NOTES ON BOOKS

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard

Date Read: Jan 30, 2020

BRIEF OPINION

One of the best books to get on the path of mastery and to stay on it. The book is small with 176 pages but teaches invaluable lessons. The author talks a lot about Aikido as a way of telling the story but at some places, he goes over the board especially for people like me who have no idea of what Aikido is. The story about Aikido does help in understanding about Mastery and how we can implement it in our day to day lives.

The master’s journey — practice diligently for the sake of practice itself; to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere (plateau) as learning occurs in stages; to be a learner i.e., to cultivate the mind and heart of the beginning at every stage along the way.

MY NOTES

PART ONE: THE MASTER’S JOURNEY

• The purpose of the feature was to describe the path that best led to mastery, not just in sports but in all of life, and to warn against the prevailing bottom-line mentality that puts quick, easy results ahead of long-term dedication to the journey itself.
• Our current society works in many ways to lead us astray, but the path of mastery is always there, waiting for us.
• Mastery is available to anyone who is willing to get on the path and stay on it — regardless of age, sex or previous experience.
• Days and weeks pass with no apparent progress. There you are on that damned plateau.
• For most people brought up in this society, the plateau can be a form purgatory. It triggers disowned emotions. It flushed out hidden motivations.
• While learning tennis, with the introduction of each new stage, you’re going to have to start thinking again, which means things will temporarily fall apart. You have a decision to make along the journey. You’re tempted to drop tennis and go out looking for another easier sport. Or you might try twice as hard, insist on extra lessons, practice day and night. Or you could quit your lessons and take whatever you’ve learned out on the court; you could forget about improving your game and just have fun with friends who don’t play much better than you.
• Seduced by the siren song of a consumerist, quick-fix society, we sometimes choose a course of action that brings only the illusion of accomplishment, the shadow of satisfaction. And sometimes, knowing little or nothing about the process that leads to mastery, we don’t even realize a choice is being offered.
• Genius, no matter how bright, will come to naught or swiftly burn out if you don’t choose the master’s journey.
• The master’s journey will take you along a path that is both arduous and exhilarating. It will bring you unexpected heartaches and unexpected rewards, and you will never reach a final destination.
• To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently and hone your skills to attain new levels of competence, willing to spend more of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

• Learning generally occurs in stages. A stage ends when the habitual system has been programmed to the new task, and the cognitive and effort systems have withdrawn.

How do you best move toward mastery? You practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Love the plateau.

THE DABBLER: The dabbler approaches each new sport, career, opportunity, or relationship with enormous enthusiasm. He or she loves the shine of newness. The falloff from his first peak comes as a shock. The plateau that follows is unacceptable. His enthusiasm quickly wanes. To stay on the path of mastery would mean changing himself. How much easier it is to jump into another bed and start the process all over again.

• The dabbler might think of himself as an adventurer, a connoisseur of novelty, but he’s probably closer to the eternal kid.

THE OBSESSIVE: The obsessive is a bottom-line type of person, not one to settle for second best. He or she knows results are what count, and it doesn’t matter how you get them, just so you get them fast.

• When he inevitably regresses and finds himself on a plateau, he simply won’t accept it. He redoubles his effort. He pushes himself mercilessly. He refuses to accept his boss’s and colleagues’ counsel of moderation. He works all night at the office, he’s tempted to take shortcuts for the sake of quick results.
• Somehow, in whatever he is doing, the obsessive manages for a while to keep making brief spurts of upward progress, followed by sharp declines-a jagged ride toward a sure fall. When the fall occurs, the Obsessive is likely to get hurt. And so are friends, colleagues, stockholders, and lovers.

THE HACKER: After sort of getting the hang of a thing, he or she is willing to stay on the plateau indefinitely. He’s the physician or teacher who doesn’t bother going to professional meetings, the tennis plays who develops a solid forehand and figures he can make do with a ragged backhand.

