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Notes on Mastery

Various Notes, Thoughts & Musings on The Concept of Mastery - Unorganized

Various Quotes About the Concept of Mastery

“If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master.” ― Jordan B. Peterson

“Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject” ― Thomas Mann

“A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.” ― Miyamoto Musashi

“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.” ― George Leonard

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” ― Stephen McCranie

"An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them." — Werner Heisenberg

From Robert Greene, Book: Mastery

Greene, Robert. Mastery. Penguin Books, 2013.

Various Quotes

First, you must see your attempt at attaining mastery as something extremely necessary and positive

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”

“The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.”

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”

“It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.”

“You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.”

“A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don’t try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable.”

"You must engrave deeply in your mind and never forget: your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. If you are excited and obsessive in the hunt, it will show in the details. If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated.

“The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.” - See Knowledge-Management

“Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.” —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Greene's Mastery Process...

We enter a new field with excitement, but also fear about how much there is to learn ahead of us. The greatest danger here is boredom, impatience, fear, and confusion. Once we stop observing and learning, the process towards mastery comes to a halt.

But if we manage these emotions and keep pushing forward, we start to gain fluency, and we master the basic skills allowing us to take on bigger and better challenges.

Eventually, we move from student to practitioner. We use our own ideas and experiments, getting feedback in the process. We start to use our own style. [an indicator of transition from student to practitioner]

Then as we continue for years we make the leap to mastery. We develop an intuitive sense of the skill and have mastered it to the point of being able to innovate and break the rules.

The Three Phases

Apprenticeship

Creative-Active

Mastery

On Discover Your Calling

Develop Passion For Your Vocation - Work is often seen as a means for making money so we can enjoy that second life that we lead. Even if we derive some satisfaction from our careers we still tend to compartmentalize our lives in this way. This is a depressing attitude, because in the end we spend a substantial part of our waking life at work. If we experience this time as something to get through on the way to real pleasure, then our hours at work represent a tragic waste of the short time we have to live. Instead you want to see your work as something more inspiring, as part of your vocation… Your work then is something connected deeply to who you are, not a separate compartment in your life. You develop then a sense of your vocation.

Return to your origins: for many of the masters, their inclination presented itself clearly during childhood. What were you obsessed with when you were younger?

Occupy the perfect niche: Find where your interests align in a field to identify a particular niche that you can dominate.

Avoid the false path: We’ll all be attracted to fields for the wrong reasons: money, fame, parental influence. We have to rebel against these forces and be honest about what our interests are.

Let go of the past: Avoid the sunk cost fallacy, if something is wrong for you, abandon it. You’re not wedded to your past choices. Don’t feel like you have to rigidly stick with a plan that you set before.

Find your way back: You’ll be tempted to deviate from the path throughout your pursuit of mastery, even if you do mistakenly veer away, you can always come back. Reminds me of Siddhartha.

The Ideal Apprenticeship

After your formal education, you enter the most critical phase in your life— a second, practical education known as The Apprenticeship. [..] In the process you will master the necessary skills, discipline your mind, and transform yourself into an independent thinker, prepared for the creative challenges on the way to mastery.

“The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character— the first transformation on the way to mastery… This has a simple consequence: you must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning… This means that you move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. You do not choose apprenticeships that seem easy and comfortable.”

Apprenticeship Three Steps

Observe

Practice - skill acquisition

Experimentation - active

Step one: Deep observation — the passive mode

“The greatest mistake you can make in the initial months of your apprenticeship is to imagine that you have to get attention, impress people, and prove yourself. These thoughts will dominate your mind and close it off from the reality around you.”

"You start by observing who is doing well in the field and trying to learn rules and strategies through your observation of them."

Step two: Skill acquisition — the practice mode

You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.

[learning can be painful] "Second, the initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise. Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.” - Robert Greene, Mastery

[on the process of deep work] “This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain.

It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it. You want to be as immediately present to what you are doing as possible.”

Step three: Experimentation — the active mode

As you gain more skill and understanding, you must move into the active mode where you take the skill and apply it yourself. You have to break out of just following the rules, and start creating new works on your own.

Move toward resistance and pain: Once we get good at part of a skill, we tend to just do that since it’s easy and familiar. We avoid our weaknesses, and that prevents us from learning. Instead, we must follow the “resistance path,” fighting against where we want to go and making it more challenging for ourselves." - Robert Greene, Mastery

Combine the “how” and the “what”: Get a full understanding of the skill, not just the recipes or tools, don’t leave parts of it unlearned.

