I just stumbled across Penelope Trunk’s blog, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. In her latest post, she discusses “mastery” and says she “will not embark on anything unless I know I can become a master at it.” As evidence of this, she says she didn’t “start Ashtanga yoga until I knew I could do it every day for a year. I did not start swing dancing lessons until I had enough money to take three lessons a day, with three different teachers. I’m not interested in merely trying something. I just find it totally unrewarding.”
My first response to that wasn’t “wow, that’s awesome” or “wow, that’s dedicated.” My first response was “wow, that’s batshit crazy.”
I’m all about pursuing mastery, but how the hell do you know whether you want to master something if you don’t try it first? I’ve thought it would be cool to master a ton of different things, but when I tried them out, I realized they suck.
How did Penelope decide she wanted to master yoga, particularly Ashtanga yoga, without ever trying it? Did she just think it sounded cool, dive into it, and stick with it regardless of whether she enjoyed it or not? And who the hell would take three swing dancing lessons a day before figuring out whether they liked to swing dance?
Nobody.
Pursuing mastery is hard fucking work. It’s a grind. That’s why so few people do it. Think about how much you’d miss out on if you really worked that way. If you pursued mastery in every new thing you picked up, you’d get great at a number of things, but you wouldn’t have much time for new experiences. Assuming you have to support yourself, you could realistically only try a couple new things every couple of years.
The much better way, in my view, is to try everything, in cycles. Be a dilettante for a month or two a year (depending on how many things you’re currently trying to master). Try as many things as you can. Figure out if one of those things is something you’d like to pursue further. Take a few violin lessons, a few swing dance classes, go rock climbing a few times, play a few games of chess in the park. Whatever you think might be cool.
I guarantee you some of the things you think you’re interested in won’t be a good fit after you try it. You might find the violin annoying, you might find you don’t like hugging sweaty strangers, you might find your finger joints really hurt when you rock climb, you might find sitting in the park sucks and chess is boring. You’ll never know if you don’t try.
After you try all these things, then pursue mastery in an area you actually like. Find out what you’re interested in before you dive in. It’s true that the more time you spend at something and the better you get at it, the more you’ll tend to like it. But why start with something you’re just not into when there’s so much more out there? Forcing yourself to put in the time to master something is hard enough when it’s something you like, let alone when it’s something you’re not that into.
For example, I entered high school without a sport. I thought water polo sounded cool so I went out for it. Practices were 30 minutes from my house, from 6:30-11:00 every night, so that wasn’t so appealing. Even in San Diego, it’s fairly cold outside at 11:00pm in October, especially when you’re wet. I went anyways, and that first practice was absolutely brutal. I wanted to quit that night, but I decided to stick around for one more. It was hard, but the second night was a ton of fun, and I was hooked. By the end of the season I was the best player on the freshman team, and I loved the game.
Contrast that with swim team practice, which was only 90 minutes a day, right after school in the spring semester, in the unbelievably awesome San Diego sun. I hated it instantly. I passionately hated swimming for four years, and I still hate it today. It’s so goddamn boring. If I didn’t need to stay in shape for polo, I never would have done it after trying it.
Am I better off for having mastered swimming? You could argue I’m more interesting since I have an in depth understanding of it and could talk to anyone for an hour about the sport, the technique, my experiences, etc. But had I mastered underwater basket weaving, or some other useless skill, I don’t think I’d be any happier or better off. I could have poured all those hours into something else, like guitar, or photography, or finding something I truly loved that I would do for the rest of my life.
What I do love about Penelope’s approach is the drive to succeed. The desire to master a bunch of different things is really awesome, and something I aspire to. After all, mastery is one of the key ingredients for an interesting person and an interesting life.
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