PDF Summary:Mastery, by George Leonard

In Mastery, writer and educator George Leonard describes in detail how you can walk the path of the master—the life lived in disciplined dedication to your chosen skill, craft, or art. He explains that mastery isn’t an end goal so much as a continual process of learning, discovery, and exploration of that skill, whether it’s taekwondo, oil painting, marathon running, chess, or something else.

Further, Leonard argues that the master’s path is the only guaranteed way to live a fulfilling life. Whereas modern culture conditions us on instant gratification that can never provide real meaning or satisfaction, pursuing mastery can yield a lifetime of rich experiences and personal growth.

Our guide will detail Leonard’s perspective on the path of mastery, including how you can get on the master’s path today, overcome its obstacles, and immerse yourself in learning. In commentary, we’ll compare his ideas to those of other books on mastery, including Robert Greene’s Mastery, Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, and Anders Ericsson’s Peak.

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Finally, Leonard recommends that you be ready to break it off if, even after you’ve chosen a good teacher, the student-teacher relationship doesn’t work out. Teachers, like anyone, are only human. If you feel uncomfortable or like you just aren’t learning effectively, know that it’s alright to say goodbye and look for someone else to guide you.

(Shortform note: Continuing the parallels between Greene and Leonard’s recommendations, Greene also suggests that you avoid getting sucked too far into a mentor’s orbit. He explains that in time, you’ll have to step out of your mentor’s shadow—especially if they’re big in the field. The risk here is that they may resent your departure, which is a hurdle you’ll have to overcome. If, however, you’re pursuing a skill that doesn’t hinge on professional success (such as martial arts or yoga), you may not encounter these challenges. Your teacher simply won’t mind that you’re moving on, as his role is not put in jeopardy by your growth and success.)

Embrace Practice

In the end, the way of the master is practice. Leonard explains that we should understand this word in two ways:

• As a verb, meaning to regularly engage in your chosen skills.
• As a noun, meaning your practice as something you have, live, and embody.

That latter sense is more important, for a master is most interested in practice as an end in itself. In other words, the practice itself is the point and path, and masters live primarily for their practices. Results are secondary to everyday immersion in the essential, ongoing practice of your skill.

(Shortform note: Here, Leonard’s discussion of the path and the results mirrors Josh Waitzkin’s reflections in The Art of Learning. Similarly to Leonard, Waitzkin contends that the process comes before the results—however, he doesn’t cast results aside altogether. Rather, he recommends that you regularly participate in competitions or similar tests of your skills as a way to see how you measure up against others. This is particularly useful if you’re interested in competitive success, which Waitzkin argues is an important, confidence-building part of any lifelong learner’s journey.)

At first, practice will probably seem tiresome. However, Leonard contends that over time, it transforms into something deeply alive—a time and space into which the master fully immerses himself in the exploration of the nuances and subtleties of his craft. For instance, you could spend a lifetime exploring the endless scales, chords, intervals, and other musical patterns on the fretboard of a guitar. Even one chord, containing three or four notes, could be “voiced” or played in various ways, placed in myriad positions across the fretboard, and combined with hundreds of other such chords to create thousands of variations, thousands of sounds.

From the basic moves, which the master returns to time and again, to the advanced techniques, this way of approaching practice allows for lifelong cultivation and refinement of your skill.

(Shortform note: To dive beyond Leonard’s advice about your attitude toward practice, consider the notion of deliberate practice as popularized by Anders Ericsson in Peak. Deliberate practice is a distinct form of training in which you measure your actions, use that feedback to adjust what you’re doing, get precise guidance from a coach or mentor, and give maximal effort. Altogether, this helps you refine, for instance, your form for a difficult technique like a three-point jump shot in basketball. This way of practicing, Ericsson argues, is how experts become so good at what they do.)

Submit to the Process

The master’s path is thus to continually learn, and to do this requires surrender, according to Leonard. Surrender means letting go of your ego or any pretense to skill that you carry. If you clutch onto some idea that you’re already good enough or you always know what’s best, you’ll be too preoccupied with protecting your sense of self to truly learn anything. Leonard explains two ways in which you must surrender:

First, you must surrender to your teacher: Having already made sure you have a good teacher, trust what they have you do—no matter how ridiculous it seems. Right now, they’re the master, and you have to trust that they know what’s best for the beginner (you).

