Mastery

This entry is credited to both George Leonard and Robert Greene, which conflates two different books with the same title, and the 1991 date points to Leonard's. Leonard was an aikido teacher and Esquire editor, and his book is short, roughly one hundred and seventy pages, arguing that mastery of any skill requires accepting long periods without visible progress.

His central observation comes from teaching aikido. Learning proceeds as a brief spurt of improvement followed by a slight decline and then a long plateau, repeated indefinitely. Most people quit during a plateau because they interpret the absence of progress as failure. Leonard argues that the person who masters a skill is the one who learns to practise during the plateau without requiring the reward of visible improvement.

He identifies three failure patterns: the dabbler, who loves beginnings and quits when the first plateau arrives; the obsessive, who forces progress and burns out or injures themselves; and the hacker, who reaches adequacy and stops. He gives five keys, which are instruction from a qualified teacher, practice as something you do rather than something you have, surrender to the teacher and to the awkwardness of being a beginner, intentionality meaning mental rehearsal and vision, and the edge, meaning occasional controlled pushing past current limits.

The book contains no research and is built entirely on Leonard's teaching experience and on the human potential movement he was part of at Esalen. Some passages on energy and consciousness will not persuade many readers. The plateau observation and the three failure types are the durable content, and both transfer directly to any skill acquired over years. Robert Greene's separate book of the same name is a different and much longer work about apprenticeship and creative development.