If there is any sure route to success and fulfillment in life, it is to be found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery.
Master Suzuki says. When you learn too easily, you’re tempted not to work hard, not to penetrate to the marrow of a practice.
Practice is the path upon which you travel, just that.
Actually, the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.
But the journey is what counts. In the words of the ancient Eastern adage: “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” The new black belt is expected to be on the mat the next day, ready to take the first fall.
Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, and perhaps the nation’s top management consultant, speaks of “an almost spooky similarity of language” among the managers of America’s most successful companies. To a man and a woman, they stress the value of a positive attitude and the effectiveness of praise and other forms of positive feedback. “The most successful managers,” Peters told me, “are those who are unwilling to tolerate the negative stuff.” Peters cites one study’s findings that very successful people had had “an obnoxiously high level of praise piled on them in childhood—praise to the point of embarrassment. It seems you can hardly overdo it.”
When it’s your turn to teach or supervise or give advice, you might try the following approach: “Here’s what I like about what you’re doing, and here’s how you might improve it.”
There are times when it’s appropriate to express anger, but there’s also the possibility of taking the fervid energy of indignation, even of rage, and putting it to work for positive purposes. In other words, when you feel your anger rising, you can choose to go and work furiously on a favorite project, or to transmute the energy beneath your anger to fuel that you can use on your journey of mastery.
The desire of most people today for quick, sure, and highly visible results is perhaps the deadliest enemy of mastery. It’s fine to have ambitious goals, but the best way of reaching them is to cultivate modest expectations at every step along the way.
Even without comparing ourselves to the world’s greatest, we set such high standards for ourselves that neither we nor anyone else could ever meet them—and nothing is more destructive to creativity than this. We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.
Relaxation is essential for the full expression of power. If we take the body as a metaphor for everything else in our lives, the implications are even more significant. Just think what kind of world it would be if we all realized that we could be powerful in everything we do without being tense and rigid.
To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.