I love learning new things and have written about learning on this blog several times before. But I am also a fan of observing mastery. I seem to remember reading in Gladwell’s Outliers, that mastery requires at least 10,000 hours of doing something. This makes it unlikely that I will achieve mastery in most of the things I am doing outside my professional live. That doesn’t prevent me from deeply enjoying the effortlessness displayed by masters. Three very different recent examples come to mind:
Last week I saw the debut of Ryu Goto at Carnegie Hall. I have known Ryu since he was 10 and we lived in the same building in New York. He is a wonderful young man who is not only a violin virtuoso but also a Karate black belt! Ryu played the famous Bruch violin concerto and did so with wonderful expressiveness. For an encore, he tore through a fiendishly difficult Paganini piece without breaking a sweat. It was fantastic.
A completely different master is John Stewart. The Daily Show is the only TV show I watch with any kind of regularity (and thanks to a DVR it clocks in at only 20 minutes). Over the last few years Stewart’s delivery has become simply perfect. His facial expressions, mock outrage, sound effects or even singing, make even some of the weaker material funny.
Finally, this weekend I had the pleasure of sailing with my friend HL DeVore in the EDLU race. Within the space of a single race we experienced a super wide range of conditions (thunderstorm with pouring rain to beautiful sun and more importantly, no wind to 30 knots with gusts above 40). Sailing upwind in heavy weather through 5 foot chop, HL was moving smoothly around the boat (including going to the foredeck to retrieve a jib sheet) while I was mostly working hard just to stay in place.
In each example, I enjoyed the thing itself. I loved the music at the concert, I dig the humor on the Daily Show, and I had a blast sailing – but appreciating the mastery of the people involved added tremendously to that enjoyment.
