Road to Mastery: What the journey looks like.

Like a Jedi you must first be a Youngling, then a Padawan, then a Knight and finally a Master. Even in each level you would have combat styles that you would want to master. Each one of us is moving towards the path of Mastery and we would want to master everything! And one day you wake up and your friends are calling you a ‘jack of all trades and master of none’.

Here’s what I’ve learn so far and how I explain to myself or my colleagues when helping myself/them to choose a path in their life/career progression.

First rule of Mastery is; getting good at something…

Takes time.

We often hear those words thrown about in a conversation. ‘It takes time to be good at one thing’, a younger me would say ‘No it does not, I’ll show you!’. Hence the younger me set a goal to be a designer and off I go onto the path of Mastery.

Young, naive and with nothing to lose.

‘How did I get here? What path have I taken? And what mistakes have I made?’ I asked myself in late 2015 and started to spend some time reflecting.

Year is 2016. I am now a co-founder at VLT Labs, a venture builder in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve helped to launch 40 odd products, running a co-working space with 2 outlets in Malaysia and growing a team of 15. Came a long way from working for someone, to working with everyone.

I was told that they are two things that I would need to pay attention to when taking the journey to Mastery.

Time, Depth and Effort.

Here’s how it looks like.

Time

Cooking takes time, no matter what it is that you are trying to cook (roasting, grilling, sous vide, etc). It all takes time, some shorter and some longer. It leads to the same outcome, cooked food but not the same result.

Time as we know is linear, precise and non-replenishable. A movement is depict as getting from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, which in theory a linear movement. Non-perishable means that once time has past we are not able to revisit it and change things.

Now in my head I was thinking ‘In order to be good at something I need to move forward’ but then the idea of mistakes pops up ‘How then do I know that the mistakes I have made will benefit the outcome?’. Another question that popped up is ‘How can I be good at 3 things at once and having to correct each mistake if I can’t fix the past?’

Those 3 things are being a good designer, Building a good Company and being good at Problem Solving.

Depth

To dive deeper into the ocean, you must first be prepared. I am not a diver but it’s commonsense that if you don’t practice, you won’t go far or even worse you will die trying to go beyond what you can do or understand how to maneuver the situations that will occur.

Manoeuvring is an intersting word. It means, to be able to make sense of the given situation. The ability to make decisions that would lead to an outcome (good or bad) in order to move forward.

Here is how ‘Jack of all trades’ would look like.Each box represents a trade.

Can I master all 3 things that I have mentioned earlier? Is the question that I have asked myself countless times.

Sounds like I need to put in a lot of…

Effort

There is only so much time in a day! I would need to split myself in 3 and send them all towards the journey to Mastery. Sadly, that is not possible.

Every knowledge comes with resistance in it’s early days. The acquisition of basic knowledge on a topic will require effort. How much effort is need? That depends on interest and the drive. Once the threshold is passed the basics will then help to reduce the resistance on acquiring a knowledge.

Here is what I did. I distributed the effort accordingly to which topic that I would want to be good at in a specific amount of time. In this case, I chose something that I thought I was pretty good at which Design.

Design is broad and covers many topics. My requirement was to help me be a better design for the future of product design. The future happens to be the experience of a product or service in the digital space. I figured that it would require a design driven thinking process. I then steered my early days in acquring the knowledge that I needed to be good at it.

Here’s how the journey looks like.

Now here’s …

The round up.

From what I have learnt,to Master something means to continously learn and improve as time moves along.Learning from the past helps us maneuver towards the future.

Also to truly master something, I would need a good amount of concentration

We can’t change the mistakes but if we spend sometime to reflect on it, will help in making better decisions in the near future.

‘It gets easier over time’

We have all heard that every now and then. Here is my effort in formulating this whole write up:

Depth/Time x Effort = Mastery

At least that’s what I think the formula to mastery looks like. I might be completely wrong or right on the dot. I would love for you to share what you think of this write up and if you feel the same or different.