The Path to Mastery

The concept of mastery of a skill has been poorly understood and poorly defined in the West. In the East however it is an essential part of many cultures. Like many Westerners I was exposed to the concept through martial arts. The beauty of it however is that it can be applied to almost anything. It is one more piece of the puzzle of what it means to be human.

In the beginning of learning any skill there is the introductory phase. One is exposed to ideas and movements that are unfamiliar. I have come to call this the Unconscious-Unskilled phase. You have no idea what you are doing and no clue how to do it!

As you become aware of what is expected or desired you begin to get an idea of what you hope to achieve but still lack the specific skills to get there. This I call the Conscious-Unskilled phase. Now you know that you don’t have a clue!

The third phase comes from practice of newly acquired skills. This I have come to call the Conscious-Skilled phase. You know what to do now but you still have to think about how to do it.

The forth and final stage of growth is the Mastery stage. You know your skill so well that you no longer have to think about it…it has become programmed in you. This is the Unconscious-Skilled phase. At this point you simply do what is needed without much, if any, thought.

To master an art you must first master the discipline of that art. This is very poorly understood in the West. It takes work…the kind that too many modern Westerners aren’t willing to exert these days. In Japan if you worked for say, a textile mill, you would be expected to learn the history of where the fibers come from and how they were originally dyed so you would understand how the modern processes developed. You would be expected to have an understanding of the big picture of your craft.

In the US…if someone merely claims to be a painter, they can just throw paint at a canvas (some have!) and call themselves an artist! A whole culture has developed here in the ‘art world’ wherein people with NO talent praise and admire the work of other people with NO talent in a kind of unspoken conspiracy that the rest of us are expected to fall for! (They all see the Emperors new clothes too!) A REAL artist would master his or her discipline before developing their own style. Pablo Picasso could match any of the great old masters doing landscapes or portraits but he went on to develop his own concept of abstraction. You can love his work or hate it…but it was the product of mastery!

There is a story told in Zen Buddhist circles of a rich art patron in ancient China who wanted a painting of a cat. He was willing to pay very well…but he wanted the best his money could buy. He sought out the best known artist of his day and told him what he wanted. He even paid a large advance. The artist told him to come back in a month. The patron returned in a month only to be told it would be another month. He returned time after time for months before he finally became angry and demanded that he get his painting for which he had already paid handsomely. The artist put a piece of paper down in front of his patron and in two minutes painted the most perfect cat the patron had ever seen! The man was stunned… Why, he asked, did you keep me waiting for months if you could do such remarkable work in minutes? Without a word the artist opened a cupboard door nearby and hundreds of paintings of cats fell out... He understood mastery.