Mastering your craft
Motivation leads to mastery
In my job as a leader, I think a lot about motivation. What motivates each person in my team and how does motivation work?
If we consider Dan Pink’s RSA talk The surprising truth about what motivates us, motivation is three things:
- Autonomy — give someone a task and let them get on with it
- Purpose — why are we doing it in the first place
- Mastery — gaining knowledge and becoming better at something
I see autonomy and purpose as entirely my responsibility: if I cannot give my team the ability to work independently and communicate why they are doing the work, then that’s on me.
Mastery is more difficult, because it makes several assumptions about what it actually means to master something.
Why am I not an expert yet?
I have sat in 1-to-1 meetings with staff over the years, and been told that in another month, or three months, or six months, they will get to where they need to be technically. They will know everything they need to know; they will be an expert.
I hear frustration in their voice, ‘why am I not an expert yet?’
I could reference Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers: you can become an expert in a field with 10,000 hours of practice. (For those counting: this equates to a little over 5 years of full time work.) Would this provide the motivation the person sitting in front of me needs?
The journey is never over
Being an expert is the goal, but it is the journey to get there that matters most. I have spent a lot more than 10,000 hours at my craft and I have a confession to make: I am not an expert. I probably never will be. However, I am still motivated by mastery because I am not trying to be an expert, I’m trying to get better.
Particularly in Tech, there is an ever-expanding landscape of things to learn, disappearing into the distance in every direction. For some this is a fantastic prospect; for others it’s frightening.
As gently as I can, I try to explain that focusing on ‘knowing everything I need to know’, or becoming an expert, can demotivate more than it will motivate. It can be a constant crushing blow that you are not there yet.
Focus on learning, focus on getting better, focus on enjoying the process
I talk particularly about Tech, but what about very narrow fields? Is it not better to focus on the end goal, on becoming an expert? I will answer this with another question: will you become an expert if you don’t enjoy the process to get there?
To me, if you do not focus on enjoying the process of learning — of mastering your craft — you will not get there in either case. To put it another way:
Take joy from the journey, not the destination.
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