If I’d found George Leonard’s Mastery in a bookshop, I wouldn’t have bought it. The subtitle (“The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment”) and cheesy cover — featuring Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man — brand it as lightweight self-help. And in fact it does get suspiciously New Age at times, especially near the end, when Leonard talks about locating your ki. But I didn’t find it at a bookshop, and I didn’t have to buy it. It’s freely available on Scribd. Which was lucky, because even with its whiff of patchouli, Mastery is a useful exploration of a subject which obsesses me: expertise and deliberate practice.
I’ve read a great deal on the topic but have never been satisfied, because deliberate practice is rarely treated substantively. You can find any number of 500 word articles about the principles of deliberate practice (and how it can increase your workforce’s productivity), but these are mostly abridgements of a Malcolm Gladwell book which was superficial to begin with. There are books on the topic. There’s the aforementioned Gladwell book, Outliers. Geoff Colvin wrote a book called Talent is Overrated. If you can stomach academic writing, there’s Karl Anders Ericsson’s research about the acquisition of expert skills. Then there are books that allude to its importance, like Born to Run and All Things Shining. Their primary subjects were running and eudaimonia, respectively, but both acknowledged practice’s importance to those pursuits. Or there’s always the world of sports, where our most glamorous ascetics live. You can watch thirty second Nike spots and feel like you spent hours sweating in the gym. Michael Jordan will tell you that you’re just making excuses. You can hear Ray Allen discusses his pre-game routine for ninety seconds.
Which is the problem: we acknowledge practice’s importance, but it bores us, so we don’t want to discuss it too long. That’s why Rocky’s training montages only last a few minutes, and why someone intrigued by deliberate practice can find only brief, generalist articles. (I do recommend the Ericsson, as it is neither.) Worse is the orientation of these books and articles. Gladwell talks about practice as a term in a secret formula. 10,000 hours of practice + environmental advantages = genius. These books and articles are about process, but only as it relates to the payoff – becoming an elite performer.
Leonard’s Mastery talks about how process can be its own payoff. Written in 1992*, Leonard writes about deliberate practice avant la lettre. He describes the expert’s learning curve and its many plateaus, and how to appreciate those. It’s the Karate Kid training montage expatiated into a 179 page book. If you’re like me, that should be exciting.
Leonard’s a fan of that movie. He teaches martial arts himself, though it is Aikido instead of karate. As such, he enjoys Zen parables. He sees the Karate Kid as the Americanization of the swordmaster myth: the story of the eager pupil come to learn at the feet of an at first indifferent master. When he finally agrees to teach him, the master makes him chop wood to learn swordsmanship. There’s other parables, about how you have to empty your cup before you can fill it, or how you have to let go of that cup of expertise to grab the quart on the table.
Someone aiming for excellence might roll their eyes at these Zen paradoxes. I am convinced by them. Maybe to get good at something, you have to not care if you ever do. The road is too long to be motivated by a destination you can only imagine and never see. The journey has to be its own satisfaction. I don’t fantasize about seeing my name on a bookstore’s shelves, anymore. I am more interested in learning how to pay attention to all the steps leading to it.
I like finishing projects. I liked it when I was up for critique in workshops; people would usually say something nice. Once a classmate compared a story I wrote to James Joyce. (The teacher told her not to get too crazy.) I’ve written a lot of sentences and even a few stories that seemed great at the time. That pride has never lasted more than a few months, though, so I have learned not to trust it. Now I take pride in effort alone. I feel best when I have pushed at a stone for two hours without appreciable effect. I am most excited about writing whenever some other writer shows me just how much there is to learn.
* He despises insta-diets and quick fixes, and his condemnations of corporate raiders and high finance gambling are weirdly prescient about the 2008 catastrophe.
