The Hidden Superpower of Our Human Brain

Imagine the following scenario:

You are in the situation where you are writing something, and you’ve been struggling for hours trying to find the right words. It’s super painful and frustrating, and no good ideas are coming to your head. But all of a sudden, something hits you. The right words magically seem to just come to you.

It’s like you’ve been mining in a cold, dark cave for days, and you finally struck gold.

Or maybe you are playing around on the piano trying to improvise something, and you are not really coming up with anything good. Suddenly, you try something new, and you somehow pull off a brilliant new melody.

It’s like genius struck for a brief moment and then faded from existence.

Moments like these seem to fall upon us kind of randomly and without warning. While we’re in them, it’s almost euphoric. All the things click together and start making sense, as the pieces to a giant complex puzzle are starting to snap themselves together.

But most of the time, this just isn’t how things go. Practicing an instrument is usually tedious and boring. Writing is difficult. But as we’re trudging through these activities, we remember those brief bouts of brilliance and we hope that this time when we’re participating in our craft, it can be like that one time when things just clicked and everything was perfect.

Although these moments may seem like it, these little flashes of brilliance aren’t just random and nonsensical. They are a window, through which we can catch a glimpse of our full potential.

It’s like a little preview of the power that we all possess inside of us. A power that makes this elusive state of brilliance and creativity into a consistent and replicable reality. And if we’re able to fully develop this power, it can give us a greater command over ourselves, over others, and over the world around us. This power is called Mastery.

What Mastery Truly Means?

When most people think of the word mastery, they think of somebody who’s really good at something. Beethoven was a master composer and musician. And most people would say that Martin Scorsese is a master filmmaker.

But mastery is a lot more than just being really good at something. Because the master has such a thorough understanding of his craft, that it becomes like an extension of himself. It becomes a language they can use to influence and inspire other people in a way that seems almost magical.

A masterpiece of literature can bring us tears of joy or tears of bitter sadness. And a master painting can cause us to reflect on the fleeting nature of time or the nature of our very existence. It’s as if the master, through their expertise, has access to something like the heart of life.

But a lot of people disqualify themselves from ever achieving mastery in whatever their craft is. If they are a normal person like you or me, we tend to think that we are incapable of achieving mastery like some of the greats before us.

We may be tempted to think that mastery is reserved for the genius or the child prodigy. But the truth is mastery is something that already exists inside you, and it’s up to you to develop it.

How To Develop Mastery

How does one go about developing their mastery? Well, you may have heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. And this is kind of true. You do need an insane amount of practice at your given craft in order to achieve mastery.

But it isn’t just a numbers game. You’re probably never going to put in that amount of time practicing a craft if you don’t actually enjoy it. This is why the first step of mastery is the discovery of your calling.

Step-1: Discover Your Calling

Everyone who has ever lived has at least one thing that sets their imagination on fire. Something we feel naturally drawn towards or fascinated by. Whether that’s constructing something, or solving a problem, or playing an instrument, because of your unique brain, you have certain things you really dislike doing and certain things that you really have a preference for.

So really reflect on your life and figure out what your passions are. If you really like doing something and you feel important while doing it, then that’s an indication that you can potentially become a master in this thing.

Step-2: Eliminate Your Ego

The second step on the road to mastery is to eliminate the ego. Realize that you know absolutely nothing, and become a blank canvas.

You need to seek every opportunity to grow and view everything as a potential learning experience. Approach your craft with ruthless objectivity. Don’t identify as being good or talented at anything. Because that puts a barrier in the way of viewing your work objectively and being critical about it.

A good example of me not doing this was when I was in a filmmaking class. And I always carried around this sense of pride about my filmmaking ability. I was usually the best filmmaker in a room. But I’m usually in a room where nobody makes films. That’s pretty easy!

You need to eliminate the need to be the best artist in the room, or the best at your craft, or the best athlete. Because when you’re trying to learn as much as possible, none of that matters.

If you can eliminate your ego, you can view your peers' work, and figure out what they’re doing better than you. And then you can apply that to your own work. It also allows you to look at your own work with ruthless objectivity as well, and scrutinize it more.

Find out where your weak spots are, and try to make them strengths. None of this is possible if you have a giant ego, and identify as a master long before you’ve earned that title.

Step-3: Embrace Tedium

The third step on the road to mastery is to learn to embrace tedium. When you first approach a craft, you approach it as an apprentice. Practicing your craft, for the most part, is going to be tedious. It’s not going to be very exciting. Applying new techniques and trying to stretch your boundaries is usually really uncomfortable, boring, and not very exciting.

But if you learn to embrace the tedious nature of practicing your craft day after day, you’ll eventually reach a point of accelerated return. You start to become a practitioner. And the practitioner understands the complex relationships between each component of their craft. They start to get a view of the bigger picture. They can really engage with their craft in a more creative way.

Once you reach this stage in the game, practicing becomes a lot less tedious, and more enjoyable. You can start to have some fun with it.

Step-4: Absurb The Master’s Power

Since you’ve become a practitioner, you can use your competency in your craft as a sort of proof that you take it seriously, and you’re willing to learn. You can then take this proof to somebody who’s much better than you at your craft, and work under them. It’s crucial that you find somebody who’s much better than you at what you do, and learn from them so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Your work can also be scrutinized by somebody who has the authority to scrutinize it. By learning from a master, you can then view your own work through their eyes, and try to work on things that they would want you to work on. And working alongside a master collaboratively is a great way to become one yourself.

But if you’re unwilling to take this path towards mastery, then this creative power inside you will remain undeveloped. It will lie dormant. It will occasionally reveal itself in these little glimmers of temporary brilliance, begging to be fully realized.

Bottom Line

There is a fantastic book called Mastery by Robert Greene to really understand how to master your own inner-self in order to achieve mastery at your craft. And yes this article is also inspired by the book Master.

This article took me a long time to write. I wrote probably, 8000 words about achieving the Mastery because it’s such a rich topic. But I wrote a lot of things, and they weren’t necessarily all connected in this nice through-line. So it was really hard for me to try to figure out how to distill such a rich topic into a smaller and easy-to-follow article. But hopefully, you have found something useful out of it.