? It’s a memoir of his show business experiences from working in the Disneyland magic store to his final stand up performances, but it reads like a “how to” of mastery:
The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances. Performing in so many varied situations made every predicament manageable, [even in] Toronto where I performed next to an active salad bar…
…
What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh…
At least that was the theory. And for the next eight years, I rolled it up a hill like Sisyphus.
Lately I’ve come to realize that artistic pursuits are what I should have been working on my whole life, but for all the usual reasons I didn’t end up doing what I was passionate about.
The good news is that I’ve found the courage to turn this around. Posts about this are coming soon, but until then I’d like you to think about that creative or competitive pursuit you were compulsive about as a child. It’s that thing you thought about building your life around but didn’t because you had to get a “real” job since your parents spent all that money sending you to college. It’s the abstract doodle that still finds its way into the margins of all your status meeting notes. It’s that thing you’d try “if only.”
See also: Steve Martin interviewed by Charlie Rose.
One Comment
This is a great post. I have found that once you start working on the things you have actually wanted to pursue, you work harder than you ever had at your day job.