THE PATH OF MASTERY
An Excerpt from George Leonard's book Mastery

Start with something simple. Try touching your forehead with your hand.

Ah, that's easy, automatic. Nothing to it. But there was a time when you were as far removed from the mastery of that simple skill as a non-pianist is from playing a Beethoven sonata.

First, you had to learn to control the movements of your hands (you were just a baby then) and somehow get them to move where you wanted them to. You had to develop some sort of kinesthetic "image" of your body so that you could know the relationship between your forehead and the other parts of your body. You had to learn to match this image with the visual image of an adult's body. You had to learn how to mimic your mother's actions. Momentous stuff, make no mistake about it. And we haven't yet considered the matter of language - learning to decode sounds shaped as words and to match them to our own actions.

Only after all this could you play the learning game parents everywhere play with their children: "Where's your nose? Where are your ears? Where's your forehead?" As with all significant learning, this learning was measured not in a straight line but in stages: brief spurts of progress separated by periods during which you seemed to be getting nowhere.

Still, you learned an essential skill. What's more important, you learned about learning. You started with something difficult and made it easy and pleasurable through instruction and practice. You took a master's journey. And if you could learn to touch your forehead with your hand, you could learn to play a Beethoven sonata or fly a jet plane, to be a better manager or improve your relationships. Our current society works in many ways to lead us astray, but the path of mastery is always there, waiting for us.

The Mastery Curve

There's really no way around it. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it:

To take the master's journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so - and this is the inexorable fact of the journey - you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.