Finding Mastery

I have to admit… I’m a bit obsessive when I find things I’m interested in. As far back as I remember I’ve been this way. I have a memory of the first home computer we got for the house, it was meant to enable me to do school work, write papers and what not.

Before long that computer, and the access to the internet became a gateway to the world. I used it to look up facts about all manner of things, but I also became curious about how it worked.

It took up a lot of my time, I was still in school and busy with sports but if I had free time I would be logged in and connected.

For some reason it wasn’t until later in life that I realized you could get paid to build programs, but when I had my chance I jumped at it. Learning to program originally in Java and C# with some Lua for game modding.

Along the way I read many influential books that helped frame my pursuits. First Mastery - by Robert Greene and then later Deep Work - by Cal Newport.

In Mastery, Robert Greene laid out the path to mastery. It had many stages and he gave many historical examples of people that impacted the world and pointed out what we could take away from them. This gave me a framework to think about how I too could become a master of my craft.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport elaborated about the value of going deep. And how deep work was highly valuable.

Put together if I mastered a craft and worked deeply I too could have an impact.

I’m lucky to be able to make a living writing code and building software, no doubt about it. Being able to make ends meet doing the thing that I want to master builds into my day time that I’m getting paid to do what I love.

Not all masters are so lucky.