What topic do you most connect with?
What subject fills you with an almost religious fervor?
What do you spend your time thinking and learning about, regardless of what you’re paid to do?
This feeling of love for a field might be pointing you toward something worth mastering.
Go ahead: read the books, watch the videos, and take the courses.
But at the end of all that, you need to take action. And the best way to do so is to have a project.
I don’t mean a 3-panel trifold board school project that you dread so much you put it off until the night before it’s due.
I mean a project that puts into action the stuff you’ve just learned. Something that fires you up. And lets you use your new skills in a way that will let you experiment while also helping others.
Maybe that’s:
When I was working and studying as a musician myself, I learned this was an unspoken rule of improvement.
Everything you learned had one goal attached: perform what you learned in front of someone else.
That pressure to perform led to vast improvements in my playing abilities, especially my weekly recurring jazz trio gig. I had to be laser-focused on putting newfound abilities to use on a regular basis.
My unspoken mantra became: “If I can’t use this tonight, I haven’t really learned it yet.”
Until you can use what you’ve “learned” in the real world, nothing has happened.
Human beings are artisans and craftspeople: your brain is wired to make things and do something with what you learn. Not just have it marinate in your mind after reading a book or watching a video.
Making, performing, creating, teaching. These acts put our knowledge to use… and make us feel useful. Like the masters of a craft that we all have the ability to be.
So, you need projects.
They’re the key to learning new things. But they’re also the key to fulfilling work and a meaningful life.
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There isn’t one…
“There are no shortcuts to the creative process…the very impatience that drives you to desire shortcuts makes you unsuited for mastery.”
—Robert Greene, The Daily Laws p. 84
Do the work. Trust the process. It will be tough to master anything.
But it’s so worth it.
Human beings are weird…
I had a conversation yesterday with my cousin, Erin, in which we discussed curiosity and the peculiar inclinations each one of us possesses.
I believe Robert Greene needs to be quoted at length here:
“[We each have] a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular subject.
This inclination is a reflection of a person’s uniqueness…it is a scientific fact that genetically, every one of us is unique; our exact genetic makeup has never happened before and will never be repeated. This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words.”
– Robert Greene, Mastery
I vividly remember discovering my own inclination: I was 9 years old, in the library of my elementary school, looking for a book to read. I picked up The Journal of Scott Pendleton Collins by Walter Dean Myers and was hooked. I am not exaggerating when I say that that one (seemingly) random book changed the course of my life. I became a voracious reader, taking a deep dive down the rabbit hole of World War II history, attempting to put my hands on any and every book I could on the subject.
By the age of 10, I was reading college-level historical monographs, encouraged by both my parents and my teachers. This interest gradually spread out until I was gorging myself on stories of American history, colonial times, European battlefields, and ancient civilizations.
Why is it that reading one book propelled me into so an extensive study of a particular field? Why am I so drawn to this subject, and yet I care nothing for sciences (unless I’m looking at them from a historical perspective) or cooking or any other number of subjects? Why am I drawn to history when another person is delighted by math or chemistry? And yet another person is drawn to space, theology; to beauty and hair care; or to art and photography.
I don’t have a true answer to the question. It is simply amusing to me. We can be so alike, and yet each of us seems to have a curiosity, sometimes more than one, which separates us from every other human being that is or ever has been.
All I can think is that we have been uniquely created by God, the universe, the Higher Self, or whichever spiritual ideal in which you believe. We have each been created with a unique curiosity that, if satisfied, if given the opportunity to develop enough, will help us fulfill our purpose on Earth and make it a better place for those curious beings that come after us.
I hope that you will follow your own curiosity, wherever it leads. It is quite possibly the most necessary thing you can do with your life.
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