Quotes About Mastery

and a completely unfair question popped into my mind.

People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves.

perfect their skills, and move on to a better position.

WHAT DOES IT take to be good at something in which failure is so easy, so effortless?

practice, however, matters aren't so straightforward.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.

much about it. When

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience

we need practice to get good at what we do.

Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: "I can do it better than you," but simply: "I can do it." What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.

I still believe that the world is arranged in our favor, since we can nevertheless gain mastery over things that run counter to our senses.

I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick— schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

Man's mastery over nature, then, is a mastery which has less and less control over itself. . . . A world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or fear.2 —Gabriel Marcel

It is dangerous that by sudden invasions men shall be drawn to the use of his weapons before he hath skill how to use it

So, I heard you're this ninja or something.

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking through fingers, blood dripping from ears.

as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art.

We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

If you know how something works, you can control it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (what ever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head.

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.