The Definitive Field Guide for the Journeyman to Master Their Craft

All throughout the world, thousands, millions of people don’t really feel like their life is meaningful.

You may be one of these people.

You go through the grind. You go to work and punch a clock, do mind-numbing tasks, come home, watch TV, go to bed and repeat. Over and over and over again, an endless hypnotic cycle.

After all, bills need to be paid, work needs to be done, and life needs to be lived.

But let me offer another wrinkle to this: what if you focused on instead of just “working”, you were honing your craft, mastering your craft, maybe even perfecting it.

In this article, I offer some reasons why you should be focused on finding what you’re good at and mastering it.

I also give some insights on how to do that, the stages you’ll go through, and how to move forward.

Let’s start sharpening.

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What Does It Mean to “Master Your Craft”?

Mastering your craft or approaching a mastery level means to become very good at it – think top tier level.

When I say “top tier”, I mean someone who is able to outperform and outproduce 75-80% of their peers within that activity.

Many things are subjective, however, many fields have certain standards that must be met for someone to be considered “average” or even “exceptional”.

Let’s use the example of a creative field such as painting, writing, or music composition.

All fields have a level of technical expertise that must be met for creativity and expression to flourish. Without that expertise, there is no true expression. It’s pretty hard to write the next Great American Novel when you can’t even speak the language on a third-grade level.

These technical aspects of a craft? The master has a solid grasp on all of them. He knows the techniques, he knows the structure that builds the house.

The master works off of a solid foundation of fundamentals that enable him to show up in a big way.

In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle talks about how a little known quarterback named Tom Brady would visit his high school coach every year and “work on the fundamentals” despite being a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

A master is continuously sharpening the fundamentals.

The Long, Winding Road to Mastering Your Craft

“You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.” – Robert Greene, Mastery

In his seminal book Mastery, Robert Greene outlines the several phases of the road to mastery. Within those phases are phases themselves.

I’m going to give a brief overview of how this looks from my own experience.

To get a deeper outline and the inner workings of mastery from someone who has thoroughly studied it, pick up the book.

1. The Outsider’s Perspective

Length of Time: 1 month to 1 1/2 years
Obstacles and Challenges: Ignorance of the field, giving up too soon before you’ve really tried, self-image diminishment
Feelings of: Frustration, confusion, non-enjoyment, curiosity, intrigue

When you first encounter something new, your brain doesn’t know how to contextualize it within the framework of everything else it has already experienced.

If you are very young, your brain has not created any sort of paradigms or mental frameworks that help you compare to this experience to something similar.

This experience may be something you’re inherently interested in or something you naturally gravitate towards. These are known as “primal inclinations”.

This creates an “experimentation” phase where you try to build some sort of mental model around it. This means a lot of stumbling and embarrassment but you keep trying because of your interest.

When I was younger, I used to play tennis. I didn’t have anything else to really compare it to, so I just saw it as “hitting a ball with a racket”. I thought it was fun, but I didn’t experience any joy or interest to progress past the beginner experimentation phase into the intermediate phase of purposeful practice. That’s where my journey ended.

Conversely with guitar, I started playing because I was inherently interested in music and the creative possibilities of the instrument. I then started to take it seriously and invest in coaching and equipment. This took me from a beginner phase into a low level of intermediate playing.

If a person can manage to separate his bruised self-image from the things that come with being a newbie, he can them make an informed choice:

Do I continue with this or do I just stop and never do it again?

If the person decides the latter, this is where the story ends. If they decide the former, they enter the next phase.

2. The Apprenticeship Phase

Length of Time: 5-10 years
Obstacles and Challenges: Learning new techniques, developing working competency, low level of self-directed learning
Feelings of: Self-efficacy, growing confidence, mild frustration, understanding

Within the apprenticeship phase of mastery are several sub-phases that intertwine. They include some form of passive observation, skill acquisition, implementation, and eventual experimentation outside of the “lab”.