(Shortform note: You should be able to trust your teacher if you’ve followed Leonard’s tips and vetted a good one, but note still that full surrender to a master figure can be risky. Recent studies report that close to 50% of professional athletes suffer from mental health issues such as depression or anxiety that may be related to mental, physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse from their coaches. Given this, watch for clear red flags—such as abusive language or unwanted physical advances—and cut off the relationship if things feel wrong or unsafe.)

Second, Leonard says, you must surrender to your ignorance: To learn requires that you be willing to look foolish. At first, you’ll be bad at whatever new skill you try to learn. However, floundering and flailing is precisely the mistake-driven learning process that takes us forward. If you’re unwilling to look foolish, though, you won’t make progress because you’ll be afraid to make mistakes or look like you’re bad at something.

(Shortform note: Leonard isn’t the only expert who argues that foolishness is on the path to mastery—Matthew Syed makes a similar case in Black Box Thinking, where he argues that failure is the essence of learning. Only through a willingness to be wrong and to fail can we learn, he argues, because our mistakes reveal to us what we don’t yet understand. So if you aren’t willing to be foolish, you’ll never learn, because you’ll never allow yourself to be wrong—and thereby to learn.)

According to Leonard, the true master is an eternal beginner, always willing to play the fool. This is because with any sufficiently complex skill, there’s always more to learn—for each step you take, there are always two more that arise on the road ahead. Thus the master walks her path not to reach results, but to sink ever deeper into the mysteries and challenges of her chosen skill.

(Shortform note: Here, Leonard alludes to the concept of beginner’s mind, or shoshin, which originates from Zen Buddhism. It contrasts with the “expert’s mind,” or the mind of someone who thinks they’ve learned it all. To such a person, the possibilities are limited and rigid. But to someone who cultivates a beginner’s mind—for instance, by practicing humility, curiosity, and quiet sitting—the possibilities are endless, and the learning experience is therefore far richer.)

Visualize Your Growth

According to Leonard, the best learners use visualization, or mental rehearsal, to cultivate their skills. Leonard argues that this technique is the one key that high-performing athletes, businesspeople, and artists use to perform at higher and higher levels of skill. Mental rehearsal simply means creating in your mind a clear, vivid image or scene of a move or technique that you’re learning. For instance, you might visualize yourself performing a difficult passage on the piano or executing a perfect kickflip on the skateboard.

Visualizing in this way allows you to create a precise, focused template that your body will then follow when you go to perform the move in real life. According to Leonard, visualization trains your mind to start forming the circuits you need to execute that move as if by habit. The more you rehearse it—and the more vividly you do so—the stronger these “preconditioned” habits become. Ultimately, this is the master’s best technique for isolating and refining specific moves and techniques, and it accelerates the learning process beyond what practice alone can do.

Visualize for Peak Performance

Drawing from more recent research than Leonard had access to, Anders Ericsson (Peak) explains visualization as a way of using mental representations to enhance your performance. In short, mental representations are the patterns you learn to instinctively recognize as you refine your skills, such as a poker player’s tell or the wind-up that indicates a forehand swing in tennis.

Visualizing a move or technique, then, is a powerful way to internalize these patterns. It allows you to practice them repeatedly in a controlled environment until you can summon them up in your mind’s eye at will. For instance, you could practice in your mind’s eye the sequence of muscle movements required to perform a riposte or lunge (in fencing).

Do this with a variety of techniques, balancing mental rehearsal with actual practice, and you’ll develop an intuitive grasp of a wide range of patterns or techniques. Then, when it’s time to compete or perform, you’ll have access to that rich repertoire of internalized patterns that will enhance your abilities.

Push to the Edge

Lastly, Leonard writes that masters tend to be people who push to the edge of what’s possible in their chosen fields. While masters also deeply love the basics and will practice them for many hours, they also feel drawn to explore the outer limits of what they can do. For instance, a master snowboarder will have spent countless hours refining his basic balance, jumping, and landing techniques—all of which enable him to try to pull off tricks like the quadruple backside cork 1980, one of the hardest snowboarding stunts ever performed.

