Pyramid of Humble Mastery — A Pathway to Become a Master in Any Field

Have you tried to master a new field anytime in your life? Programming? AI? Blockchain? Accounting? Agile? DevOps? Management? Cooking? Anything?

While you were on the quest of mastery, how much guidance did you from external sources (friends, teachers, internet, etc.) about
a) ‘what’ to learn?
b) ‘how’ to learn?

Speaking from personal experience, I got a lot of guidance about the ‘what to learn’ part and very less guidance about the ‘how to learn’ part. When I asked my near and dear ones, their experience was also the same. This led me to look for inspirations to create a model for mastering a field.

The Inspiration

In a completely unrelated exercise, I came across a way in which Hinduism organizes the available knowledge into (debatable) roughly three categories.

1. Philosophy (Shruti)
2. Frameworks (Smriti)
3. Stories (Purana)

Why not try to see if this model can be put to use for attaining mastery? So, I started trying out my already in-progress learning venture (I was learning Blockchain at that time, if you are curious) using this as a model, taking care not to force-fit my experiences to this model, given the religious origins. In short, this model was just a starting point, which could be improved or modified based on my personal experience.

[I don’t know much about how other religions classify their knowledge and I am not trying to do the ‘A is better than B’ thing here. This concept from Hinduism was an inspiration for the model and let us leave it at that.]

What is learning?

Before we barge into the model for mastery, it is important to understand what ‘learning’ means.

One could learn one of the following things.

1. Information
2. Skill

1. Learning new information

Contrary to popular belief, learning is not just adding new information into your brain. It is the creation of links between what one already knows and the new information.

New links can be created in any of the following ways.

1. Consuming information — Reading, Listening, Watching videos, etc.
2. Experiencing change — Personally experiencing how the real world doesn’t conform to your expectations, thereby falsifying assumptions and creating new learning.

2. Learning new skill

An ability and capacity acquired through deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to smoothly and adaptively carryout complex activities or job functions involving ideas (cognitive skills), things (technical skills), and/or people (interpersonal skills).
— Definition of the word ‘Skill’ from BusinessDictionary.com

If you are trying to learn a new skill like singing, writing, cooking or arithmetic, the word ‘learning’ doesn’t mean creating new links in your brain. Learning a skill means gently pushing the capacity of your body and/or mind by repeated practice of the desired activity. For example, you get better in singing by actually practicing singing, not by reading notes.

Why ‘Humble’ Mastery?

While on the quest of mastery, there is a risk of the learner becoming ‘too proud to learn anymore’. This is a roadblock for mastery because the person stops learning or, in other words, closes himself for new learning opportunities when he enters the state of ‘proud’ mastery.

I have seen myself in such ‘closed for learning’ states before, only to be blown away by reality after it was too late. Hence, the model for mastery needed a strong intention to promote humility, at least for my selfish motives, if not for making others feel good. The learning model should always remind one that ‘there is room for more learning’.

Pyramid of Humble Mastery

As I experimented with my own learning quest using the earlier model from Hinduism, I settled on the following representation.

There are three levels (very much like Shruti, Smriti and Purana of Hinduism, although with mild modifications) in this model.

Why a Pyramid?

If all that we require are three levels, why create a pyramid? Why not create a three layered rectangle? Because the name ‘Three Layered Rectangle of Humble Mastery’ doesn’t sound good?

There is a reason why I represent this as a pyramid. In a pyramid, the area occupied by each level is different. Lower levels occupy more area than the upper levels. The inspiration for this came from the Test Pyramid.

Philosophy (the top level) covers very less area. This is because the amount of information or text available in the ‘Philosophy’ level is very less for any field, given the abstract nature of the information. Generally, you can represent this philosophy in less than a few pages.

The second level of Practices and Frameworks cover a bigger area. All these practices and frameworks implement the philosophy in a less-abstract manner. This removal of abstractness adds to more wordiness. Also, there is a factor of ‘number’. There are many competing frameworks and practices to implement the same philosophy. This leads to the second level covering more area than the top layer.

The third level consists of actual experiences, either by self or by others. Just because there are so many implementations of a framework possible, this level takes even more area and hence becomes the base of pyramid. If the field you are trying to master is ‘information’ dominated, then this third level is not complete without your application of the learnt information to a real-life context. Similarly, if the field you are trying to master is ‘skill’ dominated, then this third level is not complete with ‘your’ application of the skill aka the practice.

Note that you do not have to force-fit a pyramid shape in this. As long as there are three layers with increasing area from top to bottom, we are good.

Examples for each level in different fields

Level 1 — Philosophy:

1. Taking the example of the field of ‘Agility in IT’, the philosophy is nothing but the Agile Manifesto with its 12 principles.
2. In case of the field of ‘DevOps’, the philosophy is just the ‘Three Ways’.
3. In case of Blockchain, it is the ‘Chain of blocks to automate trust’ part.
4. In case of Music, it could be the elements of music.

Level 2 — Frameworks/Practices:

1. There are numerous frameworks/methods/practices like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Daily standups, etc. to implement ‘Agility in IT’.
2. In case of DevOps, this layer will contain the practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Deployment Strategies, etc. along with the knowledge about necessary tooling.
3. In case of Blockchain, this layer includes Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger, etc.
4. In case of Music, this layer includes the warmups, vocal techniques, etc.

Level 3 — Applications/Stories:

1. There are more case studies than frameworks or practices in ‘Agile in IT’
2. For DevOps too, there are more case studies than practices.
3. In Blockchain arena, there are more applications and stories (Blockchain for IoT transactions, Bitcoin for buying goods, Mahesh Murthy’s Ethereum for voting, Hyperledger for managing digital properties, etc) than the number of frameworks.
4. In case of Music, this layer includes all real-world practices or performances that you or your anyone else could have done. Others practice gives you only inspiration. Only your practice contributes to your mastery. If you create a Youtube channel for showing off your singing practice, this is the level the channel belongs to.

How to use this model?

1. Create a new copy(either digital or physical) of the Pyramid of Humble Mastery for each field that you want to master.
2. Represent all that you learn into the levels in the Pyramid of Humble Mastery using Post-its or just dots on pyramid, placed according to where in the pyramid the new learning belongs.
3. Once you see a vertical line of your dots/post-its covering all levels, present what you have learnt by means of a conference talk, blog, YouTube video, etc. This way, you create a level-3 (story) content yourself. Seek feedback.
4. Once you get feedback, see if any other existing level-2 practices or frameworks can better fix the shortcomings of your story. If none exist, try to add your own framework/practice to the level-2 in the pyramid.
5. Go to step 3 and repeat.

There will come a point where you are satisfied with the current mastery you have. At that point, you can stop concentrating on that field, with a clear understanding that you have not mastered everything and that is okay. In other words, you stopped concentrating because you find value somewhere else not because you know everything in that field.

Conclusion

I read in Jurgen Appelo’s book titled ‘Managing for Happiness’ that “All models are wrong but some are useful”. I understand that this model is not perfect but I found it useful. This has helped me learn faster keeping my pride in control. Do you find this useful too? What do you think of this model? How can we improve the quest to mastery either with or without this model?

[Meta: I understand that I have just presented the ‘Philosophy’ level (level -1) of this model in this blog post. The practices (level -2) that I use were probably just working for me (level -3) in my Blockchain learning context. You can add more practices or your stories if you want, to improve this field of ‘Humble Mastery’]

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