Mastery

"To stick to a thing until you are master, is a test of intellectual discipline and power." - Orison Swett Marden

How often do I undertake things with the thought of mastering them?  This is something that seems to keep resounding from my reading of An Iron Will by Orison Swett Marden.  The book, in case you have never heard of it (or the author), is a 19th century inspirational work about the power of the will, how it matters, and how important it is to adopt one.

But back to mastery.  How often do I undertake things with the thought of mastering them?  How much do any of us, if I desire to spread the pain a bit?  I think the reality is most people -certainly myself - undertake things unthinkingly without the first of thought of coming to master them.  We dally with a multiplicity of thing like a dilettante rather than take the time to actual master what we do.

The interesting thing is that our society values mastery but in very odd ways.  We recognize Olympic athletes yet we have built an entire industry on "Online Gaming" where people spend the same amount of time and effort mastering that which does not exist as for that the does.  We say that we value the level of craftsmanship and performance that comes with anything built by one who has spent the long hours mastering a skill or item, yet would rather spend our money on the cheap and pleasing. We claim that we want our personnel to master what they do, but we refuse to pay the wages for what a mastery of that skill would look like.

Is it wrong to not master everything we put our hand to?  Of course not.  Experimenting is the great spice of life - without experimenting in different things, I would never have discover many of the activities that I enjoy today.  We need to look to different areas, to try, to explore, to find things that are worthy of our time.

But once we find such things we need to make a commitment to them not just to continue to play in the shallows of the knowledge, but to go deeper.  It is like swimming:  as a child it is wonderful to paddle our way in the shallows but as an adult such paddling looks ludicrous and is counterproductive to actually swimming anyway. 

And such commitment - this mastery - is one that requires of us to do a number of things:

1)  Focus:  Our focus narrows as we continue to learn and practice one things.

2)  Effort:  The amount of effort required to master something is always greater than the effort to just participate in it.

3)  Intellectual Engagement:  As we seek to master something, we will find that our minds become consumed by it.  It haunts our waking thoughts.  It is applied in every situation.

4)  Discipline: To become a master of anything is to stick to it until it is mastered.  To do this correctly it requires a significant application of discipline, to the task of getting the thing done until it is done.

Focus, Effort, Intellectual Engagement, Discipline - are these not things that make for better people, better lives and better societies? 

The benefits of mastery are there - the question is, are we - am I - willing to pay the price?