• Our hyped-up consumerist society is engaged, in an all-out war on mastery.
• The specific content is not nearly destructive to mastery as is the ‘rhythm’. One epiphany follows another. One fantasy is crowded out by the next. Climax is piled upon climax. There’s no plateau.
• American vision of good life — an endless series of climactic moments.
• There’s perhaps no more dangerous time for any society than its moment of greatest triumph. It would be truly foolish to let the decline of communism blind us to the long-term contradictions in a free market economy unrestrained by considerations of the environment and social justice, and driven by heedless consumerism, instant gratification, and the quick fix.
• In the long run, the war against mastery, the path of patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results, is a war that can’t be won.
• The real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.
• If our life is a good one, a life of mastery, most of it will be spent on the plateau. If not a large part of it may well be spent in restless, distracted, ultimately self-destructive attempts to escape the plateau.
• Think of being on a plateau in a positive manner — “Oh boy. Another plateau. Good. I can just stay on it and keep practicing. Sooner or later, there’ll be another spurt.”

• Practicing regularly and hard for no particular goal at all, just for its own sake. Nothing special.
• See Set back as a means to get back on the plateau and keep learning instead of changing.
• Unlike the Hacker, we were working hard, doing the best we could to improve our skills. But we had learned the perils of getting ahead of ourselves, and now were willing to stay on the plateau for as long as was necessary.
• When you discover your own desire, you’re not going to wait for other people to find solutions to your problems.
• Sports photography shows “the thrill of victory/agony of defeat”. We’re shown climactic moments, but mastery’s true face is relaxed and serene.
• Man is a learning animal.
• Goals and contingencies are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present.
• To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.

PART TWO: THE FIVE MASTER KEYS

KEY 1: INSTRUCTION

• The best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.
• The self-taught person is on a chancy path. Most, have spent their lives reinventing the wheel, then refusing to concede that it’s out of round.
• When you learn too easily, you’re tempted not to work hard.
• Sometimes, those with exceptional talent have trouble staying on the path of mastery. Work and experience over raw talent.
• The best horse, according to Suzuki, maybe the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for it preserves, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones.
• It poses a clear challenge for the person with exceptional talent to achieve his or her full potential, this person will have to work just as diligently as those with less innate ability.
• When you look for your instructor, in whatever skill or art, spent a moment celebrating it when you discover one who pursues maximum performance. But also make sure than he or she is paying exquisite attention to the slowest student on the mat.
• Bear in mind that on the path of mastery learning never ends. In the words of the great Japanese swordmaster Yamaoka Tesshu:

Do not think that

This is all there is.

More and more

Wonderful teachings exist —

The sword is unfathomable.

KEY 2: PRACTICE

• A practice (as a noun) can be anything you practice on a regular basis as an integral part of your life — not in order to gain something else but for its own sake.
• For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey.
• The master goes along with the rhetoric about scoring and winning but secretly cherishes those games filled with delicious twists and turns of fortune, great plays, close calls, and magical finishes-regardless of who wins.

Secret: The people we know as masters don’t devote themselves to their particular skill just to get better at it. The truth is “they love to practice”-and because of this, they do get better. And then, to complete the circle, the better they get the more they enjoy performing the basic moves over and over again.

• Old martial art saying: “The master is the one who stays on the mat five minutes longer every day than anybody else.”

Mastery is Practice.

• The master of any game is generally a master of practice.
• Masters love to practice.
• An example of Larry Bird’s training is given. “He does it just to enjoy himself. Not to make money, to get acclaim, to gain stature. He just loves to play basketball.”
• What is mastery? At heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

KEY 3: SURRENDER

• The early stages of any significant new learning invoke the spirit of the fool (being naive or newborn or starting from zero mentality of learning)
• It’s almost inevitable that you’ll feel clumsy, that you’ll take literal or figurative pitfalls. There’s no way around it. One should be willing to take this embarrassment or punishment.

The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty (new). — One should be bored with trying to find new things and be bored with it.

• Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.
• To get the quart of milk by letting a cup of milk go: You might have to take your game apart before putting it back together. This is true of almost any skill.
• Be a learner. The best you can hope for on the master’s journey — whether your art be management or marriage, badminton or ballet — is to cultivate the mind and heart of the beginning at every stage along the way.

For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.

KEY 4: INTENTIONALITY

• Viseo-motor behavior rehearsal (VMBR) combines deep relaxation with vivid mental imaging of the skill to be learned.
• The Viseo Motor Based Rehearsal (VMBR) or Imaging or Visualizing helps in improving the mind and improve the work or art.
• Arnold Schwarzenneger: “All I know is that the first step is to create the vision because when you see the vision there-the beautiful vision-that creates the ‘want power’. For example, my wanting to be Mr. Universe came about because I saw myself so clearly, being up there on the stage and winning.”

Intentionality fuels the master’s journey. Every master is a master of vision.

KEY 5: THE EDGE

• Masters are dedicated to the fundamentals of their calling. (pg. 97)
• They are zealots of practice, connoisseurs of the small, incremental steps. At the same time, these people, these masters, are precisely the ones who are likely to challenge previous limits, to take risks for the sake of higher performance, and even to become obsessive at times in that pursuit. Masters do both.
• The trick here is not only to test the edges of the envelope but also to walk the fine line between endless, goalless practice and those alluring goals that appear along the way. (pg. 98)
• Playing the edge is a balancing act. It demands the awareness to know when you’re pushing yourself beyond safe limits. In this awareness, the man or woman on the path of mastery sometimes makes a conscious decision to do just that. (pg. 99)
• The author illustrates an example running where this Edge can be seen clearly.
• Julie Moss — in the Ironman — collapsed and started crawling across the finish line, and passed out. It was stupid and heroic. But what type of world would it be without such heroics? People such as Julie Moss run for all of us, re-affirming our humanity.
• Before you can even consider playing this edge, there must be many years of instruction, practice, surrender, and intentionality. And afterwards? More training, more time on the plateau: the never-ending path again.

PART THREE: TOOLS FOR MASTERY

WHY RESOLUTIONS FAIL?

• Backsliding is a universal experience. Everyone resists significant change. We tend to stay within narrow limits and snap back when changed.

Equilibrium is called homeostasis. It applies to psychological states as well as physical functioning.

• A national culture is held together by legislation, law, education, arts, sports, and a complex web of mores, prestige markers, and style that relies largely on the media as a national nervous system. The predominant function of this: the survival of things as they are.
• Homeostasis works to keep things as they are even if they aren’t very good. For example, After 20 years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary life as normal. The beginning of change for the better is interpreted as a threat.
• Resistance is proportional to the size and speed of change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.
• Realizing your potential in almost anything can change you in many ways.
• You’ll meet with homeostasis sooner or later. You might unknowingly sabotage your own best efforts, or get resistance from family.

If you really do want to spend the time and effort, here are 5 guidelines:

1. Be aware of the homeostasis: Expect resistance and backlash. Don’t give up at the first sign of trouble. Don’t be surprised if some of the people you love start covertly or overtly undermining your self-improvement. It’s not that they wish you harm, it’s just homeostasis at work.
2. Negotiate with your resistance to change: Use pain not as an adversary but as the best possible guide to performance. Play the edge of discontent, the inevitable escort of transformation. The fine art of playing the edge, in this case, involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa. It demands a determination to keep pushing, but not without awareness. Simply turning off your awareness of the warnings deprives you of guidance and risks damaging the system. Simply pushing your way through despite the warning signals increases the probability of backsliding.
3. Develop a support system: It helps a great deal to have other people with whom you can share the joys of the change you’re making. The path of mastery, always fosters social groupings. If you’re alone on a particular path, let the people close to you know what you’re doing, and ask for their support.
4. Follow a regular practice: Gain stability and comfort through practicing on a regular basis, not for the sake of achieving an external goal as simply for its own sake. The practice is a habit and provides homeostasis, a stable base during the instability of change.
5. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning: The best learning of all involves learning how to learn — that is, to change. The lifelong learner is essentially one who has learned to deal with homeostasis because he or she is doing it all the time.

