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Ass-Kicking Email – The Mastery Habit

Hey,

One of the most important questions about learning, for me, is how
to become insanely good at something.

Sure, passing tests, and getting decent grades with less studying is
admirable. Particularly if you want to have a life outside of your
homework.

But in the end, accomplishing big things requires more than just
getting an A+ on an exam. It’s about becoming really good at rare
and valuable skills.

—

The key to mastery is largely getting more deliberate practice than
anyone else. If you keep the challenge level high, feedback regular
and practice longer, you’ll do better.

This view of mastery means that the basis of getting insanely good
at anything must start with a habit. If it doesn’t, how can you
possibly extend your efforts long enough to see results?

—

The Mastery Habit

The process for getting good at anything, in my view, can be split
into just three steps:

1. Create a baseline level of involvement.
2. Sustain your baseline exposure.
3. Continually reinvent the habit to get even better.

Step One: Create a Baseline

Let’s say you want to master a programming language. The first step
is simply to get enough constant exposure to the language. If you
aren’t writing code in that language every day, you don’t have
a baseline.

When I made it my goal to learn French, I made an effort to have
conversations in French every single day. Sometimes I would fail,
but by setting this as my goal, I helped create a baseline that was
strong enough that I ended up continuing to use a lot of French even
after I left France.

The best way to build a baseline is to start a really easy 30-Day
Trial and grow it from there.

Starting with 3 hours per day of practice is probably unrealistic.
I’m sure there are a few incredibly dedicated people who can pull
this off, but for most people it’s simply too drastic a change to
successfully implement.

A better method would be to start with just a baseline of 10 minutes
per day. Once this baseline becomes a habit, it is easier to adjust
updwards.

Step Two: Sustain Your Baseline

The problem with the first step is that many people confuse
momentum for habits. They get really excited about a new idea,
resolve to practice constantly, then give up three months later.

The second step is to sustain your baseline over longer periods of
time, so that it becomes automatic. If you keep this up long enough,
you can eventually reach the point where a break from practice feels
weird in your life.

After writing for five years with various baselines, when I take two
weeks off for a vacation, I can already feel myself itching to begin
writing again.

Getting to this point isn’t easy, but it requires you to emphasize
consistency first. Keeping a low minimum that you ALWAYS stick to is
vastly better than a higher average that you rarely stick to. The
reason is that the first will most likely continue as a habit and
grow, while the second is too unstable for the future.

Step Three: Reinvent the Habit

The third step is to reinvent the habit continuously. Mastery is
difficult precisely for this third step, that it both requires
patient continuity of effort as well as discontinuity of
application.

Once you’ve invested a few months into the baseline of the habit,
that’s a good time to try adjusting the habit to explore more
challenging aspects of the skill.

If you’ve been speaking Spanish, try writing Spanish. If you’ve been
writing blog articles, write prose. If you’ve been painting
landscapes, try portraits.

The goal isn’t to destroy your baseline, which needs to remain in
place. Rather, it’s to be creative and challenging with what’s left.

Keep reinventing the mastery habit and you’ll hit fewer plateaus in
your skill.