When Your Goal is Mastery, This Must Be Your Mindset
Mastery is a long-term goal. Correspondingly, what stops people from achieving this goal is a short-term mindset. Specifically, the mindset of immediate gratification. Unfortunately, there is a popular cultural phenomenon that provides short-term rewards to those who sacrifice their future.
When your goal is mastery, anything that happens in the short-term is only a measurement. It’s not a reward or punishment, success or failure. While short-term rewards may be enticing, they are also a distraction. A distraction that convinces you that doing more of less is better than doing less of more.
This is the mindset you must ultimately master to reach mastery in anything. When you do too much you never learn to be great at anything. You become a jack of all trades but a master of none. This is the opposite of mastery.
Indeed, when you focus on mastery you spend your time doing more of less instead of less of more. Furthermore, doing more of less requires you to have a detailed understanding of four things:
- What you want.
- What you must master to get it.
- The other options you must sacrifice.
- The consequences of sacrificing your other options.
Knowing these four things is what allows you to go all in on what you need to do more of and avoid all the other things you need to do less of. When your goal is mastery, this is where you start.