Advance through trial and error: Try out different paths and adopt new skills, avoid following a fixed career path, especially spend your 20s moving around and exploring different paths, learning everything you can along the way.

Absorb The Master's Power: The Mentorship Dynamic

“The mentor-protégé relationship is the most efficient and productive form of learning. The right mentors know where to focus your attention and how to challenge you. Their knowledge and experience become yours. They provide immediate and realistic feedback on your work, so you can improve more rapidly. Through an intense person-to-person interaction, you absorb a way of thinking that contains great power and can be adapted to your individual spirit. Choose the mentor who best fits your needs and connects to your Life’s Task. Once you have internalized their knowledge, you must move on and never remain in their shadow. Your goal is always to surpass your mentors in mastery and brilliance.”

“Although one mentor at a time is best, it is not always possible to find the perfect one. In such a case, an alternate strategy is to find several mentors in your immediate environment, each one filling strategic gaps in your knowledge and experience. Having more than one mentor has side benefits, giving you several connections and important allies to rely upon later on. Similarly, if your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as temporary mentors, as The Improvement of the Mind did for Faraday.”

On Persona

"You must see the creation of a persona as a key element in social intelligence, not something evil or demonic. We all wear masks in the social arena, playing different roles to suit the different environments we pass through. You are simply becoming more conscious of the process. Think of it as theater. By creating a persona that is mysterious, intriguing, and masterful, you are playing to the public, giving them something compelling and pleasurable to witness. You are allowing them to project their fantasies onto you, or directing their attention to other theatrical qualities."

Creative Strategies

Allow for Serendipity: Move outside your normal realm of comfort and interest, explore far and wide, while staying open and avoiding jumping to conclusions. Let yourself be surprised and discover new opportunities. Keep a notebook with you at all time and record ideas as they appear to you.

Take a walk, waiting for an epiphany. “At a particular high point of [creative] tension, let go for a moment. This could be as simple as stopping work and going to sleep; or it could mean deciding to take a break, or to temporarily work on something else. What almost inevitably happens in such moments is that the solution, the perfect idea for completing the work comes to them. After ten long years of incessant thinking on the problem of general relativity, Albert Einstein decided one evening to simply give up. He had had enough. It was beyond him. He went to bed early, and when he awoke the solution suddenly came to him.”

Where procrastination or lack of focus comes from...

"The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Our lack of intensity makes it hard for the brain to jolt into a higher gear. The connections do not occur. For this purpose you must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured.

There are nine different strategies you can use for enhancing the creative-active phase.

“Anyone who would spend ten years absorbing the techniques and conventions of their field, trying them out, mastering them, exploring and personalizing them, would inevitably find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive.” [capturing your own expertise, eg. writing a book, sharing your findings]

Your project [message] or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger— a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place.

Strategies For Attaining Mastery

[Know Your Strengths, Mitigate Your Weaknesses] Mastery is like swimming— it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. Know your strengths and move with them.

[create automatic responses - sub-routines - through practice] If we are learning a complex skill, such as flying a jet in combat, we must master a series of simple skills, one on top of the other. Each time one skill becomes automatic, the mind is freed up to focus on the higher one. At the very end of this process, when there are no more simple skills to learn, the brain has assimilated an incredible amount of information, all of which has become internalized, part of our nervous system.

Article Notes

Title: If You Want to Build an Audience, Focus on Mastery Instead of Metrics - Link - By: Srinivas Rao

Key Points

"When you focus on mastery, the metrics will eventually move in a positive direction. It’s an inevitable byproduct of being so good they can’t ignore you."

"My advice for anyone starting out, whether that be as a podcast host, a writer, or any other kind of creative was to commit to mastery over metrics. Far too often people prioritize metrics over mastery. E.g. They value traffic to a blog post over the quality of the writing"

Metrics can be inflated, this is not a sustainable long term strategy. E.g. you can buy your way onto the NYT best sellers list, it doesn't mean your book is good.

Mastery Over Metrics

"Constantly checking the traffic to your website won’t cause it to go up. Writing something worth reading will."

"Obsessively looking at your podcast downloads won’t cause them to go up. Producing an amazing episode will."

By focusing on the things you control, you tap into the profound power of consistency, experience visible progress, and build momentum.

Focus on delivering value, not just grabbing attention -- "Just because you’ve gained somebody’s attention for a small fraction of their day, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created something of value."

