Getting stuck in Local Maximums - Dangers of mastery.

Mastery is the way?

Mastery is the way to achieve higher standard in anything you do, in performing anything. Mastery does apply to anything, from laying bricks to building rockets. However, such achievement of mastery would eat up significant amount of time and resources of a person. The opportunity cost of this can come up resurfaced in the Middle Ages of a person as depression or existential nihilism (personal experience). 10000 hours spent on mastery can either, make you happy or sad, no guarantee. How can one commit to such an endeavor with limited information gathered around teenage years. We only have things said by our parents and teachers tell us to guide us. Lucky if they did not push us into a route that is not the passion of ours we might end up mastering the correct craft. (Read philosophical story on Drawing circles of life)

Local Maximum

Getting stuck in local maximums

Now consider a life to a function. A continuous mathematical function. And imagine this function is utterly unpredictable. And you chose to ride along the curve and it feels your growth is rapid and you accumulate enough to feel mastery in the local timescale. Maybe you become the boss of a local boutique run by multinational co-operation. Owning a happy family. Content. But how exactly do you know that you are at the global maximum of your function? (In mathematics, local maximum is a point like a peak in your county. But a global maximum is the highest point of the curve for inputs of negative to positive infinity, like Mount Everest, there is no other high point than this) The problem is on either side, you will feel you lose altitude if you try to climb down and start another journey on a next mountain. Climbing down a mountain is as hard as climbing up.

But, as I can see, lot of individuals, just do the same. They all have the highest point in their lives. Which only can be seen at the time of their death. It may feel different in value, like some might not consider monetary or material success as their highest point. But the problem is as they haven't explored all the pathways they could have taken in life, the potential of each individual is not reached most of the time. I would say it is rare someone hit absolute maximum in their lifetime. Maybe Jesus, Buddha and Tom Cruize did. Even they may have not reached full potential. This argument is clearly explained in the Sci-fi fiction movie (Lucy 2014)

How to break beyond Local Maximums.

There is no guaranteed way to do this. As you can understand mastery helps. But more importantly looking out to what to master is an important question in early life, before you commit your 10000 hours. Mastering wrong thing is the guaranteed way to be stuck in a local maximum. You can be a nice piano player and play inside the Town hotel rest of your life while you would never become next Beethoven. Or you might follow local tradition to become the best Bull rider in your town and end up paralyzed at 23 while you could have developed next Uber if you chose to become a programmer. As there are a zillion career choices finding your perfect match is even more difficult than finding a partner.

One way we can attempt to do it, is by using randomness as part of any process we are doing. Mix it up. Explore some possibilities. Ask around some questions and be creative your own way. All the limits in life are created by us. There are no natural boundaries.