While this only comes after many years of training, Leonard says that it’s the ultimate affirmation of life—an exhilarating move to express your skillfulness in its fullest strength and to discover what you’re capable of by pushing beyond anything you’ve achieved before.

(Shortform note: Above, Leonard draws attention to a valuable concept but stops just short of explaining how you might explore your edges. However, Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning) offers a concrete method that you can use to explore beyond the bounds of your field’s established techniques. You can move past your edges, he explains, by recording yourself during practice and looking for subtle, instinctive moves you make without conscious intent. For instance, he recorded himself during high-level sparring with a martial arts partner and then analyzed the footage to discover new, instinct-based moves they came up with in the heat of the moment. He then practiced and formalized them as new techniques.)

The Master’s Toolkit

In this last section of our guide, we’ll detail Leonard’s final words of advice regarding four challenges that you’ll face along the path of mastery. Namely, we’ll discuss his advice on overcoming resistance to change, building your energy, avoiding common pitfalls, and mastering the mundane aspects of everyday life.

Change for Good

According to Leonard, it’s important to achieve lasting change in your lifestyle when you seek mastery. After all, to walk the master’s path is no small commitment and will require you to prioritize your chosen skill over many other things. But lasting change doesn’t come easy. We all hesitate, stumble, and often fall when trying to change our habits, behaviors, or ways of living. We all slide backward as we try to change.

This happens because, Leonard explains, the human body and mind strive to maintain homeostasis—your natural balance of energy and effort—every day. When you try to change, your body and mind sense that something different is happening, and they generate resistance to get you to settle back into your normal patterns.

For instance, you may have tried to build a habit of getting to the gym or waking up early (or both), and soon after slipped back into an old pattern of sleeping in or finding excuses not to do as you’d planned. That’s just your natural physiological systems demanding that you make no significant changes to the established balances—not a lack of willpower or moral fortitude.

(Shortform note: Recent studies in neuroscience lend support to the idea that the human brain and body naturally resist changes to habitual behaviors as a means of maintaining homeostasis. The basal ganglia, a set of neural structures involved in habit formation, actively work to reinforce well-worn behavioral pathways, making it physically challenging to break routines or form new habits. Fortunately, the ganglia will also adapt to active efforts to learn new behaviors, and the research shows that patient, incremental development of habits is perhaps our best shot at changing how we behave.)

Overcome Inertia

According to Leonard, change, then, requires that you overcome the inertia of homeostasis and leverage your willpower to shift your body and mind into a new balance. He explains that this balance comes only when you can stick to a habit long enough that your body and mind adapt to the new efforts or exertions, while also acknowledging that resistance and not pushing so hard that you hurt yourself. In other words, Leonard says, you need to:

• Anticipate that resistance will arise and prepare for it,
• Listen to that resistance to learn what’s difficult for your body and mind, and
• Push gently yet firmly through those challenges until the change sticks.

(Shortform note: Since willpower is the main tool you’ll use to change your behaviors, it’s important to properly understand it. Kelly McGonigal explains in The Willpower Instinct that we have two minds: One that wants what feels good now, and one that tries to keep us focused on our long-term goals. To properly use your willpower is to understand what influences the short-term mind and respond in a way that strengthens your long-term focus. For instance, willpower is strongest in the morning but gets depleted by distractions and decisions—so you can improve your willpower later in the day by having a planned routine that minimizes distractions and choices you have to make.)

Leonard adds that it’s important to be consistent in your practice and remain committed to the change you want to make. By doing so, you’ll eventually change your natural balance; you’ll teach your body and mind to incorporate the new daily effort you’re making—whether it’s a morning run, a daily yoga session, or a commitment to cook healthy dinners each day.

(Shortform note: Research shows that on average, it takes 66 days for new habits to form. However, this time can vary depending on the difficulty or complexity of the behavior you’re changing—easy habits, like drinking a glass of water in the morning, can take just a few weeks, while others, like getting to the gym three times a week, can take almost a year. Keep this in mind when you’re changing your behavior, and give yourself the time and self-support to successfully work through the inertia of your existing behaviors.)