Mastery is a long game. "Very few people commit to mastery because it requires playing the long game. It takes years of deep work and deliberate practice." - "The beauty of the long game is that there’s less competition because the overwhelming majority of people (millions) are playing the short game" - People who play the short game might be relevant for a moment in time. But people who play the long game are more likely to create something timeless.

"Commitment to Mastery Leads to Higher Quality Products and Perennial Sellers"

Key: "When you commit to mastery, you increase the likelihood of producing something with emotional resonance. If it has emotional resonance, it will continue to spread without hacks and tactics. It will become what Ryan Holiday calls a Perennial Seller. But it could take years before it does."

Title: "How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy" - Link - by Benjamin Hardy, PhD

Key Points

Idea 1: You don’t have a preexisting passion (nor should you want one).

Idea 2: Becoming really good at something and generously using your skills to help the right people is how you quickly succeed.

On prioritizing 'giving' vs. 'taking' when defining what to pursue in ones life: "The primary problem, according to Cal Newport, with the passion hypothesis is that all the attention is focused on the self. People who want a job they are passionate about are less concerned about what they can give to the world and are more concerned about what the world can give to them."

Most people are unsuccessful for a reason. They operate with faulty assumptions about how the world works.

One of those assumptions is that we as people have preexisting passions we need to “discover” and then follow. Famed psychologist and author of Mindset, Carol Dweck, would call this a “fixed mindset.”

Rather than selfishly seeking a life you’re passionate about, Newport recommends becoming a “craftsman,” wherein you develop rare and valuable skills.

A Process in Refocusing Your Mindset Around Mastery as Described by Benjamin & Defined by Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You)

You determine skills and abilities that would be useful to the world.

You set clear goals for mastering those rare and valuable skills.

You engage in deliberate practice, pushing your skills and abilities to mastery.

As you get better, you begin to develop confidence in yourself (confidence doesn’t create high performance, it is the byproduct of high performance).

As you develop confidence, you begin to deeply enjoy what you’re doing — and become very passionate about it. As Newport explains, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

As your expertise, confidence, and passion grows, you begin to see your work as a “calling” or “mission” (like passion and confidence, your identity and personality are byproducts, not innate).

Because you have developed such mastery of rare and useful skills, you have the perspective and context to discern the “cutting edge” of your field.

You can then begin making distinct connections and projections into what has been dubbed, “The adjacent possible” which Steven Johnson described as“a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” In other words, this is how you become an innovator and a shaper of societal and global change.

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).” — Cal Newport

A Process of Mastery...

If you want to become successful, it’s better to follow what successful people did to get there than to follow what they do after achieving “success.”

... you must embrace a learner’s mind, leverage your position, and laterally jump into new projects that force new growth and development.

If you look at any person who is honestly seeking a higher level of success, they are usually waking up early, studying and learning lots, seeking advice and feedback, and creating, testing, and failing

[Interesting Point] This is harder to do once you’ve gained a certain level of expertise and success. Once you become comfortable, it’s hard to go back to the discomfort of learning and humility. Some of the world’s most famous chef’s continually remake their menu from scratch, even after they’ve become world-class and received global recognition, because for them, it’s about the process of growth and creativity.

[people who don't focus on growth] get “fat and lazy,” and stop doing high quality work and pushing themselves to greater mastery. They stop thinking about what they can do for the world and instead focus on what the world can do for them. According to Cal Newport, if you stop developing more “career capital,” it begins to fade away. You can only use up so much of what you got until you have to get more. Career capital is a resource that you use. And if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

“Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” — Joe Polish

Two key things to understand about developing mastery...

Big Idea: "It is by giving that your rare skills and abilities continue to develop and grow. It is by giving and investing in other people that your network becomes world-class and your ability to make lots of money becomes easy. Your network is your net worth."

Developing mastery to the point of making actual impact will not develop until you begin:

Investing in yourself

When you make investments in yourself, you shatter unhealthy and limiting subconscious patterns. You upgrade your sense of what you can be, do and have.

Investing in key relationships

When you invest in key relationships, you put yourself into proximity to the best and most generous mentors available. You gain immediate access to people and ideas that could never have been possible without such relationships.

On Financially investing in ones self...

When you invest in yourself, you become highly committed to what you’re doing. Investing in yourself is an act that facilitates what Charles Darwin would call, “Selective Pressure,” which is a phenomenon that alters the behavior and fitness of living organisms within a given environment. It is the driving force of evolution and natural selection.

The bigger you invest, the bigger the psychological leap — which then facilitates a radical upgrade in behavior, confidence, harmonious passion, and outcomes.

