Locate Hidden Micromasteries (They Are Everywhere)
A micromastery must show a level of skill beyond the ordinary. It must look hard to do and leave people—including yourself—impressed by your achievement. The bigger the challenge, the more learning that is going on. Humans are learning animals, and when we aren’t busy learning then we are busy dying, to paraphrase Bob Dylan. As traveler, storyteller, writer, and photographer Tahir Shah puts it: “The only learning curve worth being on is a steep one.” When you find yourself on a steep learning curve you simply have to stop messing about and making excuses—it’s sink or swim, and humans are good at swimming.
So you look for something hard to do. Let’s take gardening as a completely random example—growing a rare tropical plant from seed, grafting one type of orchid onto another to create your own hybrid: these are gardening micromasteries. But you could look further for micromastery ideas, in well-written autobiographical accounts and picture-driven textbooks. The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page might be one place to start.* But you have to read it in the right way. Anyone can give the advice “read a textbook,” but can you read it with a micromastery hat on? The key is to look for things that are defined and limited in extent, with a verifiable and obvious form of payoff.
In micromastery we are always looking to make something our own. Most other learning methods are impersonal, designed for an ideal beginner who doesn’t exist in reality. Let’s strip our arbitrary choice of gardening down to something really unpromising—lawn care—and see how the micromastery method works.
Lawn care involves cutting the lawn, feeding the grass, getting rid of imperfections by reseeding and rolling the grass. All pretty dull to me except the last one, which conjures up an image of a giant roller I remember from school being used to keep the cricket pitch flat and manned by about six boys all huffing and puffing as they moved it—usually as a punishment for some transgression. I like the idea of this. Okay, I will micromaster rolling the lawn dead flat—maybe for croquet or bowls or a putting green.
Looking for where the fun is in an activity is the single best way to locate the micromastery that will work for you. It’s your way in. Rolling was the only fun image I could conjure up, but I know that if I started researching and asking expert lawn carers I’d find lots more microfun possibilities.
When I returned to analog photography I dutifully tried 35mm film, but it wasn’t half as much fun as using a clunky old twin lens camera shooting larger format 120 film. I went where the fun was and devised a micromastery of shooting one film a day, giving me twelve images, which I contact-printed onto a single A4 sheet and stuck in a diary album. I then annotated and drew on the pictures for more fun using a white fiber-tip pen. Repeatable, experimental (I started using all kinds of film, including twenty-year-old Russian film), and with a low rub-pat barrier (balancing exposure and other fiddles against time, which is always short in photography), all of this came from going where the fun was: using a wacky camera and larger-negative film.
I wanted to write fiction and spent a year fiddling about with a novel without making progress and simply getting more anxious. Then a friend suggested I write flash fiction—and not get up from my desk until I’d completed a story. This sounded way more fun than puzzling over a giant, never-ending manuscript. I started writing three a day. It had become a micromastery for fiction writing. Over time I learned the skills I needed to write longer pieces and in the end I did indeed write and publish a full novel.
What we are talking about here is not just the difficulty of getting going with something new—we’re talking about specific aspects that somehow chime more deeply with you than others. It’s about making it your own. And the key is to listen to your instinctive likes and dislikes when you first approach it.
When I started to get interested in drawing, and began to look at artists’ work, I found I instinctively liked the simple technical pen drawings of Dan Price. That looks fun and I can do that, I thought—the telltale signs that you’ve found a way in. It’s easy to become dishonest about what you really like and don’t like. Advertising bombards us with images that are designed to change our minds, as do movies, TV, shop displays, and the people we meet every day. Sometimes you need to get away and find out what you really like and dislike. A well-meaning artist pal of mine advised me to start drawing with charcoal. But my childhood memories of charcoal were bad. I didn’t want to go that way again—I needed something new as my way in. I found I liked the stark black-and-white drawing I had started on my annotated photographs, and that was my way in.
The wagging tail is the fun, the way in. But you want to move up to the entire dog—the area you’d like to master or study. In our lawn-care example, rolling leads to a flat lawn, which you want for outdoor games. But there may be patches of less-dense grass—you’ll need to reseed these and nurture them. You’ll also need to mow the lawn finely, which means getting exactly the right piece of gear—one of those old-style drum mowers rather than a modern rotary. Now that I have my background support in the form of the right gear, and my payoff in having a perfect lawn, and my repeatability in needing to mow it often, I need to break mowing down into the entry trick and experimentation. The entry trick will be found by searching internet sites like YouTube and Instructables, and asking expert lawnmowers of bowling greens what the secrets are. There may be more than one—almost always there is—and these will form the basis of my experimentation. All of which I can integrate with my rolling and planting. Wow—I’m getting really interested! (And interested in a subject I’ve never even considered before.)
