As you get through the apprenticeship phase, you have accumulated a lot of skills and are able now to stand on your own feet and decide for yourself. Once you get stable and conform to a group, your creativity diminishes with time due to following a conventional way of life, and not focusing on what is happening around you. You become self-absorbed and conservative and do not entertain ideas that go against your thoughts, no matter how great they are. Flexibility is important in every stage of life, as children, we were active and curious and would explore everything in detail and were in awe of new things around us; we would look at things from every angle and would struggle to explore them to their depth. As we accumulate much knowledge, we feel that we are enough now, and we do not need more knowledge and the assistance of others to help us in the fields that we have already explored. As long as you keep your mind awake, you explore more and never get tired of learning, but once you get into your comfort zone, your mind comes to a halt, and your knowledge stops there.
Keep your mind completely open:
As long as you keep your mind open to new experiences and knowledge, you keep learning and exploring, but once you shut it completely, do not let new ideas enter your mind since you believe you have learned much and do not need people’s ideas, your learning stops. Learning, new experiences, and accepting ideas you find bizarre and unorthodox are important because it helps you see things from a new perspective that was not in your knowledge before.
“Let us call this quality the Original Mind. This mind looked at the world more directly—not through words and received ideas. It was flexible and receptive to new information. Retaining a memory of this Original Mind, we cannot help but feel nostalgia for the intensity with which we used to experience the world.”
Be childlike:
Children by nature are curious and struggle to explore more about their surroundings; they look at everything with awe. As we grow up, we lose our sense of touch with reality and listen more to others and less to ourselves. We conform to a group; our personalities get molded. To learn more and get success in this competitive world, you need to be as curious as a child, and you should keep this curiosity in your life on the path to mastery. Since when you shut down your curious mind, you become conventional; you follow specific ideas, and you rely on them, which destroys your creativity and the agility of your mind to unearth more.
“Sometimes when we visit a different country where we cannot rely upon everything being familiar, we become childlike again, struck by the oddness and newness of what we are seeing. But because our minds are not completely engaged in these activities, because they last only a short while, they are not rewarding in a deep sense. They are not creative.”
Rigor and discipline:
To keep your mind active, you need to be disciplined and motivated to keep digging and exploring to find something meaningful. What happens when we reach a certain stage in our life, we stop exploring and feel bored and lost; we give up on our dreams; we get distracted by the easiest path to success. The path to success is the one that is the hardest and the lengthiest, the easiest path is the path to destruction that secures your life for a short time, for a long time you need to plan strategically and learn the art of dealing with distractions. All the great masters chose the hardest path: the path left by others in the middle due to challenges and setbacks. To become a great master, you need to be energetic and in high spirits to continue on the path to mastery.
“Masters not only retain the spirit of the Original Mind, but they add to it their years of apprenticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems. They are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over, but they have the rigor and discipline to follow their investigations all the way to the end.”
A deep love for your field:
It is important to have a deep love for what you pursue. If you do not know your Life’s task, and you pursue one career after another just because it has been followed by others, or it was told to you by your parents to follow it since it will ensure you a rich life, you do follow it, but you do it half-heartedly. Once you know your Life’s task, and you understand this is what you are good at, this is what you should do in life, you do it with heart and mind, and you go after it. For success, passion, and deep love are important for the field you will follow. Chasing something while you are not sure whether this is what you should follow, you waste your time and energy, and in the end, even if you become successful, you do not enjoy your work.
“In his adolescence Mozart experienced a typical creative crisis, one that often destroys or derails those who are less tenacious. For close to eight years, under pressure from his father, the archbishop, and the court of Salzburg, and bearing the burden of supporting his family, he had to temper his own powerful creative urges. At this critical point he could have succumbed to this dampening of his spirit and continued to write relatively tame pieces for the court. He would have then ended up among the lesser-known composers of the eighteenth century. Instead he rebelled and reconnected with his childlike spirit—that original desire of his to transform the music into his own voice, to realize his dramatic urges in opera.”
Ignore the doubters and critics:
You will face people in life who would be judgmental and pass negative comments about your work, but you should not let negative feedback conquer your mind and heart, rather you should take them as your strengths and reflect on them; if your work needed improvement, you should improve it; and if improvement was needed, you should avoid the comments, and focus solely on your work. You should publicize your work to know what it lacks and how you can enhance it.
“Understand: it is the choice of where to direct his or her creative energy that makes the Master. When Thomas Edison saw his first demonstration of the electric arc light, he knew then and there that he had found the ultimate challenge and the perfect goal toward which to direct his creative energies. Figuring out how to make electric light not just a gimmick, but something that would eventually replace the gaslight, would require years of intense labor, but it would change the world like nothing else. It was the perfect riddle for him to solve. He had met his creative match.”
References:
- Greene, R. (2013). Mastery. Penguin.