Are You Headed Towards a Path of Mastery…
…or are you headed towards a path of mediocrity?
A couple of months ago I performed very poorly on a Calculus II test that I spent a lot of time preparing for, when in reality I ended up preparing in all the wrong ways.
This ended up being an eye opening experience for me, as I came to realize that the things I wanted to spend the most time on (like preparing for the Calculus II test or studying on my own time with books like this book or this one) was being wasted away to things that, over the long haul, won’t make the kind of impact on my life like educating myself on these topics will.
One of those things was this blog (along with a few other web projects) that could be something good one day, but are instead taking away from what I need to be focusing on.
All of this thinking was driven home by Seth Godin’s latest book, The Dip. This book talks a lot about quitting, but in reality it’s a book about becoming the best at what you want to do. If you can’t become the best at what you’re doing or you won’t put in the hard work necessary to push through the dip, then you should quit and focus on something that you can become the best at or will put in the hard work necessary to push through the dip.
For me, this dip is a conglomeration of things, but most notably it’s a small area applying probability theory, statistics, neural networks, etc. to sports. This blog won’t help that. A few other projects I was working on won’t help that. I’ve got smartcapper.com and whichteamwins.com for various aspects of this, and I expect these to be my only focus for some time to come.
I’d like to hear your thoughts, especially if you feel you’re on a path to mastery or not, and if not, how you can fix it.
Also, from now until next Thursday, May 31st, I’m going to take everyone that comments on this post about their path to mastery and randomly select someone that I’ll send a copy of The Dip to. I got a free copy from Seth as he selected my question as one to answer over at Personal MBA, so I want to share the love.
I’ll make a new post about this tomorrow in case people see the title of this post and don’t realize I’m giving something away, so feel free to spread the word.