During this phase, you seek out a good teacher. This is someone who is able to guide you through the skill acquisition phase into implementation.

This phase is characterized by intense study and application. Think of it like making a clay pot, when forming the clay, there’s an intense heat that bakes the clay into a specific shape. Once it’s hardened, it stays as a clay pot.

This phase is also characterized by what is known as “kitchen work” for very little or even no pay.

You should not be focused on proving yourself during this phase. You are learning.

When seeking out a teacher for a skill you want to build, focus on three things:

• A teacher who has proven expertise in that area (published works, papers, or artifacts of expertise)
• A teacher who can provide some degree of motivation and encouragement
• A teacher who focuses on deliberate practice

Once an apprentice has proven he has developed enough skills to be competent at whatever it is he is doing, he then leaves the master and enters the next phase: the journeyman.

3. The Journeyman Phase

Length of Time: Variable
Obstacles and Challenges: Establishing reputation and expertise, dealing with life challenges, sharpening competency
Feelings of: Self-esteem, pride, some monotony, a general feeling of good faith in whatever it is one is doing

This phase is where the rubber meets the road. This is where one starts to apply what they were taught.

This is where the college grad goes out into the work force, the newly minted doctor sets up his own practice, or the corporate executive starts his own consultancy.

You develop what is known as “working competency”. You’re not an expert – but you know enough to solve real-world problems.

When you encounter the same issues and problems repeatedly, you apply yourself and solve them. You then start to create patterns about what works and what doesn’t. This creates more expertise and your own unique stamp or “brand”.

As your expertise grows, so does your bank account and reputation.

During this phase it is easy to become distracted with “shiny object syndrome” or just the demands of life outside of your skill.

This inevitably leads to a plateau:

4. The Plateau

Length of Time: Indefinite
Obstacles and Challenges: Falling behind, keeping interested, complacency
Feelings of: Monotony, boredom, possible self-efficacy if plateau is decided upon consciously

Everyone eventually reaches a period of their life where there seems to be no progress whatsoever.

Every day is the same and you’re just “going through the motions”.

You go through this multiple times in life, but a big one comes later in life when you’ve developed a ton of expertise in a specific skill.

What’s happened here is that you’ve reached a level of automaticity and habit formation around specific patterns that are very comfortable for you to execute.

You work out the same way, you play the same scales, you see the same kinds of patients, you do repairs on the same kinds of houses, everything is the same.

This routine is very comfortable. What happens more often than not, is many people stay at a plateau of complete mediocrity.

For those who have really cranked through the journeyman phase, you took the lemon and made sweet lemonade.

You may have sacrificed a lot, put in a lot of hours, and have seen a ton of progress. You’re bringing in a ton of money and you are never out of work or at least not for long. If it’s a creative skill, then improvisation is a way of life. You seemingly make novel works of art of music out of thin air. It’s like magic.

Many people say:

That’s it for me, there is nothing more for me to do.

And they just end up maintaining a high level of productivity and output for the rest of their working lives. These people are easily in the top 5-10% of whatever it is they are skilled at.

But for those who want more, there’s another level.

5. “Unknown Territory”/ Mastery

Length of Time: Indefinite
Obstacles and Challenges: Breaking through a new paradigm, no guidance on the territory ahead
Feelings of: Frustration, inspiration, enthusiasm, higher level perspective

In order to get to this level, external motivation isn’t enough. There has to be some inner fire, some desire to climb to this level.

Up here, the air is thin and the climb is lonely.

What’s not really talked about is the amount of pain that is required to get here.

You’ll encounter pain all throughout the journeyman period, but here, it’s like squeezing water from a stone. Diminishing returns that offer seemingly no progress define this stage.

This is that bodybuilder who is sub 10% body fat and 15+ years of hard training doing extreme workouts with the effect of only 1 pound of muscle gained a year.

This is the entrepreneur who becomes the visionary, seeing targets other people didn’t even know existed after a lifetime of making high level discoveries.

