The path toward mastery: How to become an expert in a field

It seems to me the pyramid needs to be flipped upside down. The amount of knowledge needed at mastery is much higher than at the base level when you are learning the elements. It is oversimplified to say the least. Seems like an average post that appeals to a layman who is searching the Internet for an short guided answer to mastery. I didn't buy it.reads like any other self help book or guide. Sorry. Lastly the 10000 hour thing is far deeper than that. Please read the context behind it. Overall decent for a first post on a hobby blog.

The medieval explanation was far more revealing than the pyramid that came after.<p>I highly recommend &quot;everydays&quot; as a way to mastery. I&#x27;ve done in arts and music and I&#x27;m still mind blown at how fast and proficient I got.<p>The rules are simple: do one thing every day, that you can be held accountable (aka. in public). Such as a daily jam on twitch or soundcloud, a piece on IG. Keep it up, after 2-3 days you get much faster, after 10 days you do it flyingly, after 30 days I find the curve flattens a bit as you&#x27;re pretty much as proficient as could be. Time to then start another goal as &quot;everyday&quot;. If you miss one day, don&#x27;t sweat it. Pretend that day didn&#x27;t happen.

&gt;&gt;There is a widespread belief that putting in 10,000 hours will make you an expert, but that myth has been proved wrong many times).<p>No, that is a misinterpretation of what deliberate practice involves. Most shallow interpretations like this one just talk about the time involved, and not about the other important factors like continuous feedback and focused practice, and then call it a myth.

Great post! Something I have found very valuable for myself is accumulating experience. Having gone through a process, task or problem even once brings a lot of knowledge and insights. If I had to put it in numbers, I&#x27;d say mastery as a whole is 50% knowledge about the layers on one side of the pyramid and 50% experience, at least for me.

There&#x27;s a certain truth to be considered that there are some things you will never be able to master, not even after 20000 hours. Usually people identify these things early on in life, but sometimes it takes a while.<p>For example, I realized early on that I would never be able to become a fighter pilot.

I think the author confuses experts at performing particular tasks and experts for some field of knowledge.<p>And then goes on to reiterate the age old wisdom that you need to practice, and especially the fundamentals, to gain expert skills.<p>To become expert at either teaching a skill or a subject matter, or even advance the field, I think the most important activity is to find out and understand what and how they are doing and thinking.<p>Standing on the shoulders of Giants is a good first step even if just to survey where to leap next.

That seems to misunderstand the path from apprentice to journeyman (singular) to master. Look to actual (not software) engineers for that. They still do it and they somehow managed it even with present day educational standards.<p>There is also a deep misunderstanding of what the Internet is. It&#x27;s not a &quot;third dimension&quot; or a set of marketing hype. It is an engineering marvel. Which again drives home that the author has no grounding in engineering.<p>This &quot;pyramid of mastery&quot; is roughly as sensible as organizing your bookshelf by color. It might please the eye of a layman, but makes no sense to the knowledgeable. There is no sense of sweep and scope of concepts and instead everything is labelled by size of something a novice can easily identify. Never mind that this shape would be an inverted pyramid given the current taxonomy and concept of size, it just doesn&#x27;t make sense as a path toward mastery.<p>Then there is cyclic learning, not drawn because apparently it would spoil the oversimplified diagrams.<p>I don&#x27;t understand this piece. It&#x27;s not trying to sell me anything. If it were, it would be better designed to a purpose. For charity&#x27;s sake, I&#x27;ll choose to believe it&#x27;s an apprentice&#x27;s draft, a first effort at prose.