Mastery
“No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.” ― Robert Greene, Mastery
Time provides no replays. But I am left after all these years with the crystalline memories of preternaturally white clouds soaring over deep green fields of cotton and corn, of the insistent engine sound that finally became no sound at all, of smoking engines and failed hydraulic systems, of illegal flights out over the Atlantic to play vertiginous games of follow-the-leader with other planes while our students hold their breaths. But more than anything, I am left with a morality tale on the subject of instructing, in which I play the leading role. There’s nothing I can do to change it. I was the best of instructors. I was the worst of instructors. The first does not justify the second.
George Leonard
Mastery
George Leonard in the above quote is referring to the art of teaching people how to fly big metal fighter birds through the sky. The trick to doing that is to blow up the guys who the dudes paying you are telling you to blow up without getting blown’d up yourself. Leonard saw that two out of his four students were talented and that the other two were schlemiels. So he did what anyone would do under such a high-pressure situation.
He put all of his attention on the two ace pilots and never let them fly with the damned. By the end of his instruction, the Air Force had two exceptional pilots and two who were lucky to have passed the final test and not have had their skills permanently checked by gravity. One of the schlemiels found Leonard a decade later and let him know what he thought of his hands off the control stick because I don’t trust you clowns mentality.
Leonard felt bad but hey that’s what happens when you are in a competitive based market. Your winning at the fighter plane game means potentially a goat herder in Syria is going to have a bad day. But creation-based markets are a lot more friendly to human beings. Just because a novelist wins doesn’t mean you lose.
The writer always attributes his own pithy sayings to the Buddha because the Buddha has more street cred. So the writer writes what the Buddha said and apparently, the writer wrote that Buddha said there are four types of horses. The first is the smartest who understands what the rider wants when he sees the shadow of the whip. The second-rate horse is startled when the whip touches his hair. Third is surprised when the whip tears into his skin. The lowest of the horses learns only when the whip has penetrated to the bone. Ah, but the fourth horse has the advantage of his practice fusing with his marrow.
It was this observation that Leonard made when he became a teacher of Aikido in his late forties. The plodding pace of the third and fourth-rate students allowed him to blow up the minute details of the smallest moves and both learned greatly from the process. Furthermore, the worst students turned out to be the better ones because they had become accustomed to the fact that real growth is long periods of nothing-dry-plateaus followed by small incremental gains. They had begun to love practice for the sake of practice.
Leonard divided learners into four categories.
The Dabbler— The person who hits a plateau and quits because he is in love with the feeling of newness and rapid growth.
The Obsessive— Wants progress as fast as possible so he pushes himself eighteen hours a day to keep that progress chart curved up. He never learns to enjoy the plateau, never once touches the flow of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The Hacker— Has given up on improving after surmounting three or four plateaus and settles for a life of mediocrity.
The Master— Lifelong improvement until you are world-class and then continue to climb after that. The endless succession of the ten thousand hours of deliberate practice is rewarding because it is nothing special to him. The practice was just doing him
The West is an obsessive culture. It wants a nonstop highlight reel of climaxes and cannot handle the fact that not everything is getting better all of the time. The secret to finding happiness in the mind of Leonard is to find yourself in a skill and master it. That way the inside world can breach the outside world and through one thing you start to see yourself reflected in the many things. To love practice for the sake of practice is to love what is most essential and enduring in said life. Love the process even if there appears to be no progress.
Loving the practice itself puts your mind into such a different realm, feels like you're living a completely different life; as if you're temporarily tapping into your ideal self .
Hmm I can't edit my comment for some reason but autocorrect fucked "memetic" to "medically" so memetic is what I meant.