TECH MASTER
Beating the Competition by Becoming a Master at what you do.
We all dream about the celebrity lifestyle. You know, the attention it gives, the lucrative opportunities it provides, and the respect accorded wherever you find yourself due to the immense value you provide. You wish to be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk not only for the attention they get but also for the way they advance our lives as humans in general.
You wonder how Steve could deliver great products such as the iPhones and MacBooks that people crave because it shows a certain level of affluence. You question how Musk creates compelling electric cars and sends people to Mars. Different factors contribute to their excellent, glamorous lifestyle, but one stands out among others. Mastery.
Writing on mastery, Robert Greene said,
When we take our time and focus in depth, when we trust that going through a process of months or years will bring us mastery, we work with the grain of this marvelous instrument that developed over so many millions of years. We infallibly move to higher and higher levels of intelligence. We see more deeply and realistically. We practice and make things with skill. We learn to think for ourselves. We become capable of handling complex situations without being overwhelmed. In following this path we become Homo magister, man or woman the Master.
We live our lives most of the time subconsciously. Though we like to think that we make deliberate actions and plans in our lives, we make decisions based on habits we have built over the years. Most of the time, we are in a state of randomness, continuously being distracted by the world around us and unable to focus on the task at hand.
Take a deep breath and reflect on a moment in your life where the deadline for an assignment was fast approaching. You felt tense, and the tension brought along a certain feeling of energy and focus. You became so absorbed and came up with great solutions to the given assignments, be it a bug that needed fixing, a design to be completed, or a product proposal for a new product to be submitted to your superiors. Your solutions were great, and they commanded the respect of your colleagues and friends. At that point, you felt a certain level of control and power. Though this may not happen all the time, you will agree to have experienced it once or twice.
What you felt when solving the problem or trying to achieve a goal was mastery. Though you experienced it for a short period, those who make a difference in the world have made that feeling a way of life. The life you desire will not come as a product of sheer brilliance and talent. If all you needed to become great in life were those two, you would have been great a long time ago. But no, to truly become great, you need to be a master at what you do.
The Tech Master series is to bring you into the consciousness that mastery is necessary and possible. Anyone who changed the world was a master at something. Steve Jobs, a master at innovation. Albert Einstein, a master in science. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a master at composing music. Do you want to stand out of the crowd? Gain mastery. Do you want to change the world? Gain mastery. Do you want to leave your footprints in the sands of time like fellow masters? Gain mastery. Mastery, above all, will take you from where you, to where you want to be.
Tony Robbin said,
The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.
Mastery is possible. To attain it, you need to take the first step and go through the phases of this journey. Mastery has three distinct phases:
The Apprenticeship Phase
The Creative-Active Phase
Mastery
Over the coming weeks, I will release detailed articles on each phase to help you effectively attain mastery. And this series of articles will guide you on your journey to mastery.
Stay tuned by subscribing to my mailing list to know when the next article series is out.
The book Mastery written by Robert Greene inspired the ideas in this article and the forthcoming ones. You can get a copy of the book here.