Mastery versus achievement

Ben Casnocha has been talking on his blog about mastery, with his latest post (linked here) being The 30 Steps to Mastery.

With regards to mastery, I like to think of achievement versus mastery. We all set goals and then we set out to try and achieve them. For example, when I wanted to run my first marathon, I did this:

1. Start
2. Formulate my goal (e.g. run a fall marathon in Halifax after I turn 30)
3. Investigate how to achieve my goal (talk to my brother who ran a marathon, look at running plans and programs available for me)
4. Design a plan to guide me towards achieving my goal (based on my investigation, I had a 20 week plan to achieve my goal).
5. Being executing the plan (start training!)
6. Modify the plan as I go along (deal with aches and pains and illness, bad weather, busyness)
7. Achieve my goal! (I completed my first marathon in 3 hours and 47 minutes! When I first started, I could barely run 5 miles at a stretch, and when I finished, I could run over 26 miles!)

Note, unlike Ben’s list, there’s no seemingly endless list of going and going. Furthermore, there is no notion of Mastery. I didn’t plan to master the marathon.  I went on to run a number of other marathons and I got better and better (those were my future goals), but there was never any idea of Mastery in place.

It’s not always a question of Mastery or Failure (to master the activity in question). Instead you can have a process where you go from accomplishment to accomplishment, always getting better along the way.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with mastering something, assuming it can be defined in a way that you can say: if I do it in such and such a way, I have mastered it, and then going on to achieving that mastery.