Quotes About Mastery

When Michelangelo finally completed painting over 400 life size figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all." What appeared to his admirers to have flowed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20

First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we've learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can't advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and difficult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we're still able to adapt.

The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.

rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.

Practice that's spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don't get the rapid improvements and affirmations you're accustomed to seeing from massed practice.

It's not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn't result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no measure of mastery.

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they're also among the least productive.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes—and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God's creation, not as objects for our own manipulation or unholy mischief.

You didn't get to his level in Connexion Security without being competent.

Excellence was the best revenge.

As researchers and experimenters, scholars and theorists, German academics — good bourgeois virtually all of them — made signal contributions to human mastery. But as citizens they failed to claim mastery over their own fate. The way they chose to confine their lives to their professional advancement was a kind of division of labor — scholarship to the scholar, politics to the politician. But it was also a fateful division of power.

H]umor has, among other duties, the task of controlling anxieties, of mastering threats, by increasing their distance and reducing their dimensions.

Er zijn vrouwen die een soufflé kunnen maken. Die op het juiste moment een recept van mokkaparfait in hun sportbeha hebben zitten. Die met de ene hand hun eigen bruiloftstaart kunnen bouwen en met de andere pepersteak Nossi Bé maken. Daar moeten wij ons allen over verheugen. Als het maar niet betekent dat wij een slecht geweten moeten hebben omdat we de eerste beginselen van het brood roosteren nog niet onder de knie hebben.

Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.

What he'd noticed in all true masters was that the focus turned soon, or immediately, into full absorption by the act itself.

the flies contain the ingenuity and craft of fine jewelry and the promise of hours, days, in pursuit of something even more beautiful: a connection to the beating heart of the living earth and maybe to one's own mastery.

broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that.

What he'd noticed in all true masters was that the focus turned soon, or immediately, into full absorption by the act itself. The actor surrendered, and it was as if, like a change in tide, the energy was now flowing in the opposite direction-from the river, or the basketball court, or the painting. Flowing into the one who was doing. It swept her up and carried her. It fueled her, and in the most intense moments allowed her to relax

If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.”

May peoples serve you and nations bow down to you. May you be the master of your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed, and those who bless you be blessed.”