dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

I began today's journey moving from a twitter link to Albert Wenger's blog (below)

http://continuations.com/post/586625930/appreci…

Since I have already been to Albert's place in the last week or so, I looked for someone else who was focused on “mastery” and lo and behold I arrived at Alex's 2009 page. I listened to the Daniel Pink TED talk and Pink outlines a way of thinking that I have already embraced, though I do believe that the “carrot and stick” approach still applies to all those organizations who won't engage the intellectual and evidence based shift from 20th Century minded ways of doing things – and here I find that employees can be complicit.

For me mastery is a key point around which autonomy, purpose and much else can gravitate. It is key because if I had personally mastered mastery, I would not be clicking on mind-candy about “mastery”.

Autonomy I have figured out, otherwise I would not be moving from one Disqus page to another on a learning journey. Purpose I have not quite figured out but writing this brings me one step closer hopefully to whatever that thing within us called calling is.

Mastery can be viewed as authority and it can be viewed as freedom. For me authority that knows it is in the business of freedom is what I admire, but freedom that itself becomes an “authority” reminds me of The Who song about the old boss and the new boss.

The first time a conversation about mastery knocked my head back was when I read Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich”. By the time I finished the book I understood the purpose of mastery in that particular context but wondered which book best explains mastery if the title was “Enrich and Grow Thought”.

It was in reading that particular book that “victory over mind” was an essential purpose, and I also noted looking in the mirror of my own soul that what I had contemplated as an open minded nature was rather closed mind and the sense of mastery associated with it was superficial and perhaps even meaningless.

I do prescribe to this idea Gladwell wrote about about “10,000 hours” but only because I think that there is a point of transformation in anything we superfocus on. Compound interest is to me an example of this, the power-law curve is another example of that, the Eureka moment of an innovator is an additional example of this “superfocus”.

Superfocus however itself is ridiculed in our society as “attention deficit disorder”. Ironic that the most natural trigger of mastery is subverted by subject matter expertise, rather than recognizing our own calling and following where our flow naturally gravitates us towards.

For me the key to mastery is humility. When mastery does not accompany humility it becomes IMHO a form of idolatry. We then worship at the alter of success and ambition and lose sight of the joy of our own experiential learning, that same joy which we can see in a progressive child, before a sometimes retrogressive educational system squashes joyful mastery and replaces it with prescribed mastery.

So the other night when I watched this PBS documentary, it was really about people who were trying to master things in their own world – yes it was also about receiving respect.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/garbage-drea…

Yes the PBS documentary pointed out some major points of awareness regarding the status of the Egyptian garbage worker, but the documentary itself shows kids devoted to master something beyond rewards and punishment – here is where autonomy and purpose are also in full demonstration as one see's people who represent the Zaballeen trying to make other Egyptians see the value they add and against a system of authority which Daniel Pink echoes in his presentation above.

Thank You also to Alex for keeping this space open so autonomous cyber time travelers like me can simply drop on by . . .

[Em]