The path from apprenticeship to mastery is challenging yet exciting since we accumulate skills and knowledge that boost our confidence and help us solve problems from different angles. We develop an intuitive feeling that helps us explore different networks in our fields. We learn to control our frustrations; we become patient; we fall in love with the process. Once we develop a deep love for our fields, we do not succumb to the easiest path; we adhere to the difficult path that separates us from others who are left somewhere in the middle.
“All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains were designed to attain, and we will be naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate end.”
Key Points:
- Learn to ease your anxiety, and you will become a master.
- Train your memory, do not destroy it from misuse.
- To go through the hard phase, follow a routine.
- Shortcuts will destroy your career, follow the hardest path.
Learn how to quiet the anxiety:
The reason people give up on their dreams so early is they are not prepared mentally to cope with challenges and setbacks on the path to mastery. Once you enter the apprenticeship phase, you have the golden opportunity to hone the skills you already possess and accumulate more skills that you need to confront problems from different angles. You get stuck while solving a difficult problem, and you get frustrated since you waste much time on it, and you have no clue how to figure it out. You get angry and aggressive and often anxious when your work is criticized. Once you learn the art of embracing such horrible things beforehand, it gets a lot easier for you to thrive ahead in the apprenticeship phase to become a master. Those who do not control their anxieties often give up in the learning phase and crumble their careers.
“This desire for what is simple and easy infects all of us, often in ways we are mostly unaware of. The only solution is the following: We must learn how to quiet the anxiety we feel whenever we are confronted with anything that seems complex or chaotic.”
Cultivate a greater memory capacity:
Our memory gets flabby due to disuse and reliance on technology, we look up everything on our phones, and we do not even care to memorize a few contacts. In apprenticeship, you need to improve your memory which would help you build confidence; you would not need to use your phone for trivial things that you saved in it in case you needed them later. Your memory represents your health, and a healthy memory will lead you to mastery. You need to play mind games in your spare time to enhance your memory.
“To go along with this self-control, we must do whatever we can to cultivate a greater memory capacity—one of the most important skills in our technologically oriented environment. The problem that technology presents us is that it increases the amount of information at our disposal, but slowly degrades the power of our memory to retain it.”
Discipline and patience:
Going through an apprenticeship is hard since we confront people who do not conform to our ideas and concepts; our work is criticized; we feel frustrated and angry. The way forward is to be mentally prepared for horrible things in the future. Your life gets harder and more boring when you delay things because you do not feel up to them. You should develop a proper routine and stick to it to learn more in your learning phase. You depend on mentors who guide you from time to time; you should get close to them to help them open up to you; you develop a strong bond with them and attach them to yourself emotionally. Once they feel you belong to them, they would treat you better and would focus on you.
Avoid shortcuts:
To reach mastery, you should avoid the easiest paths which are just distractions to mislead you from the actual path that is long and tedious and only a few people can follow it. Following the shortcut is easy and rewarding for the time being, but in the long term, it does not guarantee a successful life. You should develop the mindset of a winner to make it to the end.
“Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us…. But, aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.’”
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Conclusion:
The path from apprenticeship to mastery is difficult, but if you follow a proper routine and have patience, you can easily cover the path, and in the end, you will become a master. You should not think like a loser and succumb to the temptations to follow the easiest path which is just a distraction, but rather you should think like a winner and fight till your last breath.
References:
- Greene, R. (2013). Mastery. Penguin.