Quotes About Mastery

Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert.

As any artist can tell you, it is easier to reach perfection than to stop there.

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less than your best.

How can we make sure we wind up behind the right door when the going gets tough? The answer is: craftsmanship.

There is no such thing as quick and dirty. Anything dirty is slow. The only way to go fast, is to go well.

That these acts are simple doesn't mean that they are simplistic, and it hardly means that they are easy.

The only way to go fast, is to go well.

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger.

the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery. You

First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time.

The Laws of Human Nature, 1: Master Your Emotional Self—The Law of Irrationality

Daily Law: Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

Immerse yourself in the world or the industry that you wish to master.

the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery.

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are… The Promethean task of the powerful is to remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist - an artist creating yourself.

what people cannot control, you can control for them.

Understand: the greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash. What happens in such a case is that you do not master the basics; you have no real vocabulary at your disposal. What you mistake for being creative and distinctive is more likely an imitation of other people's style, or personal rantings that do not really express anything.

First, you must see your attempt at attaining mastery as something extremely necessary and positive.

The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery.

You will know when your apprenticeship is over by the feeling that you have nothing left to learn in this environment.

The road to mastery requires patience. You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts. The process of getting there, however, is full of challenges and pleasures.

they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Think of yourself as your own Zen Master. Such masters would beat their pupils and deliberately lead them to points of maximum doubt and inner tension, knowing such moments precede enlightenment.