A Brief Introduction to the Pursuit
You know the refrain: practice makes perfect. We grow through education: showing up to the school day after day and putting in the work. Staying after for extra tutoring. Taking notes. Forming study groups. Actually completing the assignments.
Putting in work / hustling / grinding has certainly gained mainstream popularity in recent years, but it's not just about working hard. We must SUSTAIN our efforts over a protracted length of time to truly reap the sweet benefits.
The 10,000 hour rule that suggests the average amount of time it takes a person to become a technical master is a fair barometer, but no official indicator of each person's journey. Let's assume a 24-7 mind-body-soul-spirit fixation on a specific skill or topic; that person should achieve master in 417 days. Yes! To master our 40 hours per week job, it would take approximately 5 years (no overtime included).
The pace should be slowed or accelerated as needed, because this is your race. Surely you've heard that "life is a marathon." Even the most competitive runners are still racing against themselves. This was surely evident in NIke's recent Breaking2 experiment.
Three master runners -- Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea -- were commissioned by the brand to attempt conquering a previously untouched feat: the sub-2 hour marathon.
Though the three men began as a pack, each was running individually by race's end, charging toward their own goal, and thereby conquering themselves.
While many are guided toward the mastery path by an external goal that can only be achieved by ruthless and relentless dedication to the task, it's really about the self. Overcoming one's own tendencies, biases, and inabilities set the infrastructure within, allowing the distant goal to become more attainable over time. Thus, in the three-piece TPOM framework, first is to master the self.
I become dedicated to The Pursuit of Mastery following a terrible creative stumble. A song entitled Most Valuable inspired an idea for an album of the same name. I was rocking and rolling! The release date (Black Friday 2016) was set, the cover art was cool, I had beats, I had raps, collaborators -- the full suite. Black Friday came and went, and the album was left incomplete and unlaunched. Bum-mer.
Having invested so much time and energy into my career as a Hip Hop artist, I intended this project to be "THE ONE" that would catapult my music into the global consciousness and transform my family's fortunes. I put a lot of pressure on myself, and failed to deliver on the promise. Demoralizing of course, this event was also a turning point: would I stop making music or get back on the horse and learn how to ride again?
Notice there: I said "learn how to," not just "try again," or "ride again." Stumbling so profoundly with the album invigorated a deep humility within me, and a thirst for answers to a myriad of questions. The first and foremost is always: "Who am I?" Right now, and what about moving forward? Who do I want to be? What is keeping me from becoming my ideal self? What do I need? What do I want?
As you see, the technical pursuit of mastery involves the quest for global Hip Hop supremacy and millions in the bank, it's really about the deep internal work to achieve self-actualization.
