I was asked today: “What is mastery?” My reply was the following:
Firstly a true master gets results in his/her craft, his/her discipline of practicing the basics is consistent and regular, has an expanded knowledge of his/het craft and lastly he/she guides others effectively to mastering that craft themselves. On top of that a true master for me is always humble and respectful to others as he/she already see the potential in others to be more.
Today my challenge is to break through a blogging blank. Time and again I get this ideas of what I need to blog about but when I sit down to blog I actually sit with a blank. The reason for this is simply being exhaustingly busy at the moment. My world is racing forward with multiple different streams of momentum in a conjecture at this moment in time. I should not be complaining about it, it is actually one of my most fortunate times and times to really make a difference. My work projects are ramping up and my personal life is also ramping up in the flow of fundamental change.
So today I am simply sitting down and I am writing what is coming up in my mind to simply keep building the habit of blogging. I am still smitten by the idea of building my skills through developing healthy and uplifting habits. In a sense a focus on good habits ultimately crowds out bad habits because there is less time and attraction for bad habits to be perpetuated.
Some people see that my tracking of habits is pedantic. I track my habits in an app called “Mastery”. It is a very simple App but it is effective in tracking my daily habits and it takes about a maximum of 10 to 15 entries a day with most habits and skills already preset. I am tracking currently 5o skills accross 15 skill development areas:
These areas are likely to increase. It helps me to understand how I spend my time and what skills I am developing. This approach has significantly changed my approach to how I plan and view my work. For example I am no longer just attending meetings in my workplace but I am looking at attending meetings as a skill. So now my approach is to look at how I want to improve my skill. Rather than just attending a meeting I view the meeting as an opportunity to become better at contributing to meetings. So besides just documenting that I spend 180 minutes in meetings today I look accross those meetings and I evaluate at the end of the day my skill within meetings. Did I communicate more effectively, how well did I contribute. So having logged the habits I spend my time on assist me to evaluate if I am just doing the habit as a matter of course or if I am consciously improving how I approach that habit to turn it into a skill. One person can attend a thousand meetings without any skill development but another who is conscious of that as a skill development opportunity will experience a vase differnce between the first and the last meeting.
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Habits are the core of success. People who acquire good habits are far more likely to achieve extraordinary things. Luck often plays a role as well but people who acquire certain habits are more inclined to capitalize on those moments of good luck. In a similar manner good habits help one to overcome problems and constraints.
Today I simply marvelled at Seneca saying that he is not surprised when the gods are watching with anticipation to see how a good man fight a brave fight against bad circumstances. Whether you believe in gods or not, the image in my head of gods watching me in the arena to see how I apply my hard won skills to address problems is inspiring. I can imagine them betting on me and/or having their devices out to capture and record the fight. Changing our view on our problems in this way can often dilute the gravity of a situation that can be seen as an opportunity to apply the best of our skills.
The skills we have are really only skills when it is firmly based on a healthy set of habits. I used various apps to keep track of the skills I am developing through habits. Setting objectives without basing it on a healthy set of skills often negate those objectives naturally to failure. For example one can visualise a beautiful home and car and put its attainment on your goal list but if there is no financial acumen developed through healthy financial habits then it is a presage of failure.
By focusing on skill development as the base for achieving goals also focus us on today, the present moment. It is no longer about what we do in the future but about what we are doing in the present moment. From a Stoic perspective it is about the virtues we develop in our everyday living. You cannot develop a healthy body if you do not develop some physical skill through exercise and repetition. You cannot control your thoughts without some discipline in developing your concentration ability.
The challenge is consistency and application. There is simply not enough time to develop all the skills we need if we want to do it only in a practice ground. Habit development must be part of our daily routine. The way we wake up and prepare for the day might include a short meditation session which will proof far more useful over time than trying to have a long meditation only under specific favourable conditions. The point is not against a long meditation but rather on the fact that regularity outweighs ad hoc quality time. Regularity in its own can be established once we have integrated habits into our daily life.
Habits have a cumulative effect and is continually adding up. Like interest the longer a skill is practiced the more valuable it becomes and the more accessible that skill becomes as a tool in life. Different people will develop different habits and different skills. There is no right set of skills for our skills required is determined by our personality, environment etc. The key is to purposefully identify skills we want to develop and to make a concerted effort to make those skills working in our daily lives.
