I was talking about mastery with someone recently. It’s one of the three elements in Dan Pink’s Drive, and they asked a very reasonable question.

How do you become a master of something?

I’m not sure you ever fully do. For many things, mastery isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. It starts with noticing what you don’t know, learning how to do it, and then being able to perform at a higher level than before.

And often, we make it harder than it needs to be. We look at “mastery programmes” and see only the scale, the years, the effort and the gap. And we don’t start.

A better question might be:

What is the smallest thing I can do today to move one step closer to mastery?

Not the whole path, just the next move.