“Ultimately, practice is the path of mastery. If you stay on it long enough, you’ll find it to be a vivid place, with its ups and downs, its challenges and comforts, its surprises, disappointments, and unconditional joys. You’ll take your share of bumps and bruises while traveling – bruises of the ego as well as of the body, mind, and spirit – but it might well turn out to be the most reliable thing in your life. Then, too, it might eventually make you a winner in your chosen field, if that’s what you’re looking for, and then people will refer to you as a master.” George Leonard
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment is a small guide under 200 pages, but it packs a powerful punch and it’s a favorite of mine. In it, our boy George plots a simple but challenging path to mastery: practice. Steady, continual practice.
As he says so well, “practice is the path of mastery.” How do we travel that long road?
We’re on the road to mastery when we take pleasure in practice – in the sheer joy of the process of writing — without concern for results.
We’re on the road to mastery when we accept that we’ll have ups and downs, and disappointments – that our road will twist and turn.
We’re on the road to mastery when we can accept the bumps and bruises –- the “no’s” and the “thanks, but I’ll pass” – we all face.
We’re on the road to mastery when we turn from the “quick fix” and time-consuming distractions and spend time doing what matters to us, just writing.
Mastery isn’t something that can really be “mastered” — we can ever really achieve mastery, we can only aspire to it. And that’s the whole point. How wonderful to know that the path to mastery is never-ending: there’s always something new to learn. Write on!
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