If you don't have a spare 50 minutes to listen, here are some quotes and key points to summarise it:
- Dr Lewis writes her in her book her definitions of each word with more clarity:
"Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don't use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider it's cognate: 'perfectionism' which is an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success, an event-based victory based on a peak point. A punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal but to a curved line. Constant pursuit."
- Michael Angelo says "Lord grant that I desire more than I can accomplish"
- That success tends to focus on 'the arrival' and Mastery focusses on 'the reach'
Other things covered in this podcast also include:
- Using experiences of failing to grow, that failure forces you to wipe clean and start over
- How greatness can be deemed by others as 'not successful'. For example, Martin Luther King received his lowest grades in public speaking because his teacher didn't 'get' his style of speaking
- Embracing the terror of the blank page/canvas and reframing it as opportunity
- That you can't seize the opportunities failure presents if you're too caught up on belittling yourself about it
"To reach an audacious goal, we sometimes benefit from having it lie just beyond our grasp"
- To challenge what's possible
- The importance of creating things in private before showing others - protect your work until you're ready
"Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm" - Winston Churchill
Anyone else who listens to this podcast - feel free to pop your favourite quotes in the comments too :)
So maybe as we kind of concluded last night, it comes down to a balance of both? To be aiming to get better, we need milestones to measure that. But that the end goal doesn't always need to be a point of success? (I put these sentences with question marks because I love the paradox/contradiction of it)
I totally agree with this framing - have been thinking a lot about craft lately, particularly at work. But what I haven't figured out yet - how does one measure mastery? How can one tell if one is getting better at a craft, is gaining mastery, without points of success/failure to indicate what works well and what doesn't?