What is Mastery? What does it mean to have “mastered something”? Should we set the bar for mastery in the same place day after day?
We all have good days and bad days and we are capable of different things on those good and bad days. Some days we might feel on top of the world and like we could do anything. Other days, we feel like we shouldn’t even bother getting out of bed.
Mastery is not about whether we meet all the goals on our bucket list, or we accomplish everything to our highest potential. (I mean, if you do that…great! But we don’t have to hold ourselves to that standard). Mastery is about whether we feel like we managed to accomplish anything of value that day. On a day when I feel amazing, I might get up early, take a brisk walk/run with the dog, do some yoga, meditate, all before eating a healthy breakfast at sunrise and be productive all day. And maybe I can do all those things BECAUSE I woke up feeling great. Other days, I might feel like getting out of bed and brushing my teeth is a major accomplishment. If you’ve ever had that really terrible flu where it takes immense energy just to hold your eyelids open for more than a minute, you deserve an award for brushing your teeth that day!
The point here is, often we hold ourselves to some sort of ideal of what we believe we should be able to get done in a day. Mastery is not about always being the best at something; it is about doing something that felt hard IN THAT MOMENT. Did you shower today and felt like you knocked that out of the park? Excellent! You exhibited mastery.
If at the end of the day, you can look back and say “that thing was hard to do today, but I did it anyway”…Congratulations! You can pat yourself on the back for mastering something today. Mastery today might look vastly different than mastery tomorrow, but that’s okay. Tomorrow is a totally different day.