One of the major influences on my thinking and approach to life was a book I read in my final year of university: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-term Fulfilment by George Leonard.
The thesis of the book is simple: that there is a consistent set of principles or meta-patterns followed by those who seek superlative achievement in any field: arts, sciences, sports, business, engineering, and any other area of human activity that demands intense practice over an extended period of time.
In short, the book argues that it is always possible to seek excellence, but that it requires both diligence and the application of a conscious method.
What is this method? In brief: get to know the basic reality of your chosen skill really, really well — if you are martial artist, focus on the basic mechanics of punches and kicks as closely as you can — if you are a painter, understand the interactions of colour and light in as much detail as possible — if you are an engineer, learn the basic components of the tools you work with, and all of the ways they can fit together, as clearly as you are able — and continually seek out the best learning material and most able masters to improve your knowledge.
The author stresses that he is not advocating a kind of relentless, success-at-any-cost mentality that leads to quick results but eventually burnout, exhaustion and failure — but rather a more balanced approach that incorporates both discipline and creativity, drive and patience, effort and fun. He views the pursuit of mastery as a continual journey that does have a definite aim — excellence in one’s chosen area — but one that is a never-ending quest and therefore one that should be approached with both serenity and a sense of humour.
Is this mentality related to the research project I’ve been working on for the last week?
Yes — or at least, I think so.
I chose to focus on the city-states of Renaissance Italy as they featured both interesting political dynamics and radical social and cultural changes — but I’d also wanted to learn more about the Renaissance for a long time.
One factor that has become clear after my initial background reading is simply how tentative and ‘path-dependant’ everything that happened during that time period was. None of the major cultural figures that I’ve read about had an easy path to success — all of them dealt with, in some form or other, failures, rejection, jealous rivals, political chaos, and all of the other features of human life that anyone with any life experience knows too well.
There was also a relatively small number of people engaged in cultural work, though it seems that the ‘sense of life’ of the general culture at the time had been gradually growing more optimistic, pro-human, and lively.
(This is a thread that I may investigate at a later date — I believe that one reason that the Enlightenment and Age of Reason ‘stuck’, while the Renaissance did not, is that the ideas developed during the Enlightenment were better able to survive in a culture that was generally unfriendly towards them, in the form of the few minds that did believe those ideas. The Renaissance, in contrast, involved a broad cultural shift that blossomed powerfully, for a few decades, before fading back into the general religious, hierarchical European culture.)
However, there is a very strong sense that a clear idea of mastery lay at the heart of the life-stories of many major Renaissance figures — Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and all of the other notable personalities of that period. Machiavelli, who I read up on last week, though he doesn’t share quite the same ‘vibe’ as someone like Leonardo, did indeed some to share something of both the Renaissance realism and humanism, and also the Renaissance pursuit of mastery. (He was certainly not modest about his literary or intellectual ambitions with his writings.)
I believe that the concept of mastery also had something to do with one well-known, but poorly understood, aspect of the Renaissance worldview — the close association of the arts and the sciences. (Some say that this was a more common idea in ancient civilisations, and that only in the modern world has an artificial cleavage appeared between the two.)
Could this be true? I don’t know. It sounds plausible. There is definitely something to be said for the idea that both arts and sciences — when practiced at a high level — both aim at something like the clear awareness of reality. What’s more, this focus also seems to be at the core of mastery.
In other words, to dabblers and to shallow practitioners, the arts and the sciences appear to involve totally different ways of thinking and perceiving the world — but to masters, they converge on something universal and powerful.
This is just an idea, right now, but its something to explore next week, and it gives me more impetus to my historical investigations.