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If you are a paid member (either through FASO or BoldBrush Circle here on Substack), come see the latest ideas from us and our community in the BoldBrush Circle of Marketing community here: https://marketing.faso.com. We encourage you to join us and become a paid member today here. How to Become a MasterPractice, Repetition, and Technique
This is a members-only article series. We are making today’s article available to all subscribers today via email, but please be aware it, and other articles in this series that it links to will be locked in a few days and available for paid subscribers only on our site. Get full access to all resources by becoming a paid subscriber. (If you are a FASO member all these paid posts are available in your control panel at https://marketing.faso.com) How to Become a MasterThis article is a continuation of my series about Mastery. If you haven’t yet read it, I suggest you start with Part I - Mastery. RepetitionTo truly achieve mastery, you need to allow yourself time, and plenty of it, to practice and mature in the vocation to which you are devoted. In my opinion, modern internet culture is destroying mastery. To master something you need to love it. You need to do it to fulfill your soul. You need to pursue it because you can’t not pursue it. This is the deeper meaning of the phrase ars gratia artis – art for art’s sake. Pursue art for its own sake. Do it for the love of it, for the love of creation. This is what all true masters do. If you don’t love it, then you won’t want to put the necessary miles on the brush. “If [the things you do] feel like sacrifices, you're probably not doing the thing you're meant to do." - Kobe Bryant
In creative endeavors, continuous practice and improvement are essential to growth, particularly if you’re looking for rapid growth. The late Robert Genn of The Painter's Keys once wrote: "We're all familiar with the problems associated with Sunday Painters. Cranking up the old machine once a week may be okay in the vintage car hobby--but it's bad news in the creativity game. The steady worker who applies his craft daily is more likely to make creative gains than an intermittent one."
The other type of knowledge is much deeper. It represents the things you know from personal experiences or personal observations, which he called erfahrung. Today we sometimes call it muscle memory. Mastery is the process of developing deep erfahrung. Repetition is your opportunity to “imprint” this knowledge into your “muscle memory” – into your soul. You want to practice enough that the masterful, technical side of your craft becomes muscle memory, so that you can let your creative side flow through you as a tool. Obviously, some part of me knows what I am doing, but it seems to me that my artistic choices are never rational. I don't think; I desire. My left-brain, my Ego, is off; and my Id is free to do whatever it wants. Some technique has been sublimated, so that it can be used by my passions, but it is never analyzed. I never do anything because; I just do it. – Miles Mathis [source]
Monet painted nearly 300 paintings of his famed water lilies. Leonard Cohen worked on “Hallelujah,” reportedly, for over five years, writing more than 100 different verses. It is said that he got so frustrated he literally banged his head on the floor. That is the pursuit of mastery. Rembrandt painted nearly 100 self portraits, trying to capture his face in different light, different mediums, and different emotions. Meditation masters sit for well over 10,000 hours. That’s meditating for two hours a day, every day, for fourteen years, during which time they develop an intimate and sacred relationship with their breath. They have insights that clarify many previously unseen realities. As their refinements become progressively more and more subtle, they can see and do things the rest of us can’t. They become masters. The process of Mastery, you see, is about going to the altar each day, repetitively, and performing the sacred act in which you are engaging to the best of your ability. It is your opportunity to engage in a form of worship to your unique path. Time ConstraintsUnfortunately, the real world intervenes and makes devoting such time difficult. We can’t all devote 6-8 hours a day toward our craft, at least not at first. One way to achieve quantity, while working around time constraints, is to work small. Kevin Macpherson recommends working small as a way to gain experience rapidly. In his book, Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light and Color, he wrote: “When you step up to a small canvas to try something new every day rather than working and reworking a large painting for weeks, you see progress. You learn to master techniques such as brushwork and texture, which boosts your confidence. Painting on a small scale also forces you to ignore inconsequential details and look for larger shapes, broader color relationships and overall composition. It gives you the ability to look at a scene as a whole.” Kevin recommends committing to paint 100 small paintings in a relatively short time period as a means to rapid growth in your mastery. When you get in the creative “zone” more often, you strengthen the neural pathways that allow you to be creative, thus making it easier to be even more creative. You’re developing the habit to be creative.
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