How to Truly Master ANYTHING in Life

Take a look at this 90 second video: Purple Brain Neuron Video. When you get to the end, scroll back to the Start and notice the density and the amount of connections that have taken place over that brief time. What you’re witnessing is the brain’s “live wired” capacity for learning. Anything we wish to master in life – be it the alphabet, or public speaking or generosity, kindness and compassion – is going to require us to grow new neuronal branches making new neuronal connections. We’re going to have to immerse ourselves in learning and practice.

Where I often run into difficulty with something I’m attempting to master is in my tendency to come to it with a conscious or unconscious expectation that I should already possess all, or a great part of the mastery that I’m seeking. Recalling or reviewing that Purple Neuron Video in the paragraph above, illustrates just how silly that expectation is. I can’t have Mastery Networks before I do the study and practice required for building them. It is much like the requirement for learning the multiplication tables.

Livewired to Connect

Speak Up, Man

Several decades ago, I decided my terror at public speaking was negatively impacting my life. Just the very thought of standing and speaking in front of a group of people would send waves of stress hormones flooding through my body. I decided teaching would be the form my public speaking would take. What to teach? What else but … Listening Skills.

Embrace the Pain

My first attempts were dismally painful. So bad, in fact, that several students complained to the department chair who summarily replaced me with another instructor. At that point, my public speaking, neural-network-building enterprise came to an abrupt pause. In order to master anything, most of us will have to go through a “you suck” phase. The hard work is to not be discouraged and stopped by it. It’s not you, it’s your brain!

How might I continue to grow network cells and connections in service to being able to master teaching and public speaking? First, using a linguistic trick (second-person self-talk) I learned from Marcus Aurelius, I asked myself: “What is it about speaking/teaching that makes you so nervous?” Turns out it was two things: not being adequately clear about the content I would be presenting, but mostly fearing I’d be two hours into a 3-hour class and find myself with nothing left to say.

These concerns turned out to be easily addressed. I simply wrote out a choreographed content outline broken down into ten minute increments. For a 3-hour class I would outline four hours worth of material.. I would also have stock exercises I could do with the students in a pinch. In addition, I studied great speeches and compelling presentation structures (like The Hero’s Journey and Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling). You can imagine my surprise and delight after finishing a daylong presentation for UC Berkeley extension months later and having the students spontaneously stand and applaud!

Taking Mastery to the Max

Eric Kandel, MD with Aplysia

I spent ten years on the staff of The Center for Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences (undercover as the maintenance man). CASBS is a think tank at Stanford University where MacArthur geniuses, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners get invited to come and spend a sabbatical year to write up much of their work in progress. Visiting fellows there are masters at focused, specialized study and learning. Although he wasn’t one, Eric Kandel – who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001- could have been a fellow at CASBS. Kandel spent 30 years (!) studying how two neurons in Aplysia, a sea snail found mostly off the coast of California, learn and remember things. Turns out how sea snails learn and remember things is very much the same way you and I learn and remember things: we grow new neuronal branches and we make new neuronal connections. Sea snails gain mastery the same way you and I MacArthur geniuses gain mastery – by making connections just as you saw in the Purple Brain Neuron Video in the opening paragraph. We are indeed, all live-wired to learn and connect.