Mastery - What is it? and how you achieve it?

"Essential component of mastery is ability to create new knowledge."

What is mastery?

Kids had been playing the piano. For few hours per day initially. When I hear the music, it clearly shows the confusion, of a novice. With full of mistakes and no clear pattern. There is a long road ahead for mastery. This brings the question of mastery. And how can anyone achieve that?

Domains of knowledge.

Playing the piano- Masters and Amateurs

Playing the piano is one domain. Which includes the ability to read notations to playing them correctly. And the knowledge of the domain is already built over generations. Little by little, by pianists of previous era had worked hard on their craft, and made thousands of notes composed us to practice, play and enjoy. Over generations this domain of knowledge had increased dramatically, I would say in an exponential fashion, with the development, and popularization, and addition of new material. You can compare this to a patch of oil which expands from a leaking Oil tanker in Straight of Gulf. It will expand exponentially, over time. Provided there are no other limitations to its growth. I would consider this a good model to understand any domain of knowledge.

Any domain of knowledge is a patch of oil which expands exponentially over time, with acumination of new knowledge.

Where are the experts and amateurs?

If I ask you to position amateurs and experts in any expanding oil patch of knowledge, where would you keep them? I am sure you would put amateurs in the middle, closer to the center of the oil patch and experts closer to the outer boundary. They have spiraled through all the inner layers to reach the boundary of the current knowledge. And from there, there is no way out as they have to expand the oil patch in tiny amount more if they want to extend into the unknown. This creates many other problems for amateurs.

Behold amateurs, a difficult terrain ahead.

Amateurs nowadays finding more and more difficult to reach the outer boundary. As you can understand it expands rapidly. One cannot master and even expected to master all the information of one single domain, as oil patches are expanding rapidly and they are already huge. Consider someone studying math. Someone studying advanced mathematics, have to go from Archimedes to Newton and Euler, to Kurt Godel - who defined current boundary of mathematics. Hence even an undergraduate nowadays understand what newton did not understood in his time. How can we ever expect them to reach the boundary and expand it?

Expanding Patch of Oil

Fast way forward.

Truth is nobody can. Amateurs will need different tools. Maybe a fast boat, which can travel faster. Maybe the traditional spiral approach to learning might not work. Hence, I suggest a different way. There is no way out. You should directly target creativity even at your current state of immatureness. Maybe it is enough. You already know what newton knew that era. Hence even before you come to a current boundary, you must start your creative genes work. It doesn't matter if you fail. You can always go back and study what master's did when they encountered your pattern of thinking. Hypothesize the unknown and correct yourself if you're wrong.

It doesn't matter your current field. It may be playing with piano. So, trying to create a new song is faster way to reach the boundary of current piano knowledge. Who knows, one day you might compose another Mozart masterpiece, before you learn to play all his pieces.