The Monotony of Mastery

Author

Alex Gilliland
October 31, 2024

Terribly late on this newsletter. Been busy. Not complaining. So blessed, so grateful.

I guess I’m in my patient era because I was recently reminded — by one of the best writers of our generation — that this is long journey. Longer than I ever could have envisioned when I was a naive, self-righteous 24-year-old who moved to Washington, D.C. to do something.

It often takes decades of work to bear even the smallest fruit. It will be long and frustrating, it will require patience. It will require us to become better in its pursuit. And we are lucky to be able to do it.

A shorter letter because we’re busy bees.

Mastery

"Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status."

Derek Sivers

I'm not a master of anything yet. Mastery comes in decades. My accountant is 84 (or 87, I can't remember) — he is a master.

Spend more time with people like that and you will see just how much more experienced they are, and how much further you have to go. They are evidence of the power of compounding. None of us can fathom doing something for 50+ years yet, but spending time with someone who has is edifying.

Last letter I mentioned the value of relentless repetition. Only upon reflection do you see the beauty of repetition. Chop wood and carry water for decades?! The same dull day over and over again? Yes. That is how mastery is carved.

A master demands nothing, only keeps showing up, doing their best, failing, learning, and improving. You don’t have to be maniacal to become a master. In fact, you don’t even have to want to be a master. You just have to focus on…

Being Better

Aiming to improve 1% everyday through better habits, a better attitude, better intuition, better execution, better sleep, better eating, better workout. As it turns out, that is how you become a master, but it requires patience.

I fail at being better all the time. I backslide, try something new that doesn’t work, or face a challenge that upends my routine. Nevertheless, my goal is to show up as a clean instrument for better use in every situation, regardless of the circumstances.

Being a better version of yourself is about being better for the people around you. It’s about healing long-held, often familial wounds. That seems to be a worthy goal to me.

“Transmutation, not presumptuous denial, is the weapon of the master.”

The Kybalion

Transmuting what you considered a weakness, a fear, an insecurity, and turning it into a skill, learning from it and growing, no longer letting it trigger you, that is mastery. And I think this attitude can change the world.

Plenty of people don’t want to change the world. They just want to be healthy, raise a family, spend time with loved ones, etc. But, as it turns out, being a healthy, buoyant light in people’s lives is in fact changing the world.

Conquering yourself so that you can show up for the people in your life as a healed, more understanding person makes people around you better. And this flows outward. Change is millions of little revolutions. It’s not a presidential election, box office hit, or NYT best seller. You do it in how you treat people.

That being said, we’re less than a week out from a presidential election. Please vote. No candidate is perfect, no candidate will save you, but I hope we have the integrity to choose better. I hope we have the foresight to think about ten or 20 years from now and whether we showed integrity in the face of fear mongering and racism. At this moment in our history, it’s the time of imperfect allies.

My Swipes

“One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: it is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

James Baldwin

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Love you, bye!