Book Review: Mastery - The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
Mastery - The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
Mehdi at Strong Lifts posted a book list not too long and I took note of the mental training books. Mastery was not weight lifting specific, so I picked it up to see what it had to say about mentally preparing yourself for training that I could apply to both swimming and lifting.
To my surprise, Mastery really is not a book about training at all, but a much more general book. The book’s point is that the path you take is more important than the end goal. Mastery comes through practice, and you practice for the sake of practicing, not just to achieve some end goal.
That point, the point that the path is more important than the goal, is a very valuable lesson to me. Achieving goals only makes up a fraction of our life, while the in between time makes up most of our life. If you are constantly rushing between the in between times and only enjoying the achievement of goals, then you are not enjoying most of your life.
Mastery is broken up into three parts, an introduction, an explanation on how to maintain the path to mastery and aides to help you maintain the path.
The first part explains what the author really means by mastery, and gives some example personalities that are not on the path to mastery, and why they are not. The author dubs these non-mastery paths the dabbler, the obsessive and the hacker. This is certainly an enjoyable section where you can easily see which personality you fall into. My free time is spent as the dabbler, constantly exploring subjects that I am interested in, but never getting further than a shallow understanding of the topic before moving on to the next topic. I have gone through periods of the obsessive in the past, and am currently the hacker in several areas of my life. What I learned from Mastery isn’t necessarily that being in these states are bad, but they might be an indication that I am not doing what I actually want to do. This section also introduces the idea that to become a master, you have to love practicing the art.
Part two is all about the path, and the path is practicing. Not only is it practicing, but it is practicing the right things, focusing on the subtle nuances of what you are doing and enjoying the small improvements as well as seeing something you have seen a thousand times in a new light for the first time. This part includes both practical suggestions for finding and following the path, like what to look for in a mentor, as well as more of the metaphysical aspects, such as keeping a focused on your intent versus just going through the motions.
The final part, the aides to progressing along the path, is the weakest part of the book. There is some good information in this section, such as making use of deadlines to create extra energy and focus in your practice, but most of this section will read like a restatement of points from earlier in the book. Repetition is common in this genre of books, so I am happy that it was limited to a third of the book, but the method of reinforcement used was well done. Instead of just restating the points, the author actually refers back to the chapters where the points were introduced.
This was a very good book for me. I have always sought after goals to use as a guiding force in my life. This as been very difficult to do, as several things I enjoy doing do not easily lend themselves to goal setting. I will continue to set goals for myself, but after reading Mastery, I will focus more of my attention of enjoying just doing the activities I do, instead of always focusing on some future goal as the driving force behind the activity.