Investing in relationships creates the optimal level of synergy — where both parties can go higher and deeper than ever before — because both are invested in each other. - Those you invest in will go above and beyond to help you in all you’re doing. It becomes more than a relationship — it becomes a mission to help you and what you’re doing.

The “Magic Rapport Formula,” by Joe Polish, founder of Genius Network

Focus on how you will help them reduce their suffering

Invest time, money, and energy on relationships

Be the type of person they would always answer the phone for

Be useful, grateful, and valuable

Treat others how you would love to be treated

Avoid formalities, be fun and memorable, not boring

Appreciate people

Give value on the spot

Get as close to in-person as you can

On Mastery & Happiness

"Happiness is a byproduct. You cannot pursue it directly. It comes from dedicating yourself to a cause you firmly believe."

"You’re happiest when you’re growing and giving. When you’ve become dedicated to something bigger than yourself. When you’re engaged in work you have control and autonomy over and which work is making a tangible impact in the lives of other people. You can only have this type of work by developing mastery, investing in others, and being a giver."

[A Path to Happiness] - In order to dedicate yourself to a cause you believe in, you must invest yourself in the development of rare skills and abilities, which then lead to confidence, passion, and purpose. That purpose is your “cause,” which you now have skills and passion to contribute to.

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness comes from investing yourself deeply into something and someone other than yourself. Happiness can’t come from following a self-centered and obsessive passion aimed only at making yourself feel good. Happiness comes from self-growth and using that growth to make the world a better place.

Title: “How to Develop Mastery at Any Skill.”, 9 Mar. 2022, Link . - Benjamin Hardy, PhD.

[Ben's Definition of Mastery] - When you’ve developed mastery of something, you own that thing. You’ve learned the rules inside-out and now you have the ability, as an artist, to create your own rules.

Once you reach a certain level of mastery, and if you have the creative spirit to change the game and world entirely — then you play in the realm of crazy ideas.

[a brief run-down of key steps in the development of this level of mastery]

Study only those whose work truly inspires and touches the deepest level of your soul.

Ignore almost everyone around you, particularly those who are competing for the bottom of the barrel.

Of this fact, Tim Ferriss stated in 4HWW — “It’s lonely at the top. 99% of the world is convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre middle-ground. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time- and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 than it is $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s. If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”

Study the craft of those who are truly craftsmen — who are brilliant and nuanced at what they do. Peel back the layers until you begin to see how the sausage is made — why did they make the decisions they made in what they were doing? Why that ordering of decisions? aka Critical Thinking

Before you ever reach a goal, already have the next mountain or two in mind.

You can only have “an edge” or “chip on your shoulder” when you have something to prove — to yourself.

You already know you could destroy the competition if you wanted to, but you want to test your own internal limits.

The only way to have this level of the edge is to be attempting something so big it somewhat scares but also excites you.

You can’t have “the edge” if you’re not pursuing a fundamentally bigger and different future.

The moment you attach yourself to the success or failure of your past, then you’ve lost the edge.

The moment you stop being emotionally committed and intellectually stimulated by a future possibility, you’ve lost your edge.

The moment you stop approaching with courage a new future, and instead, seek to avoid losing your current position — you’ve lost your edge.

The moment you become satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, you’ve lost your edge.

Interesting, Michael Jordan never lost his edge. In every possession — whether practice or a game — he always imagined the score to be 0 to 0. Even if his team was winning by 50 points. Most players, when they’re either winning or losing by a landslide begin to mentally check-out.

Imagination is fundamental to having a creative and competitive edge. When you’re pursuing something that you know has never been done before — at least by yourself, but also probably not by anyone else — you can have a level of humility and excitement that spurs innovation.

When you think about where you plan to be in 12 months from now — how imaginative is it?

How exciting is the future you’re striving to make?

When you’re playing at the razor’s edge, you have a small margin for error and distraction. Are your goals big and exciting enough to keep you from being distracted by stuff that doesn’t really matter?

When you have goals that are so exciting that you no longer have time or interest in distractions like social media, then you know you’re onto something.

When you have achievements or benchmarks you’re sprinting toward that require you to be at a powerful mental and emotional place — where you’re just throwing out creative output at a level you’ve never done before — then you’re on the right track.

Nothing great has ever come out of someone trying to maintain their current position or status.

All of the best innovation and evolution comes from a small group of people who are attempting stuff that is only real in their imagination — yet deeply connected in the soul and heart.

Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

In order to experience wild levels of mastery, you need to have “practices” or “performances” that test your ability and focus. For example, at a certain level, most people get caught into a routine where they start going through the motions. When you begin going through the motions at anything, you’ve lost the edge. Once the edge is gone, all creative innovation goes out the door. As a result, you need to push yourself always to expand your current perspectives and abilities. You do this through focused, difficult, and time-bound performances. An example could be an NBA player practicing for a full week with only their left hand. This would push their brain and creative abilities.

Have clear-cut goals that are focused on numbers and events. The clearer your benchmarks, the easier it is for your brain and mind to see it. Crystallize what you’re trying to accomplish and make it on the outer edges of possible. Your goals should be beyond anything you’ve ever done, yet still within the realm of believability. No one else has to believe you can do it but yourself. Then you focus on output.

Beyond measurable and numeric goals, you need to have an emotional EXPERIENCE you’re striving to create as well. This is where you become emotionally committed to your future. What would it feel like 1 year from now to have what you plan to accomplish?

People who are distracted do not know what they really want. They aren’t being pulled forward by a beautiful and exciting future. Instead, they are maintaining their own status quo, and have either lost their edge or have never found it.

Pivoting is one of the most beautiful ways to recreate your edge. Sometimes “bigger” isn’t the answer, but rather, different. Often, for example, a company thinks they simply need to grow. This isn’t always the answer. Instead of growing, evolution and change is likely the better solution. Change what you’re doing. Change what you’re pursuing. Change why you’re pursuing it. Play a different and better game, rather than merely a bigger game.

You need priorities so clear that you’re always laser-focused on what matters most, while most people are caught in the think of thin things.

You need to build a life and environment to facilitate optimal performance, expansion, and creativity in your core priorities and relationships.

Title: "How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert" link - By Cedric Chin

Cognitive Flexibility Theory is a 30 year old learning theory that ends up someplace weird: it tells us that a specific type of note taking will help us learn better

CFT deals with a very specific aspect of expertise. It asks: “how do experts deal with novelty?”

The observation that Hatano and Inagaki made goes something like: “Sure, sure, we have plenty of studies of ‘classical expertise’ now, where people play chess or make the same sushi roll hundreds of times to perfection. But what about the cases where a grandmaster invents a new opening, or a sushi chef comes up with a completely new menu? What can we say about that? How do we train students to do that?”

adaptive expertise colors a lot of what we expect to see in our careers.

We are often presented with novel situations to solve, due to the specific constraints of our business, our industry, or our customers. As an operator, no situation that you face in the real world will perfectly match the frameworks articulated in business books.

note: dense content, overkill for our discussion

Title: "The Step-by-Step Guide to Go From Novice to Expert in Any Skill" - Link By Nat Eliason

The Stages of expertise - Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, Expert - Dreyfus model

Going From Beginner to Expert - The Concept of Deliberate Practice - Steps to Mastery

"Deliberate practice requires a teacher or method of feedback that can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance. Practice must be done near maximal effort where you’re constantly being taken out of your comfort zone. It shouldn’t be light or “fun.” The practice must be well defined with specific goals and not aimed at “overall improvement.” You must give the practice your full attention. No autopilot.You need feedback and constant little improvements, modifying efforts in response to feedback.You must be focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on aspects of those skills and improving them."

Going From Zero to Novice...

Stage Focus: focus on collecting recipes.

You should be reading books, blogs, listening to speeches, taking classes, whatever will give you a large repertoire of recipes as fast as possible. But you can’t just read them, you have to apply them. Try following along with them, doing whatever is being talked about, and not just reading.

If you only read or hear about the recipes but don’t do them yourself it is impossible to move beyond novice. The next stage requires a contextual understanding of different situations and the only way you develop that context is through practice.

To become a novice and get started in a skill, focus on collecting recipes.

Going From Novice to Advanced beginner...

Now that you’ve collected a large database of recipes and started applying them, you should begin to develop some contextual understanding of when to use which recipes.

[Define Principles] Start looking for more maxims and applying them to your practice, and seeing if they make sense to you. - [note, add in example of copywriting maxims]

[Create Your Own Processes] Try breaking away from the clear recipes you have, trying to change things in them, and seeing what happens. Make your own versions of the recipes by piecing together different recipes and looking up help as you need it.

The only way you graduate from novice is by breaking away from fixed recipes. You need to try improvising, combining recipes, and letting yourself make mistakes. More importantly, when something goes wrong, start looking for how to solve it without blaming the recipe.

