The Five Rules of Mastery

Friday Knight News

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." Aristotle

The best chance you have of achieving mastery lies in being the top expert in the world on a particular subject. This, in and of itself, is a daunting task, although there is one very specific short cut anyone can follow that will greatly increase your odds of success. This short cut is to specialize in a subject that is unique and under your control. The short cut needs to be something that holds all of your interests and only requires for you to develop skill in them. Your skill levels needs only run the range from basic, to intermediate, to advanced to succeed on three levels. Only one of these skills levels need be advanced at first but they all should be above novice. The mysterious short cut and subject is you: yourself and self-discipleship is mandatory, remember it is a long distance race and not a sprint. I will point out that even using this guideline it will still be a difficult task to master and it will demand lifelong study. The key is to practice; as mastery is in the journey and not the destination.

The first step is to be original and this is actually very easy to do as no one person has the very same interest or loves the very same things. There are various shades of differences between individual likes and dislikes and these things help define us. So, all you have to do is to develop your unique combination of interest. You should begin by writing down your prime driving forces, set goals, and time lines for achieving them. I suggest that you pick only three main sources of interest. You can decide which of the three areas to make the main points of your expression. If needed, you can always reinvent the order, or specialize in various subsets that help make you stand out.

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." Herman Melville

Second, you need to develop a point of view of how your top three level goals interrelate. You can start out by picking a physical, intellectual, and emotional expression of your personality. Often this takes some insight, and awareness to how you think and feel about these subjects. You have to learn to accept yourself with all of your flaws and shortcoming and recognize no one is perfect. Even Bruce Lee had flaws he himself pointed out his temper, nearsightedness, shorter right leg, and back injury as examples of his own.

Tertiary take personal responsibility for you actions. Rely on yourself, but be willing to accept help that is offered. This has been one of my personal biggest setbacks as I had major trust issues to overcome. Most of the time I find that I fall far short of my time goals; slow and steady wins the race they say.

Next practice, try things out and use your head to analyze what you are doing, investigate what works and what doesn't. Figure out why you succeed or fail but stick with it. If you love it, and it makes you happy, and it doesn't harm others, then do what you can to move yourself along the path. Keep playing the three cords you know until you hit the magical expert number. They say ten thousand repetitions is all that's needed for mastery, so that you can do anything without effort. Just make sure you are doing it correctly.

Finally learn to adapt, depend on failure, don't scrap a product because it didn't fit your original goal. Set it aside often after a cooling off process you can find some merit behind the pain. Then work on correction and remember that without failure their would be very little new creation. It seems that adaptation is the key to turn painful mistakes into happy coincidences.

"Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it." Bruce Lee


Rand Law Books

My stories are about martial arts adventures that are intertwined with some science fiction, a dose of conspiracies theory, along with laughter, love and mystic experiences. The following links are to the Kindle version books from the "Dream Walker” series. Our adventurers find themselves on a quest where they are confronted with both conspiracy and mystery. Their challenge is to unite their mind and body skills together utilizing what they have learned in the martial arts with the transcendental power of dream meditation. They attempt to do this while they are trying to make a life for themselves and elude those that seek to use and control them.