This is the level of Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Galileo, various Nobel Prize winners, enlightened masters, etc.

Your life is defined by this. Your obituary will be centered around this. This is what you will be “known” for.

Steps to Mastering Your Craft

From reading/scanning this, it’s clear that mastery isn’t for everyone or most people.

However, very high levels of productivity and achievement are open for anyone who wants to achieve them.

It is possible to go onto the road to mastery without climbing all the way to the undefined peak. If you choose to, you will be ahead of most people who just simply work, live, and exist.

Here’s some things to think about:

1. Decide if you really want it.

Everyone wants the outcome. Everyone wants the 6-pack abs, the 100k in the bank, the ability to play super fast on guitar.

Everyone wants these things. Winners and losers have the same goals.

But ask yourself: are you willing to go through the process? The long years of study, of application, of trying and failing, trying and failing, over and over and over and over for months – maybe even years on end?

That’s a question only you can answer.

2. Find a Mentor/Model/Teacher.

As a newcomer to a field, you have no standard on what makes quality in that field. A good mentor or teacher will give you that standard.

It’s not uncommon to hear the story of a family of an Olympic-level athlete uproot their entire lives to live in close proximity to a master teacher.

In the 60s and 70s, many people quit their jobs, sold their possessions, and left their home countries for a chance to study under a master yogi or Zen master.

When I was making a little over minimum wage several years ago, I sought out a master copywriter and paid time and money I didn’t really have to learn from them.

Finding a master teacher or a teacher on the path to mastery and lowering your ego is how you’ll learn to get better.

But you have to decide if you should sacrifice for it.

3. Go through the pain of deliberate practice.

“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.” The same thing is true for all the mental activities we engage in,” – Anders Ericsson, Peak: The Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

In the book Peak, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool detail how exactly people become extraordinarily good at things.

The answer is two words: deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is just that: engaging in routine activities that put one just outside their comfort zone.

A good teacher will constantly do this to you because most skills you want to develop lie outside of this zone.

Deliberate practice is painful because you are creating new neural pathways in the brain and using up the brain’s energy resources to do so. Deliberate practice involves focus and repetition.

If you can push past this pain, you develop new skills and as a result, see the world in a new way. Previously unseen things are now visible to you. You get a taste of what the visionary experiences every day.

4. Commit to continuous learning.

Throughout the apprenticeship and journeyman phases to master your craft, you will be learning a lot. If your field is relatively analog (plumbing, home repairs, writing), you can develop skills that will push you into a high level of competency very quickly.

However, if you are a person who is involved in something more digital (tech, marketing, etc.) your skills may be outdated within 5-10 years time. This requires continuous learning, something our brains are designed for due to neuroplasticity.

5. Recharge.

While you need to expand and create a high level of productivity to be a master, you also need to contract and recharge.

You should not be “hustlin’” 24/7.

You cannot consolidate your gains in any area unless you recharge. Part of this includes sleep.

According to Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep, sleep helps to reinforce memories:

“If you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event.”

Make sure you are getting a good amount of time off, or you could risk burnout.

6. Create a default for productivity.

In order to create mastery, you want your default to be one of productivity. You need to be learning, doing, applying, and you never stop until your life is over.

Unfortunately for us, there’s many things that make this default more challenging in the modern world. It is incredibly easy to build your life around consumption rather than creation and to be honest, it is the default without any conscious intervention.

In the audio below, I outline some ways to establish a basic level of productivity in different areas:

Conclusion + Wrap Up

The path to mastering your craft or becoming very good at it is something everyone can develop. In fact, it is the birthright of every human being to rewire their brain for excellence in a particular area.

The road to this excellence is long and winding, with many ups and downs along the way. It requires self-discipline, motivation, focus, and a commitment to fundamentals, but the exertion is worth the trip.

Are you on the road to mastery? If so, how’s it going for you? What obstacles are you encountering on the way? Let us know in the comments.