But let’s try something completely different. How about international law? I know very little about it and have not much more than a passing interest in it. No doubt if I was personally involved in a case that would be different, but with micromastery we try to find a personal point of contact even if there isn’t one initially.
So, go where the fun is. Well, law involves precedents and cases—and these are, essentially, stories. So the way in for me will be about finding the craziest stories that are real cases in international law. I’ll naturally want to relate these to others, which is a great way of memorizing them. This can be my entry trick, giving me a big advantage over someone plodding through huge lists on their own. What next?
The latest research into neurological function reveals that much of our brain is composed of multisensory neurons. There isn’t one type of brain cell for smell, another separate one for sight—all these inputs can be handled by the same cell. We learn better the more dimensions and senses we involve.
So in the somewhat arid world of international law we need to find more senses and dimensions, which means meeting people, finding real situations—all easily achieved through the internet. Instead of reading, go to an asylum center and see what is going on. Talk to a deep-sea fisherman about where he can and cannot fish—and get some fish from him! Any sensory experiences associated with what we are learning enhance memory and cognition.
Combining fun and three dimensions, I’d want to visit one of the many disputed islands in the world. Get on-the-ground experience by talking to the residents. If I couldn’t travel I’d speak on the phone, get them to send pictures. My micromastery might center around attempts to create a new country—Sealand—on an old gas platform in the North Sea, for example. I’d need repeatability, so how about creating a pack of cards featuring disputed islands and territories?
You can see that playing fast and loose with all the various concepts of micromastery helps generate possibilities for future research and inquiry. This is the way you’ll find a situation that you can structure using the six-point device of entry trick, rub-pat barrier, background support, the payoff, repeatability, and experimental possibilities.
Before bolting the structure of a micromastery onto a new activity you need to talk to people who really know about the subject. An expert, however, isn’t quite who you might think. Someone who has done the same job for twenty years has less expertise in my view than a newbie who has found something fun to do. Being able to find fun things to do with a computer program is a more useful form of expertise than knowing the program in some static sense. Children will often be great at finding the fun possibilities in a thing long before they understand it in a formal sense.
Another level of expertise is found in people who are simply able to explain a thing, even though they are not able to do it. You may learn more about writing from an unpublished editor who knows how a story works than, say, a successful novelist who writes intuitively and can’t tell you how to write well.
I’d been doing Zen circles for a while and started to look around for harder things to draw. I found I liked odd stuff like drawing Italian coffee pots and wicker chairs. Sometimes people were interesting to draw too, but none of these was really a micromastery—they were all too broad. I needed to identify a rub-pat barrier that I could focus on. After more experimentation it dawned on me that primitive art looked a lot like my untutored attempts at drawing, and that the tried-and-tested method of repeating man’s own evolutionary experience of learning a subject—start math with Euclid, physics with Galileo—was a good idea.
Immediately, I found a rub-pat barrier in flowing lines. All the great artists have lovely lines when they draw. They don’t wobble or bend—they flow and arrive at exactly the right spot. Now, this skill is at its most basic in prehistoric art, so by copying examples of it using a rollerball or microfiber-tip pen I could practice, experiment and improve at line drawing. I’d found my micromastery.
I have several books of cave art and Paleolithic art and I love the sheer simplicity of the images and the sculptures. I don’t claim to understand it—no one really can, as it dates from 10,000 to 30,000 years ago—yet the images remain beautiful and interesting. Just as beginner artists find people and faces difficult, so too did their prehistoric counterparts. They mainly didn’t bother with faces and instead concentrated on animals—side-on views at that. You can practice endless sweeping curves drawing bison and running horses. You’ll also learn some incongruous facts: rhinos were running around France 30,000 years ago engaged in head-butting contests, and our ancestors were drawing pictures of them on cave walls.
From a young age, I had always loved the white horse image cut into the chalk at Uffington in Berkshire—a testament to its power is that it is the symbol of the local district council. This was a typical simplified image using just a few beautiful lines to create the horse shape. By copying this—years later when I started drawing, not when I was younger and simply admiring it—I found it fulfilled the micromastery requirement for experimentation. Varying the lines didn’t necessarily spoil the picture—it just created new and weird iterations.
So you see, identifying a micromastery in any area involves something of a survey—but it need not be too detailed. You should learn the activity’s hotspots and especially the rub-pat barriers central to it. These may be well known, or you may unearth them by reading interviews with practitioners. And, once you happen on a micromastery, another one—perhaps a better one—may be just round the corner.