Generate Boundless Energy

If you don’t have the energy to change, you won’t be able to stick to the path long enough to build a steady, committed practice. For this reason, Leonard explains that any aspiring master must learn to release the huge, untapped stores of energy that we all have within. (Shortform note: Leonard grounds his claim that we’re all full of boundless energy in the energy systems of various martial arts. On the one hand, contemporary science questions the existence and nature of such energy—on the other hand, building energy in the general sense we mean below remains a very real strategy.)

Throughout life, Leonard argues, we’re conditioned by social expectations and mores to repress large parts of our personalities, and this effectively shuts off our expansive, energetic nature. We learn to quiet down, fit in, and not rock the boat. Unfortunately, this also tends to make us lethargic and depressed.

(Shortform note: Psychologists sometimes refer to this self-repression as masking because it involves donning a “mask,” or false personality, to hide your true one. Some of these masks are designed to help you fit in, as Leonard suggests, whereas others might lead you to hide painful feelings through behaviors such as belittling others, overachieving, or being artificially outgoing. But whatever form masking takes, experts agree that it can lead to exhaustion and depression.)

Leonard offers four ways to reclaim your lost energy:

Exercise regularly. We gain energy not by resting and storing it up, but by using it. Movement, exertion, and exercise use energy up front but make you more energetic over the long run—so be sure to exercise regularly, even if it’s just to go for a walk.

(Shortform note: Research supports Leonard’s assertion that using energy increases energy. Specifically, exercise stimulates the activity of mitochondria, our cell’s fuel producers, such that we gain energy from movement. Additionally, exercise helps our bodies to circulate oxygen: The harder your heart pumps, the better blood, and therefore oxygen, flows through your body and supports cellular function—including the energy production of your mitochondria.)

Emphasize the positives. Positive thinking, Leonard asserts, produces healthier, happier, and more energetic people. This doesn’t mean you should deny the negatives. Instead, acknowledge them first so that you’re at peace with them, and then refocus on what’s positive, uplifting, and energizing.

(Shortform note: Positive thinking correlates with a whole host of desirable health outcomes, including an increased life span, lower risk of cardiovascular issues, reduced susceptibility to various cancers, and higher resiliency to mentally and emotionally challenging circumstances, such as the death of a loved one. Given this, it’s reasonable to say that you’ll have more energy if you look at life in a positive way.)

Embrace your shadow. Though we’ve all repressed large parts of our personalities, Leonard says that we can honor them in order to release large amounts of energy from within. For instance, you might redirect repressed anger or sadness into fuel for art, exercise, or work.

(Shortform note: The “shadow” is a concept from psychology attributed to Carl Jung, a famous 20th-century psychologist who expanded on Sigmund Freud’s models of analytical psychology. In short, your shadow is the part of your personality that’s been repressed or ignored—perhaps emotions, such as anger or sadness, that you’ve shoved aside, or childhood trauma that you never addressed. These “shadows” can appear as negative habits or personality traits, like easy irritability or a tendency to get addicted. Jung argued that integrating your shadows, or facing up to and embracing these “negative” parts of your personality, could increase your energies, as Leonard says.)

Get clear, get committed. You can’t do everything, but Leonard warns against letting decision paralysis prevent you from doing anything. Pick one thing you feel strongly drawn to and commit to it, letting the rest go. This, Leonard says, will clarify your intent and unleash energy.

(Shortform note: Clarity and commitment may increase your energy because they reduce decision fatigue, or the condition of tiredness that results from constantly thinking about what you want to do. When you’re no longer flip-flopping about your course of action, your brain can home in on the right course and work out the way forward.)

Overcome Hindrances

Once you’ve built your energy and understood how to make lasting change, you can prepare for the common obstacles you’ll face along the way. Leonard explains how to overcome a number of these:

When your pursuit of mastery and your livelihood don’t match up, you’ll need to make space in your life for both, Leonard says. Be sure you have enough time by planning out the hours you’ll need for each and sticking to a disciplined work/practice schedule.

(Shortform note: One technique you can use to balance mastery and livelihood is time blocking, a powerful productivity technique that helps you optimize your efforts within set stretches of time. It involves defining set times in your day that you’ll dedicate to mastery practice. For example, you could block out one hour every morning before work or two hours every Saturday afternoon. Then, show up consistently to those times so that you develop the habit of pursuing mastery in a focused manner. With regular time blocking, you can steadily carve out space for mastery while also managing your career.)

