10,000 HOURS TO MASTERY

Master Prophet E. Bernard Jordan

LESSON 3THE STAGES OF MASTERY

• “Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” 

(Albert Einstein)

APPRENTICESHIP

•  The history of mastery is also the history of apprenticeship.

• The apprentice gave over his or her life to the journey to mastery.

• The system of apprenticeship first developed in the later Middle Ages and came to be supervised by craft guilds and town governments.

• Most apprentices aspired to becoming master craftsmen themselves on completion of their contract (usually a term of seven years).

• Apprenticeship was a formal recognition not only of the 10,000 hours principle, but of the fact that mastery comes in identifiable stages.

STAGE 1: REPETITIVE SKILL

• This is the most familiar stage. • The martial arts student throwing vertical punches

for hours every week, or the piano student playing endless scales.

• Repetitive skill involves rote memorization. • It is the gateway to the automatic quality of

mastery.• It trains the brain to develop new neural pathways

and takes complicated actions from the deliberate to the reflexive.

REPETITIVE SKILL (CON’T)

• Ex: The Zen school of Buddhism emphasizes daily practice, particularly of the koan or story, as an integrated part of daily life.

• In this way, the deep meditative skills of Zen become instinctual.

STAGE 2: LEAP OF ACHIEVEMENT

• These are the moments all students cherish, when a new set of movements clicks into place or a problem becomes clear.

• Progress toward mastery is not steady, even if study and practice are steady.

• Years of plodding effort can culminate in a second of abruptly realized perfection.

• Ex: Astronomer, Johannes Kepler, labored for decades to create a model of the solar system based on perfect geometry, which was erroneous.

STAGE 2: LEAP OF ACHIEVEMENT (CON’T)

• One night, after years of frustration, he stumbled upon the perfect formula to describe the paths of the planets around the sun.

• Kepler’s First Law of Motion still stands. • That sudden leap would not have been possible

without the years of study and carefully acquired knowledge.

STAGE 3: SUSTAINED EXCELLENCE

• Leaps of achievement lead to regular performance at an elite level.

• The path from the Leap of Achievement to Sustained Excellence is no briefer than the trudge from rote learning to sudden breakthrough.

• It can take years to consistently reproduce breakthrough performance.

• True mastery is reproducible on demand.

THE EFFORT CURVE

• Mastery can be measured by the effort curve.• As mastery increases, the effort needed to

perform essential actions decreases, and the energy available to fine-tune final results increases.

• Beyonce doesn’t put much effort into the vocal tone in the middle of her range.

• Instead, she pours her energies into expression, phrasing and soaring high notes.

THE EFFORT CURVE (CON’T)

• Masters do not ignore the details.• The details are woven into everything they do. • Masters deliver under pressure. • Athletes, live performers, speakers all can “turn it

on” to allow them to come through when others fail.

10,000 HOURS TO MASTERY

Master Prophet E. Bernard Jordan

LESSON 3THE STAGES OF MASTERY