There’s nothing like having friends as your filter.
I left a Kris Abdelmessih post in my inbox for when I had time to read it. Mostly because, and Kris knows, I get excited and then lost by the options stuff, and very much look forward to his life bits and recommendations usually towards the end of his posts.
So I was talking to our mutual friend and co-collaborator, Mat Cashman, this week, and he says, “Please tell me you saw the Derek Sivers quote Kris shared the other day” and as I went looking I realized the unopened email was still waiting for me.
Mat and I were already talking about practice. About the compulsion to work on something that has an internal game to it. How it’s like a status game but inside of yourself. You practice because you’re trying to be better than you were the day before, and the year before, and whatnot.
And maybe you perform sometimes, too, to get that external validation and status. But in between performances you get back to the internal game. You get in that woodshed and work it out.
The quote Mat was asking me if I saw, sitting in the email from Kris, was this one:
Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it.
You can only earn it through hard work.
Mastery is the ultimate status.
Striving makes you happy.
Pursuit is the opposite of depression.
People at the end of their life, who said they were the happiest with their life, were the ones who had spent the most time in the flow of fascinating work.
Concentrating all of your life’s force on one thing gives you incredible power.
Sunlight won’t catch a stick on fire.
But if you use a magnifying glass to focus the sunlight on one spot, it will.
Mastery needs your full focused attention.
We practice in the name of mastery. Because it’s the ultimate self-sustaining status game internally, AND it’s the ultimate scarcity status game externally. How cool is that? I hadn’t thought about how it bridges practice and perform like that. I hadn’t thought how it connects back to practice as the starting point for everything, either.
If attention is everything, and focused attention in practice produces mastery, and mastery is the most valuable social and personal goal - what are you practicing?
I’m probably practicing a few too many things, but if I’m pushing for mastery in each, I see no problems in it. When I’m recording a podcast or sitting down to write, it’s repetitions with a self-challenge embedded. The task at hand is the point I’m training the magnifying glass on, as Sivers puts it. I’m harnessing the power of the ultimate habit - that old earth running around that old sun.
And, most of all, if the practicing leads to getting to know people like Mat and Kris who are thinking about this stuff too, it’s all so worth it.