Leonard also recommends that when competition looms large—for instance, if you’re mastering a skill like chess or karate—avoid being over- or under-competitive. In other words, remember that results aren’t the point, but don’t phone it in either—competing with spirit will help you understand how far you’ve come, as well as how much more you have to learn.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Learning Waitzkin suggests that you use competition, whether you win or lose, as a way to keep your ego in check. A proper competitor, he argues, needs to be confident enough but not overconfident. If you have too little confidence, you simply won’t perform; and if you have too much, you can undermine your success by underestimating your opponents.)

Leonard says that when unproductive personality traits arise—such as laziness, ego, overseriousness, or perfectionism—try to let go and remember the humor in all things. Take heart, find opportunities to laugh and relax, and avoid becoming too self-important.

(Shortform note: As explained earlier, any unproductive personality traits you encounter might be aspects of your shadow that you’ve yet to address. And you might consider that something like laziness isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing that you need to eliminate from your life, but rather a natural, animal trait that you could benefit from accepting. If you take Jung’s assertion that we aren’t all so morally pure, then it follows that you could learn to allow yourself a bit of laziness or perfectionism—so long as it doesn’t throw you off course.)

Finally, when you get injured, which Leonard says is likely to happen in most physical disciplines, give yourself the grace to rest and heal. To prevent injuries, remember to balance hard work with an awareness of your body’s limits and pain points.

(Shortform note: Waitzkin also suggests in The Art of Learning that when you’re injured, you have the opportunity to practice inner work. In other words, you can use visualization, meditation, breathwork, and similar techniques to target and refine the inner or psychological aspects of your skill, such as staying calm under pressure.)

Master Everyday Life

In this final section of our guide, we’ll touch on Leonard’s advice for perhaps the most direct way to get on the master’s path—mastering the mundane, everyday aspects of your life.

Everyday life, Leonard says, is full of opportunities to practice as the master would. The only reason we don’t approach these activities as such—from folding the laundry to maintaining your car or relating to your loved ones—is because we’ve been conditioned to seek the end goal. According to Leonard, we live in a “getting things done” culture, with the emphasis on done. We do things not for their own sakes, but to get them over with.

(Shortform note: In contrast to Leonard’s juxtaposition of a lifestyle of present, masterful action with one focused on results, David Allen suggests in Getting Things Done that being on top of your to-do list actually enhances your presence and focus. When you know you have control of all your tasks and responsibilities, you can approach each with full focus because there’s nothing else nagging at you. Being productive and getting results, then, isn’t all bad and can even complement the master’s approach to life.)

According to Leonard, if you want to live a rich and fulfilling life, the “getting things done” mindset is the wrong way to go about things. He says that we should instead seek to cultivate the master’s attitude in all of these mundane, intermittent moments of life. To do this:

1) Start from relaxed presence. Before beginning to, say, fold the laundry, take a moment to compose yourself for the task ahead. By relaxing first, you’ll find it easier to…

2) Fully immerse yourself in the activity at hand. In other words, maintain that presence from which you started in each moment of the activity. Pick up and fold each new article of clothing with a calm, diligent focus on that task, striving for excellence and elegance in each minute aspect of the activity.

3) Forget about the end goal. The master practices not to achieve a result but for the sake of the activity itself. Paradoxically, Leonard says that this often improves the result, since you’ll be more dedicated to patient, quality performance of the activity.

Life as a Learning Journey

In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin discusses a similar set of principles that concerns lifelong learning—which we might consider to be a different approach to the same idea that Leonard discusses above. That is, approaching daily life with the master’s attitude essentially means that you’re always present and learning throughout your life.

Like Leonard, Waitzkin offers three principles:

• Strive for presence in all things. Living from a state of deep, focused calm enables you to better navigate and respond to all of life’s difficulties and challenges.

• Learn through trial and error—mistakes teach you what to improve and how.

• Focus on the process, valuing your overarching experience of learning over any results you may achieve.

Leonard says you can cultivate the master’s attitude in all the mundane aspects of life—everything from driving to work to cooking dinner, cleaning your house, or tucking your kids into bed each night. Approach these activities with presence and diligence, and you’ll be well on the way to living as a master would in every aspect of your life.