Copyright Jurgens Pieterse aka Zeal4living 2018
We all face challenges at some stage that seems to like disasters, as a matter of fact some are indeed disasters that will lead to a loss of some kind for us in life. This is part of normal life. Stoic philosophy says it is external and and externals should not determine our level of happiness. It is our perception on these externals that will change how we experience these significant life events.
I am currently experiencing it on both a macro and micro level. The micro level relates to my own finances where I am struggling to make ends meet while succeeding in my duty to assist my children with their studies. The macro level relates to me living in a metropolitan city that is preparing to run out of water. Both are equally eminent and will bring a level of discomfort and challenge along with it. In magnitude of course the macro issue is far greater since it will affect many people and can lead to the actual death of many people. Without water there is no life.
Within these periods of times I reallise more than ever the value of philosophy. To have an approach that you can follow with confidence. I cannot avoid the problems or issues but I do have a choice how to deal with the situation. It calls for courage, integrity and creativity. These types of unavoidable disasters challenge our core philosophical concepts and drives us to work from divine creative inspiration. We need to find new solutions and make fundamental shifts in our way of life.
Contemplating this situation it reminds me of the image of the Tower card in the Tarot. Sometimes the breakdown of our existing way of living, as painful as it is, will lead to new life and living patternd. For the mystic it is never to get dismayed but to keep living with hope to keep contemplating on solutions. The Stoic on the other hand accepts fate even if it threaten to shorten life. For the Stoic the aim remain ever to live with virtuous integrity remaining in tact.
I am contemplating what it means to be of service to humanity. Am I really making an optimal contribution? Maybe leaving a legacy is not as important as to actually having the energy and consistency in producing some value. In order to make such a contribution it is essential that I have confidence in myself and in my work. What I can do is to better engage with other people and work more with the assistance of other people. I think generally that I am not as aware as I should be aware of other people. What has put me in this frame of mind is my time in the celestial sanctum and the yearning it creates within to be a true illuminatus and somebody that is an unconditional servant of humanity. Saying it is unconditional is truly a high and noble ideal that is not as easy to put into practice. In practice, we are lazy, we want to enjoy life, and if we can, we will do it without putting in effort.
Most of us are working just so that we can survive and others to continue to feed their hunger for power, fame or wealth. As a true Stoic; the three hungers are irrelevant since the Stoic endeavours to achieve an internal goal that is a goal of being inwardly the best human being possible. A human being that exceeds in every aspect in the qualities that makes a human being human. The fact is that from a mystical perspective we are even more than what are generally considered being human. In general, Stoics define our humanity in terms of the ability to reason, the social nature of humans and the ability to be self-aware and creative. Other creatures in our world does not seem to have these qualities.
Yet the mystic believes that there is the divine spark within that of which all these qualities, that we attribute to being human, are just a shadow. From a mystical point of view, more will be realised in this world when we truly understand this “sage within”. I prefer this term over “Master within” because the term master has so many negative connotations within the South African context with its history of one group being dominated by another. Indeed, I am beginning to realise more and more that what we consider as legacy will differ from society to society and from generation to generation.
This I am saying from the perspective of being both a constructivist and relativist. True these positions are not perfect and not the answer to all but I do think that they offer the best of values in our world. However, it requires an agreement on these base assumptions for it to be effective. When you have intellectual arrogance as oppose to intellectual humility then a relativist will have to continually fight a dominant or unmovable opposing position for incorporating it blindly into one’s own world will violate that very premise of relativism and even in terms of a constructivist view it is becoming something that has the wrong baseline. In terms of this, the relativist and constructivist must find ways and means to neutralise strong opinions and bring them to equality with other ideas before there is an evaluative phase that allow the strongest ideas to come forward. Indeed the question is how we evaluate different ideas when we are in the fluid world of a relativist or constructivist paradigm.
The moment we make a value judgment, we are in a position where we are moving out of the fluid paradigm into a structured paradigm. Maybe this illustrates once again the polar nature of our thinking. We cannot just be constructivist and relativist all the time. We have to be able to discern when to be in this free flow paradigm and then when to start to crystallise solutions and conclude our theories. Even the relativist needs some fixed points of reference.
Here we have some lessons to learn from the astrologer, who aligns his actions with the celestial bodies. The time of Saturn is always such a time where firmness replaces flow and Yang must flow from Yin. We can see Saturn time in a negative light but it is opposite to that of Venus time when we have to be open to society and fluid in our thinking. Projecting this onto my thinking about the tree of life then Yesod is the flowing paradigm and Malkuth the crystalline paradigm. In the first, we have some flexibility that allows different things to manifest but it can come only in existence in the latter.
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