PN: Tension and insight

Keywords:: PermanentNote

Reference: R: Mastery by Robert Greene

You need to see the process of mastery as an investment.

What you're doing throughout the process is feeding and expanding your mind. Each new idea, concept becomes a building block of your potential mastery. Every new skill you acquire to get those ideas into your brain makes it grow. Each difficulty and crisis you overcome with perseverance is a sign that your mind is growing. (It's like working out—when the muscles hurt, it means that they grow)

What you must understand is that this work creates an environment for mastery. The vast amount of ideas and skills you've generated throughout the process are constantly mixing and merging without you knowing about it. Eventually, a great combination will be born (similarly to PN: Environment for idea generation).

The only thing that can impede this process is a lack of patience. Your mind needs time to process all the inputs. Trying to speed up the process will only fill you with frustration. It's as if you wanted to make a plant grow quicker—you can't. It will grow at its own pace anyway. The only thing you can do is to patiently wait and nurture it.

It's like cooking a soup. Great ones require many ingredients (ideas and skills). For that you need a big pot (expanded mind through practice and overcoming difficulties). The longer it cooks and simmers the more delicious it becomes because the all the nutrients from the ingredients have more time to be extracted (mastery.)

The most important thing is trusting the process. You need time to gather all the needed ingredients and create a big enough pot to create a tasty soup.

Relevant notes: