Defining Mastery

Have you been following the debate about mastery?

It isn't trending on Twitter or broadcast on CNN. In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proposed that those who excel have spent 10,000 hours on deliberate practice. That means that anyone can achieve mastery if they spend about ten years attentively improving a skill twenty hours per week.

What an exciting result! He had data and put it together in memorable, surprising words. It's a beautiful insight into human progress. If you ever start thinking we aren't getting any wiser, spend a little while considering that the 10,000 hour concept arrived only 11 years ago, has spread well, and lays out a path for becoming much better at any chosen skill. That means that we now know how to create better results for anyone — which meets my definition of us becoming wiser.

Since then, people have been testing the 10,000 hour concept. They haven't disproved it so much as refined it, finding situations where it might take more or less time, looking for exceptions, and so on. (More advances in wisdom!)

On my own part, I've had mixed feelings about mastery. On the one hand, how lovely it would be to master a skill! On the other hand, I am broadly curious and enjoy spreading my attention between many subjects and pursuits — which means any single one may not receive enough of my time for me to reach mastery in it. When is it worth immersion in a single activity to bring it to mastery? What other uses of my time would I give up to gain mastery? These are worthwhile questions.

In the meantime, I needed to understand what mastery was. So I've been working on a definition, checking the words and rolling it around in my mind, and settling on this:

Mastery is fast, nuanced response to specific situations.

For example, suppose it's the guitar you want to master. Then a sign of mastery would be playing quickly, with variety in tone, volume, technique, matching the particular song and group you are playing with.

In martial arts, it's reflexive attacks, parries, and dodges that meet a particular opponent and their moves with the appropriate amount of force.

In coaching, it is seeing the person before you and choosing in the moment from a wide variety of responses to help that person move ahead.

A master doesn't always have to respond quickly, carefully adjusted for the current circumstances. But if someone can't, they are not showing mastery in that moment.

I'm open to debate on this! And one part is that I needed something more specific than "performing well."

Bonus definition, extracted from dictionary.com: Wisdom is "knowledge of what is true or right, coupled with just judgment as to action." I'd say wisdom is both knowing how to do something and choosing well what to do. And the 10,000 hour concept helps someone both know how to gain mastery and choose whether gaining mastery is worth it.

I Will Mess Up

Today I was watching a thread where John Scalzi commented on the Hugo for An Archive of Our Own and then apologized.

He's one of the good guys. He's a little younger than I am, far more engaged in public discussion of how to treat women and people of color well in the community of science fiction than I have ever been, and has a lot of experience with being a public figure. If he's going to misspeak at times, I definitely am too. Unless I stop speaking altogether, and that isn't good for me or likely to make the world better.

It is better than I engage and try than sit silent to avoid error. So I am going to mess up.

It's quite a relief to accept that, actually. It's also a relief to see Cory Doctorow arguing that neither our good actions nor our bad actions cancel out the others. We are imperfect. We act from what we know now. Some of it will be mistakes, or perhaps ignorant errors that will make future generations or even more alert contemporaries cringe.

I, in particular, have come with blind spots and upbringing and imperfect knowledge and I will mess up.

I'm human. The game is to keep trying to do better.