Mastery is the ability to blend skills and knowledge in a specific area of practice – a profession, trade, athletics, science or the arts. Mastery is practice not knowledge alone. Mastery of any field takes instruction, practice, stamina, setbacks, and intentionality. After years of practice, one knows exactly when and how to swing a bat to get a homerun; read a P&L to get at the subtleties of an organization; recognize students’ needs and instantly redesign a presentation; or hear a certain sound and know a machine is about to malfunction. |
Each of these people has a deep command of the basic practices embedded in their trade or profession. We have masters in all professions, trades, arts and crafts. Some places to study masters Include: the history of the Nobel prizes atwww.Nobelprize.org.; Pulitzer prize winners at www.pulitzer.org.; fellowship recipients atwww.macfound.org.; or recipients of the National Medal of Arts atwww.nea.gov/honors/medals.
“Almost without exception, those we know as masters are dedicated to the fundamentals of their calling. They are zealots of practice, connoisseurs of the small, incremental step. At the same time – and here’s the paradox – these people are precisely the ones who are likely to challenge previous limits, to take risks for the sake of higher performance, and seen to become obsessive at times in that pursuit. Clearly, for them the key is not either/or, it’s both/and.” ….George Leonard
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