Le Journal

This article is an early look at our upcoming special issue on Mastery. Check back in on January 28 to catch the full issue. After years of studies and six months in New York, I was convinced I’d mastered English. I was cracking jokes with American friends, binge-watching shows without subtitles, and even thinking in English half the time. Then I moved to London for my first job at Google, and suddenly, I felt like I’d never truly master the language. Colleagues used phrases I’d never heard. Cultural references flew over my head. I found myself nodding along in meetings, pretending to understand jokes that left me completely lost. It felt terrible. I was encountering the growing pains inherent to mastery, but everything I’d been told about getting good at something had set me up to misinterpret this growth as failure. Our cultural narrative about mastery is not just incomplete. It’s actively misleading, and we’ve mythologized mastery in ways that make people quit right when they might be breaking into new territories. The five lies we tell ourselves about mastery The problem starts with how we think about mastery itself. We carry a set of deeply ingrained assumptions about how it works — assumptions that feel obvious and true, but that are actually counterproductive. Here are the most damaging ones: Misconception #1: Mastery is a destination. We imagine crossing a finish line where we’ll finally “arrive” as experts. Watch any master craftsperson, though, and you’ll see someone still questioning their approach, still discovering new techniques, still experimenting and pushing into uncharted territory. Misconception #2: Improvement is linear. We expect steady, measurable progress: practice more, get better, repeat. Reality looks more like a stock chart: long plateaus punctuated by sudden jumps, with occasional dips when you’re integrating something new. Misconception #3: Mastery requires extreme intensity. Research shows that sustainable, consistent practice beats sporadic bursts of intensity. Someone who practices 30 minutes daily for a year will typically outpace someone who practices 3 hours once a week. Misconception #4: Technique is everything. We obsess over the mechanics: the “right” way to hold the instrument, the perfect form, the exact method. But while technique matters enormously, so do mindset, feedback loops, rest, and environmental support. Misconception #5: Mastery feels easy once achieved. This is perhaps the most dangerous myth of all. Even masters experience frustration and have to revisit fundamentals, but they’ve learned to find satisfaction in the process itself, not just the outcomes. So, if all our assumptions about mastery are wrong, what actually works? The answer lies in how our brains learn and adapt. George Wylesol Achieving mastery through experimentation Our brains adapt most rapidly when faced with novel challenges, not repetitive drilling. Perhaps most importantly, studies on what researchers call “desirable difficulty” show that struggle isn’t a sign that you’re failing. It’s a sign that your brain is forming new neural pathways. That’s why experts don’t just repeat what they know — they constantly experiment at the edge of their abilities. Instead of grinding through repetition, they treat every practice session like a mini-laboratory. Here’s what that looks like: Run tiny experiments. Let go of the idea of mastery as a destination. Instead, experiment with different approaches. A programmer might experiment for a few days with coding without looking at Stack Overflow or ChatGPT. A musician might practice scales for 10 minutes before touching any songs for two weeks. These tiny experiments let you test the boundaries of your knowledge while embracing the in-betweens. Design feedback loops. Create systems that help you notice what’s working. You might track which new words you actually use in conversation, photograph your work at different stages to see patterns in your process, or ask for…

You may think that denial can be harmful when encountering a challenge. But let me tell you about Richard Cohen. When I was struggling with my eyesight, I read a book called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, by Richard Cohen. Cohen, who called the book a “reluctant memoir,” was diagnosed with MS at 25, survived two bouts of colon cancer, was legally blind for much of his life, and yet had an incredible, award-winning career as a war correspondent and journalist. He was married to journalist Meredith Viera for almost 40 years and was the father of three children. Sadly, he passed away in late 2024 after a struggle with pneumonia. I had the chance to speak with Richard 20 years after I first read his book. He was a third-generation MS patient: Both his grandmother and his father had MS. What he learned by their example, especially his father, was not to allow himself to be victimized by the illness — to accept it and live with it rather than in spite of it. Indeed, his father, a physician, practiced medicine for nearly four decades and lived into his nineties. He taught Richard, by example, that he could live a rich and meaningful life with MS. Richard had seen others close to him do it, and he told himself that meant he could, too. Though the diagnosis was devastating, maintaining a flexible mindset helped him see that he could nonetheless continue to pursue his dreams — living with, not despite, his illness. Richard was not in any position to stop or give up. When he learned he had MS, he had just landed a plum position as a producer with ABC News. A neurologist he had only seen once called and blurted out that Richard had MS, and that there was no treatment and no cure. And then hung up. “Diagnosed and adios. Nothing much we can do,” Richard recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. This sucks. But I don’t have enough information about this to freak out, so I won’t.’ And I didn’t. But I also didn’t talk about it. There was, and remains, way too much stigma put on people who have to go through life with a chronic illness, so I decided that I would just go ahead and live my life.” I asked Richard if he thought of this as stoicism, and he laughed. “I’d actually use the word denial. Look — I wasn’t in denial about having MS. What I mean by denial is I wasn’t about to let this disease dictate the terms of my life, you know? I wasn’t going to let it keep me from getting the jobs I wanted, which eventually included reporting from war zones and having to run my ass off so I wouldn’t get shot.” Cohen certainly piqued my interest in adding the concept of denial to my understanding of resilience. It was completely at odds with the pillars of [Steven] Hayes’s definition, and yet, Cohen arrived at a similar destination: He knew what really mattered to him. “Of course, I told the people I’m close to about my illness. I told Meredith, my wife, on our second date because I wanted her to know what she might be getting herself into. But she decided she was interested in me anyway, and we’ve been together ever since.”  Richard had a strong marriage and a close bond with his children — which are absolutely relationship goals for me. But he wasn’t an open book, either.  “Aside from only those closest to me knowing, my father encouraged me, from early on, not to share my illness with anyone else. He knew the stigma that would get attached to me, and he wanted me to define my life on my own terms and not become my diagnosis.” And so, in a sense, his keeping this private became a kind of denial, too — he only shared his full self with a chosen few, but with the rest of the world, he refused to accept their preconceived notions that would come along with their knowledge of his MS. Cohen didn’t make his diagnosis public until deep into his career, when he was a well-established producer for the Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Only after he’d proven himself on the job did he share with his bosses that he had MS. “I wanted them to…

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