Yesterday morning (Dr. Martin Luther King Day) I experienced an excellent demonstration of the importance of mastery. I had my radio tuned to the local NPR station and they were airing a program called Meeting Hate with Love: Stories of King and Gandhi. If you didn’t catch this program, I highly recommend it. You can get an MP3 download for $6.95 at www.humanmedia.org.
I was impressed with the substance of the program. It honored Dr. King by exploring a topic with deep meaning for him - the concept of nonviolence. The program ended before I arrived at my destination, and the next radio show was another program honoring Dr. King. What I was treated to for the next half hour was an incompetent and unsatisfying rehash of the important dates of Dr. King’s life, a review of his general message, and a man-on-the-street do-you-remember-that-day format. It was clear that the radio station in question felt compelled to fill a certain block of programming with Dr. King’s life.
If I hadn’t been treated to the first program, the insufficiency of the second would not have been so noticeable. The first program honored my time and my intellect by teaching me something new and trusting me to learn it. The second program simply took up time. And therein lies a lesson about mastery.
Intelligence and subject mastery are not the same thing. I had a friend long ago who was one of the smartest guys I had ever met – but he had never been disciplined enough to develop mastery of anything. As a result he was an extremely entertaining dinner companion, but very frustrating as an employee (which I experienced when I hired him). Mastery requires both curiosity (see last week’s post) and discipline (ditto). Had the radio announcer for the second program simply been curious enough to develop some interesting questions about Dr. King’s life, she would likely have come up with a fresh and interesting take worthy of spending half an hour of her life (and mine) on. Would she have been a master of the topic of Dr. King’s life? No. But she would have demonstrated mastery over her own radio program, which she has apparently committed to producing once each week.
I am a dilettante crafter. I knit well enough, sew well enough, make jewelry well enough – but none of them to the level of mastery. In my case, that’s acceptable, because I do crafts for relaxation. An artist friend of mine once made a comment that an artist can not afford to be a dilettante – they must pick one medium and focus entirely on it to become truly skilled. To achieve mastery in an art requires years of curiosity pursued with discipline followed by more curiosity pursued with more discipline. If an artist flits from one artistic medium to another they never develop the skill in any one required to be a master. Could someone pursue a medium to the point of mastery, then pursue another medium? Of course they could, and to do so would likely indicate very high quality curiosity and discipline on their part.
Being near someone else’s mastery – even for long periods of time – does not constitute your own mastery. I remember sitting at a business dinner one night years ago and listening to my boss describe an extremely challenging business transaction “we” had done as if it had been his accomplishment. From his perspective – and lack of mastery – the accomplishment seemed to be about “X.” But from the perspective of experts in that sort of transaction – of which there was another at the table besides myself – the accomplishment was, in fact, about “Y.” I remember during the dinner being irritated that my boss was so blithe about presenting my hard work as his own. But by that night when I crawled between the scratchy hotel sheets, I had begun to fixate on times when I had spoken authoritatively about things for which I, too, lacked mastery.
Turn on the television for five minutes and you’ll be reminded that we are a society filled with uninformed opinions. But it’s not just on reality TV and the generally pathetic news efforts that lack of mastery abounds. The failure rate for new business is somewhere around 56% in 5 years. Lack of mastery is a strong contributor to this statistic. Mid-sized and large businesses fail for lack of mastery as well. What counts for business mastery in a $40 million business doesn’t impress at $150 million, and what worked in 1992 may need significant updating to matter in 2008. I watched the marriage of two friends disintegrate over disagreements regarding how to parent. Why didn’t they go to a counselor? The husband said that he wasn’t paying someone else to tell him how to be a father. Anyone who has ever raised a teenager knows that the core conflict is between one person’s desire to share mastery and another’s desire to avoid being told anything. So you take a deep breath and remember that adolescence lasts until age 25. Though where mastery is concerned, it appears that immaturity may last somewhat longer.
Just as my Great-aunt Carrie once informed me that my manners weren’t for my benefit, but rather, to demonstrate my respect for others, one might say the same thing about mastery. It seems to me that we are here to live a life of service to others. Not just when it comes to our families, but to everyone. If your calling is to be an artist, then your mastery honors those who will view and buy your art. If your calling is to be a business executive, then your mastery honors those will depend on you for employment and those who will buy your products or services. What is your calling, and who does your mastery serve.
Of course, we can’t be masters of everything. Intellectually that’s easy to say, if not to accept. But egotistically we struggle with this. If we honored the truth in it, we would be much more receptive to those who possess the mastery we lack. We would defer and seek more, listen more, praise more. We’d recognize when we were doing a less-than-acceptable job, when we were about to waste someone else’s time. The most difficult mastery of all – mastery of our “self” – honors everyone with whom we come in contact.
Maybe there should be a new national holiday. It could be called “Speak or Do Only What Comes from Mastery Day.” What kind of a day would that be? Quiet? Substantive? Maybe even nonviolent.
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“90% of life is just showing up.” Woody Allen
“The average human only uses 10% of their brain’s potential.” Unknown, though often attributed to Albert Einstein
(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill
