Day 22: Learning & Mastery

Today you will learn what mastery is, why mastery is important for achieving your purpose, and how to master this skills necessary to achieve your purpose.

Summary

What is Mastery?

As you begin executing on different strategies for fulfilling your purpose, you will inevitably come across moments where you lack the necessary skills to execute on those strategies. You must master skills that have actual utility, allowing you to do real things in the world, to actually put your purpose into practice.

Mastery is achieved by learning the fundamentals of skills and practicing them till your are able to apply that skill to higher level concepts, new contexts, and producing new and original works.

• Mastering a skill or a knowledge concept means fully understanding that knowledge or skill before moving on to the next one.
• Mastery moves you up Bloom's Taxonomy from the ability to recall something from memory at a basic level to creating new works at the highest level.
• Mastery is the desire to get better at the things we do. It's devotion to craft, the need for progress, the urge to continually improve.

Why pursue Mastery?

Because we want to be able to understand these skills enough to create new and original works that can be applied to our chosen strategies and goals.

Additionally, our brain is hard wired for mastery.

• Dopamine is the brain's way of encouraging us to act and the biological basis of exploration and innovation.
• When we work towards an important goal and pursue mastery, dopamine levels spike.
• So not only is mastering skills going to help you achieve your goals, but it's also going to feel good during the process.

Why is choosing Strategies important?

When we choose a strategy, and it fails, we gain rich data into the weaknesses of our abilities and thinking which we can change in order to get better.

• In order to develop your potential to the fullest, to actually reach your purpose, you need to get better at the things you care about most.
• Getting better consists of climbing toward a personal peak of excellence. Only by advancing towards that peak of excellence, can you experience fulfillment.
• And this means that fulfillment and excellence come under your conscious control.

How to Master anything

Mastery Based Learning has three phases:

Phase One: Explore

• When you first begin learning a skill, you need to identify wish concepts are at the core of this skill. You learn the fundamentals.
• The main goal is to get your feet wet at this stage and develop some hands on feel for the topic.
• This foundational knowledge are the basic building blocks that you can build the top of when you begin creating frameworks around this skill
• They're the principles of a skill that will be used over and over and over again.

Phase Two: Engage

• In this phase you're going to be recalling knowledge, practicing skills and engaging in experiences that form relationships between those foundational concepts.
• The goal at this stage is to understand concepts one level deeper. It's not enough to simply take in knowledge, the focus switches from getting a feel for the topic to studying how things work so that you can quickly build up progressively more accurate mental models of the core concepts that you can apply.
• You begin understanding not only how to use a skill, but also how and why that skill is constructed the way it is, establishing valid relationships among facts and different concepts yielding a systematic understanding of the subject.
• So we take that foundational knowledge that we've learned and begin applying it, practicing it in different experiences until that knowledge and skillset becomes intuitive to us.

Phase Three: Execution

• This phase is about applying that knowledge and skills to higher level concepts, new context, and producing new and original works.
• You're trying to take all the knowledge and skills that you've learned and actually apply them to real problems using those skill sets in new ways.
• This can often be done through experiments, creating new things, or even teaching others the skills and knowledge that you've learned.

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Activity

Begin taking the Plato University How to Learn Anything course which will teach you this exact process and allow you to create a learning plan for any skill or knowledge set that you need to learn for your path to purpose.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.