Going from Advanced Beginner to Competent

At this point you should have a large repertoire of recipes and maxims that you can apply, but not a lot of clarity around what is important in deciding which ones to use. You might get overwhelmed by decisions easily, and as a result, revert to simply following a recipe and hoping you get lucky.

Now you need to start trying to figure out what data and information is important and what isn’t. This can be hard to do on your own, which is why the Advanced Beginner to Competent stage is benefited greatly by a mentor who can provide rules and guidelines on what information to focus on. Without a mentor, you’ll need to find guidelines and rules online or in books to help you, or through trial and error, develop them on your own.

One method for doing this might be to deliberately restrict yourself in a situation to not using all of your available recipes. Maybe you force yourself to write without any adjectives, or draw using only pencil, or play with only your pawns and king. By deliberately limiting what data you can focus on, you’ll develop a more intuitive understanding of what is and isn’t relevant in novel situations. Thinking Inside The Box

To become Competent, deliberately limit what information you can consider in order to develop a more intuitive understanding of what is and isn’t important.

*Going from Competent to Proficient*

See Also: Book BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell

At this point you’re emotionally invested in the outcomes and you’re starting to develop an understanding of what inputs are important, but you haven’t completely internalized what data you need to focus on. There’s still a choice being made about what to focus on, it’s not intuitive.

This is where tactics start to get hazy. It’s difficult to practice making something intuitive, so you need to keep employing deliberate practice around what to focus on and set as your goal and assess the outcomes in order to reach proficiency. As you get better at picking what data and goals to focus on, you will slowly develop a more intuitive understanding of which decisions will do well and which ones won’t and you’ll move from competent to proficient.

It will be an emergent shift. You won’t be able to do it as deliberately as you did the last three, rather, you’ll wake up one day and realize you know what to focus on. You’ll look at a chess board and know what your goal should be. You’ll look at a setting and know what variables to focus on with your photo. You’ll look at a site and know which marketing tactics will work well for it.

To become Proficient, keep practicing and collecting more experience until your chosen perspective becomes intuitive. Until you have a sense of what to focus on and what goals to set instead of having to choose it deliberately.

Going from Proficient to Expert

... to reach expertise, you need to not only intuit what to focus on but also how to do it. Everything must feel completely intuitive like recognizing the faces of your family or navigating the streets around where you grew up. In most cases, you won’t be able to explain what you’re doing to non-experts. You’re going by feel and subconscious reason instead of conscious deciding and choosing.

To reach this stage, it again comes back to deliberate practice. You must keep experimenting and practicing and limiting yourself in order to see how different goals you intuitively set lead to different outcomes until you can intuitively set the process as well.

Practice following your instincts and seeing where they lead, and allow yourself to feel good or bad about the outcomes in order to learn the most from the experience. You have to let yourself be emotionally involved in the whole process in order to develop expertise. [interesting]

The move from proficient to expert will take the longest, so be patient with it. Keep practicing, keep experimenting, and with time, you’ll develop the intuition you need.

Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals - Source

In response to People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice, many suggest that they don’t want detailed recall. They do most of their reading “to get a general picture,” or “just to get a conceptual understanding.” That might sometimes be possible, but in many cases it’s not possible to really understand a concept without a firm grasp of the details on which it’s built.

The intuitive argument:

Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. Imagine meeting a person who told you they “had a broad conceptual understanding” of how to speak French, but it turned out they didn’t know the meaning of “bonjour”, “au revoir”, or “tres bien”. You’d think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious.”

A more concrete argument is that conceptual understanding is mostly about connections—understanding how elements relate to each other, causes, effects, implications, constraints, tendencies, etc. You can’t understand these high-order relationships without familiarity with their constituents.

Another argument draws on our understanding of human information processing: Expertise requires building sophisticated chunk recoding schemes.

Q. Reductio ad absurdum argument against someone who only wants a “broad conceptual understanding,” not detailed recall?

A. That’s like wanting to have a “broad conceptual understanding” of French without knowing the meaning of “bonjour.”

Q. Connectivist argument that deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals?

A. Conceptual understanding is largely about relationships; can’t learn the edges without knowing the nodes.

Referenced in

effective note taking

The end goal isn't to collect, but to convert ideas, information, and our understanding into tangible creatives. It also serves as a tool to help us master skills and create new and useful frameworks for ourselves and others. We're also relieving our biological brain from the stress of holding everything in our memory, allowing it to do imagine, create, and simply be present.

Mastery the “Adventure to Excellence” & The Ultimate Growth Skill

Mastery - comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment. AKA knowing your stuff.