“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery’s the ultimate status.”
Derek Sivers – How to Live
Some things you can’t replace and hard work is one of them. When we see someone who has devoted their life to a singular task, we want that for ourselves. The problem is we don’t know where to start. It’s as if we want to become masters, but we don’t know which activity to master. I wish there were a simple system to find that. Since it’s different for everyone, let’s figure out how to get there.
I’m a big fan of asking myself questions because I often find the questions more interesting than the answers. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield says: “Of any activity you do, ask yourself: “If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?” Similarly, Derek Sivers says in Hell Yeah or No “What would you do then, if you didn’t need the money and didn’t need the attention?” Some people also use fear as a compass. Another useful question you can ask yourself is what will I wish five years from now that I had started doing today? Since habits compound over time, your life can change radically if you’re willing to work on something for the next half-decade.
To find an activity to master, we need action. The rest takes care of itself. Benjamin Disraeli, former prime minister of the United Kingdom once said “Action may not always bring happiness, but there’s no happiness without action.” Throughout history, there have been countless definitions of happiness, but one of my favorites comes from Yeats: “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure (…), but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” I love this definition because implicitly, growth demands hard work and sacrifice. We often think happiness is a divine moment of inspiration that washes over us while we sit there and enjoy life.
Once we find the activity we want to lose ourselves in for the rest of our lives, we can expect some setbacks, but as long as we keep doing it, we’ll be fine. Kevin Kelly wrote in his article 101 Additional Advices: “There is no formula for success, but there are two formulas for failure; not trying and not persisting.” Albert Einstein defined failure as “success in progress”, so regardless of what you do never stop, and more importantly, give it your best.