Whenever we’re starting the journey to acquire a new skill, there’s an inevitable crossroads we arrive at a few months in. In his book Mastery, George Leonard describes the path leading up to that crossroads using tennis as an example.
Even as a reasonably fit and talented person, chances are your first five weeks of learning to play tennis as an adult will come straight out of hell. Stand, swing, hit. Stand, swing, hit. That’s all you’ll do for three hours each week. By the time your forehand finally clicks into place, you realize you have to start moving around the court, and the cycle of endless repetition starts all over again. Your teacher tells you it takes years to routinely hit forehands that land, and it’ll probably be 18 months before you can play a half-decent match with a friend. It is at this point, Leonard writes, that the crossroads appears:
“You’re tempted to drop tennis and go out looking for another, easier sport. Or you might try twice as hard, insist on extra lessons, practice day and night. Or you could quit your lessons and take whatever you’ve learned out on the court; you could forget about improving your game and just have fun with friends who don’t play much better than you. Of course, you could also do what your teachers suggests, and stay on the long road to mastery. What will you choose?”
We rarely practice skills for their own sake from the get-go. Often, other incentives are at play, even if we don’t realize it. As it turns out, you wanted to learn tennis not just to learn tennis. You wanted to look cool. You wanted to feel like a winner. Now that neither seems to be on the table for the foreseeable future, how will you react?
Fear, obsession, fun, or mastery. Those are your options. The first two won’t get you anywhere. “The Dabbler” and “the Obsessive,” Leonard calls them. One never arrives anywhere, for he abandons everything too soon, the other always crashes and burns, for she tries way too hard.
Now fun, that can be a reasonable choice. “The Hacker,” as Leonard says, can gain a lot out of his hobby, even if he never improves at it. But unless he makes that choice consciously, he’ll soon be haunted by the spirits of what might have been.
Finally, there it is. Wide open. Accessible but scary: the road to mastery. You’ll have to be patient. There are no quick wins here. Not in tennis, and not in any other sport, art, or personal endeavor. You’ll grind your teeth in frustration as repetition wears you down, again and again. But you’ll also level up from time to time, again and again.
“How do you best move toward mastery?” Leonard asks. “To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself. Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.” This is a skill in and of itself, but without ever committing to the master’s path, you’ll never attain it. “The only way to learn is to live,” the main character in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library painfully realizes.
See you at the crossroads. Fear, obsession, fun, or mastery. Which one is it going to be?