HOW TO GET ENERGY FOR MASTERY?

• A human is a machine that wears out from lack of use. We gain energy by using energy. The best remedy for physical weariness is 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.
• Human energy comes into existence through use.
• Fredrich S. Perls: “I don’t want to be saved, I want to be spent.”

• Watch an 18-month-old. This raw, unadulterated learning energy exploits everything he can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. We, adults, are easily exhausted, so we say, “Why can’t you be still?” We park the learner in front of the TV. Now the kid’s as lethargic as we are.
• The conventional classroom — with kids forced to do the same thing at the same time — makes individual initiative and exploration nearly impossible.

Here’s how to get started on using our native energy in a beneficial way:

1. Maintain physical fitness: People who are in touch with nature and their own bodies, are more likely to use their energy for the good of this planet.
2. Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive: Numerous studies show that people with a positive outlook on life suffer far less sickness than those who see the world in negative terms. They also have more energy. Denial inhibits energy, while the realistic acknowledgment of the truth releases it. Even serious blows in life can give you extra energy by knocking you off dead center — but not if you deny the blows are real. Acknowledging the negative doesn’t mean sniveling; it means facing the truth and then moving on. Telling people what they’re doing wrong while ignoring what they’re doing right reduces their energy.
3. Try telling the truth: When people start telling the truth, you see almost immediate reductions in mistakes and increases in productivity.
4. Honor but don’t indulge your own dark side: Take the fervid energy of indignation, even of rage, and putting it to work for positive purposes — say, working furiously on a favorite project. We admire people who know how to utilize the blazing energy that flows from that which has been called dark.
5. Set your priorities: To move in one direction, you must forgo all others. To choose one goal is to forsake other possible goals. Our generation has been raised on the idea of keeping your options open. But if you keep all your options open, you can’t do a damned thing. An affluent, consumer-oriented way of life multiplies the choices that face you. Television offers endless possibilities and tempts you to choose none, to sit staring in endless wonder, to become comatose. Indecision leads to inaction, which leads to low energy, depression, despair.

Liberation comes through the acceptance of limits. You can’t do everything, but you can do one thing, and then another, and another.

In terms of energy, it is better to make a wrong choice than none at all.

6. Make Commitments. Take action: The journey of mastery is ultimately goalless. But, there are interim goals along the way, like starting the journey itself, deadlines, etc.

• Goeth: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can — begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

7. Get on the path of mastery and stay on it: There is nothing like the path of mastery to lead you to energetic life. A regular practice not only elicits energy but tames it. You can’t hoard energy; you can’t build energy up by not using it. Adequate rest is a part of the journey, but unaccompanied by positive action, rest may only depress you.

WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS ON THE MASTER’S JOURNEY?

• It’s easy to get on the path of mastery. The real challenge lies in staying on it.

Here are 13 Pitfalls that you might run into:

1. Conflicting way of life: The path of mastery doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It wends its way through a landscape of other obligations, pleasures, relationships. When things aren’t going well on your path of mastery, don’t forget to check out the rest of your life. Then consider the possibility that the rest of your life can be lived in terms of mastery principles.
2. Obsessive goal orientation: The desire of most people today for quick, sure, and highly visible results is perhaps the deadliest enemy of mastery. It’s fine to have ambitious goals, but the best way of reaching them is to cultivate modest expectations at every step along the way. Keep your eyes on the path instead of always looking up at the goal. Zen Saying: When you reach the top of the mountain, keep on climbing.
3. Poor Instruction: Don’t bounce from one teacher to another, but don’t stick with a situation that’s not working, just out of inertia. The ultimate responsibility for your getting good instruction lies not with your teacher but with you.
4. Lack of competitiveness
5. Overcompetitiveness: If winning is the only thing, then practice, discipline, conditioning, and character are nothing.
6. Laziness: Laziness will knock you off the mastery path. The good news is that the mastery path is the best possible cure for laziness. Courage.
7. Injuries: The best way of achieving the goal is to be fully present. Surpassing previous limits involves negotiating with your body, not ignoring or overriding its messages. Negotiation involves awareness. Avoiding serious injury is less a matter of being cautious than of being conscious.
8. Drugs: At first, it might seem to work but regular use leads inevitably to disaster. If you’re on drugs, you’re not on the path.
9. Prizes and Medals: Excessive use of external motivation can slow and even stop your journey to mastery. Studies show that rewarding school children by giving them gold stars initially speeds up their learning, but their progress soon levels off, even if you increase the number of stars. When you stop giving stars, their progress falls to a level lower than that of matched groups of children who got no stars in the first place. Henry W. Ryder: “The champions stop not at a given speed but when they set a record.” The ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself.
10. Vanity: It’s possible that one of the reasons you got on the path of mastery was to look good. But to learn something new of any significance, you have to be willing to look foolish. If you’re always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that’s necessary for effective learning and top performance.
11. Dead Seriousness: To be deadly serious is to suffer tunnel vision. To be able to laugh at yourself clears the vision.
12. Inconsistency: Consistency of practice is the mark of the master. Continuity of time and place (where this is feasible) can establish a rhythm that buoys you up, carries you along. There is even value in repeating favorite rituals before, during, and after practice. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has studied a state of happy concentration called ‘flow,’ points out that some surgeons wash their hands and put on their gowns in precisely the same way before each operation, thus stripping their minds of outside concerns and focusing their attention fully on the task at hand. Inconsistency not only loses you practice time, but makes everything more difficult when you do get around to practicing. But if you should happen to miss a few sessions, don’t use that as an excuse to quit entirely. The path of mastery takes many twists and turns and calls for a certain flexibility of strategy and action. Consistency is of the essence, but “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson).
13. Perfectionism: People who are self-critical without comparing themselves to the world’s greatest, they set such high standards for themselves and others that neither they nor anyone else could ever meet them-and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

HOW TO MASTER THE COMMONPLACE?

• Most of life is “in between.” When goal orientation comes to dominate our thoughts, little seems to really count is left.

• The quality of a Zen student’s practice is defined just as much by how he or she sweeps the courtyard as by how he or she sits in Meditation.
• All those chores that we can’t avoid: Reclaim the lost hours by making everything part of our practice.
• Maintain full awareness of each of your movements. Pay attention to the rest of your body. Go for efficiency, elegance, and grace in your motions. Stay wholly focused on the moment. Above all, don’t hurry.
• Life is filled with opportunities for practicing the inexorable, unhurried rhythm of mastery, which focuses on process rather than the product, yet which, paradoxically, often ends up creating more and better products in a shorter time than does the hurried, excessively goal-oriented rhythm that has become standard in our society.
• The person who can vacuum an entire house without losing his or her composure, staying balanced, centered, and focused on the process rather than pressing impatiently for completion, is a person who knows something about mastery.
• All of life is seamless. The way we walk, talk to our children, study, or do our jobs.

Nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge.

• I am struck by the insignificance of anything or anyone else could give you compared with what you already have. You are the culmination of an extravagant evolutionary journey.
• You are made of mostly unused potential. It is your evolutionary destiny to use what is unused, to learn and keep on learning for as long as you live.

To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.

• What if out of the infant’s babble comes the syllable “da”, then the father looks down sternly and says, “No! That is wrong! It’s dad-dy!” Consider the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because other people have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process. How often have you censored your spontaneity out of fear of being thought childish?

ENDING THOUGHTS

• Complement with ‘Siddhartha’ by Hermann Hesse — deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.
• Continue the Mastery journey with book “Mastery” by Robert Greene — I fell in love with the word Mastery after reading this book in 2016. The book examines the lives of historical figures such as Charles Darwin and Henry Ford, as well as the lives of contemporary leaders such as Paul Graham and Freddie Roach, and examines what led to their success.
• If you want to learn more about Mastery you should definitely check out “The Mastery Sessions” by Robin Sharma