Mastery Requires This…
The Amplified Impact Podcast
July 30th, 2023
We all know you can be pretty successful without being a total expert, right?
You can be a jack of all trades and still rock at a bunch of stuff, reaching some wild success.
But let’s talk about “mastery”– it’s like the ultimate level up in life.
But reaching mastery isn’t easy…it’s a whole different ball game from just being good.
We overestimate how hard it is to get pretty good at something, but we underestimate the massive leap needed to become a true master.
And most of us won’t ever put in the crazy amount of time it takes to get there.
So, you might be thinking, “Well, is chasing mastery just a waste of time then?”
While it may be challenging to achieve, there are still benefits to aiming for mastery.
The journey toward mastery involves incremental progress, but with each step, our self-identity shifts. After all, pursuing greatness is the result of continuous progression toward mastery.
So, embrace the grind and keep pushing for greatness.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“I think the idea of pursuing your greatness is the result of incremental progression towards mastery. So I think it helps us to understand what does it actually take to achieve mastery.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What does it take to be the absolute best at what you do to achieve mastery? This is a question I think about a lot because on the one hand, one of the things I’ve come to realize over my over the last, I don’t know, two decades or so, is that you can achieve a stunning amount of success in life without actually having mastered anything. You can be a jack of all trades and be pretty damn good at a lot of things and and achieve wild success. And so this idea of achieving mastery is this kind of like sexy, romantic, beautiful notion. But in reality you’d be better off instead of trying to master one skill, in a lot of cases you’d be far more successful by just taking a conglomerate, say, five, six, seven complementary or synergistic skills and then getting to 70 80% proficiency at those things. And it’s so interesting that we overestimate how hard it is to get competent at a thing, but we underestimate how hard it is to become like a master at the thing. And what I mean by that is there was a book a while back, I can’t remember who wrote it, but they talked about the 20 Hours rule where you could effectively get good enough at any skill with about 20 hours of concerted effort, concerted practice. And in my experience, that’s pretty true. If you think about like, playing the guitar, after about 20 hours you’re going to know enough of the basics to be competent because 20 hours of concentrated time and effort is actually quite a lot.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:30]:
And it’s quite a lot more than I think a lot of us put into a thing before we give up on the thing and say it’s just too hard. Whereas to get from that 60, 70, 80% competency at the thing to 100% mastery, the jump is massive. It’s far more significant than most of us even realize and it’s a jump that most of us are simply not going to be able to make. In the vast majority of situations, however, I think there’s still benefit. And I’ve said the opposite of this before. I’ve said there’s no point in trying to achieve mastery. But I’m going to walk that back a bit because I do think there is actually a benefit because I think we as humans, we hold in high internal regard the idea of mastery. Like as you improve and become masterful at an activity, your self identity starts to shift as a result.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:23]:
And I think there’s a lot of positive things that come with that. I think the idea of pursuing your greatness is the result of incremental progression towards mastery. So I think it helps us to understand what does it actually take to achieve mastery. And on the one hand you have things like the 10,000 Hours Rule from Malcolm Gladwell. I can’t remember which book it was that he wrote and a lot of people take that at face value and they’re like, oh, you got to put about 10,000 hours into a thing and then you’ll have achieved mastery. And that’s a lot of time, first of all. A lot of time. And I was reminded by this when was reading a biography recently about General Chuck Yeager, who was a World War II fighter pilot.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:00]:
He also fought in Vietnam and Korea, all these places. Maybe not Vietnam. Yeah, I think Vietnam actually. He was a fighter pilot for like 50, 60 years. First man to break the sound barrier in an airplane. Really fantastic. Interesting career. But at the end of the book, they mentioned the fact that he had spent 10,000 hours in a cockpit, which is pretty crazy to think about.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:21]:
That’s a lot of time behind the yoke. And most of us will never put 10,000 hours of concentrated effort into a thing. So therefore we will just never really have put the reps in. But if we were to put in 10,000 hours, it on its own wouldn’t be enough if we didn’t do these three things. I think these three things are paramount to achieving mastery in anything. So I want to share them with you. So that as you’re trying to improve at whatever you’re trying to do, if you’re in school, in your business, or in your life, whatever, you have an activity, you have a hobby you want to get better at, you need these three aspects. Otherwise you might improve, but you’re not going to improve to the level of master.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:58]:
So first you need feedback. You need to have a way of receiving feedback from the thing that you’re doing. Is what you’re doing good? Is it bad? Is it right? Is it better than what you tried before? If you don’t have a system for feedback, then you can’t progress to the next steps. And this is important because there’s a lot of things that we do in life that do provide feedback, but because we don’t acknowledge it, we can’t move to the next steps. But there’s also a lot of things in life that they don’t offer feedback. For instance, I could sit down and I could write 50 novels. But if I never take those novels and I never put them in front of an audience, I never get somebody to read those books and then give me some feedback, then I do not know if I’m actually improving. There’s no quantifiable way.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:43]:
Now, presumably I hopefully would, but not necessarily. Okay, so number one, we need feedback. Number two is reflection. It’s not enough just to write the books, give them to the readers, get their feedback, and then do nothing with the feedback, right? We need to reflect on what they’re saying to us, why it might be right, why it might be wrong, what we could have done differently, what we could improve next time. Why, if the feedback was positive, why this time it was better than last time. That period of reflection is key. And what I find is we don’t do that nearly enough in activities that we do throughout our lives. For instance, I use the example all the time of driving a car.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:26]:
You’re probably not a better driver now than you were 20 years ago or ten years ago or five years ago, right? Despite the fact that you’ve probably driven many, many more miles in those years, right? So repetition is not enough. You might be getting feedback in a lot of cases, but if you’re not reflecting on what you’re doing, how the car is moving, how the tires are gripping, or whatever scenario, if you’re not getting that feedback and reflecting on it, then you can’t move to the next step. And without this last step, nothing actually changes. It’s just mindless repetition. So step one, feedback. Step two, reflection. Step three is iteration. Once we’ve gotten our feedback, once we’ve reflected on what worked, what didn’t, what we could do different, what we could do different next time, we have to make an hypothesis with that feedback, with that reflection, and then we need to put it into action through iteration.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:19]:
We have to change our behavior because if we do the same thing over and over, we can’t expect a different result each time. It might look like we’re doing things the same way over and over as we’re perfecting our tennis serve, but if we’re making minute adjustments, that is what’s going to pay the massive dividends. And so you’ve probably heard insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result. Somebody had said, well that sounds an awful lot like practice to me. And I was like, no, that’s not practice, that’s mindless repetition. And true practice is more than just mindless repetition. It’s intentional iteration. I think that’s where the true growth occurs in any activity.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:02]:
Anything that you want to do in life is to intentionally iterate and say, have a hypothesis about why you think this way will work better, and then execute it. And then you circle back through the loop again, you go back to the feedback, you reflect on the results, then you iterate again. And the tighter you can make that circle between feedback, reflection, iteration, the faster that you can do that, the faster you’re going to achieve mastery or at least the faster that you’re going to improve at the thing, regardless of where you’re trying to get to if that’s mastery or just above average. So these are the three things that I encourage you to think about. What is it that you’re trying to improve at life? If there’s like some skill, if it’s copywriting, digital design, public speaking, what are the ways that you could get feedback you could reflect and then you could iterate? For instance, one of the reasons I do this podcast is I want to become a better public speaker. I want to come to a better understanding of what I think on different topics. And so this podcast is an opportunity for me to get feedback from you guys. I can look at the views, I can look at the likes, I can look at the comments.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:07]:
I can get feedback. Are you guys liking this? Is it hitting? Is it not? I can reflect on why it might be working or might not be working, and then I can iterate on the next time. I can improve. I can try to remove some likes and, UMS, and Oz and I can try to in tone differently, or I can try and talk more authentically. I don’t know. There’s countless ways that you can improve at the thing, but it’s only through the feedback, reflection, iteration loop that actually occurs. So I hope this brings you a little bit of value. As always, I appreciate every single one of you taking a little bit of time out of your day to be with me here today.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:38]:
I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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