I am continuing to open up paid subscription issues like this one to everyone through the end of the month, in case they may help someone deal with the challenges of the current crisis a little bit better.
Dear friends, welcome to Ad Astra. It’s so wonderful to be able to welcome you here.
This week, I was watching Russell Brunson, a self-made entrepreneur and YouTuber, tell his life story in one of his videos. Russell’s high-energy (some would say aggressive) style is not something I particularly enjoy, but amidst his bombastic speech, there was a message that resonated with me (in fact, it’s a message I hear — and try to spread — often):
Becoming a master is a process. Don’t expect to get good in the blink of an eye.
Stories of overnight success abound on social media and in our psyches, but that thing truly doesn’t exist. To get good at something — anything — you have to spend time honing your craft.
So that’s the topic I’d like to discuss today: becoming a master.
“The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.”
By far, the question I get most often from folks is “How do I get published in National Geographic?”
To me, a more appropriate question would be “What should I be doing every single day to become a master at X (where X is the thing that you most desire for yourself)?”
Last I checked, there were 22,136 images in my Lightroom processing software. These are not all the images I have ever taken, nor the images I have taken in the past four years since I started on this path.
These are the images that I have imported from my hard drives and edited in the past four years. That’s roughly 16 images a day, every single day, for the past four years, that I have actively worked on.
The first Nat Geo assignment happened roughly 16 thousand edited images into this path.
The numbers here are not important. What matters is that we do something to hone our craft consistently, over time.
And that’s how we get closer to mastery.
Ira Glass, a beloved host of This American Life, explains this better than me:
“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap: for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK?
It’s trying to be good, it has the ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work.
Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?”
Watch the full video, Ira Glass On Storytelling, here. I highly recommend watching it as a regular level-setting exercise for anyone with a goal of mastering a skill (it could relate to your creative work, yoga practice, or any new endeavor you’re hoping to take on). I certainly have days when I feel as if I’ll never reach mastery and that’s when I refer back to this video.
You belong
Even if it doesn’t feel this way right now, you belong in the space you yearn for. You have the passion, the taste, the desire to be in this field and that’s half the battle already. You might not have mastered the skill yet, but you belong.
It may be hard to keep at it (as Ira Glass says, many people never get through this phase), but if you do stick with it, you will eventually start closing the gap between the great work in your vision and the actual work you produce.
What can we do to help ourselves in this process?
Here are some of my thoughts (let’s use photography as an example but you can apply it to many other fields):
Become the connoisseur of your chosen field: look at the work of other photographers and analyze what makes it good. Become a frequent visitor of sites like LensCulture or Aperture. “Consume” quality and you’ll start discerning what quality in your field looks and feels like.
Practice your skill every day: you don’t have to whip out an expensive camera gear (although getting comfortable with your gear is also important), but you can take images with your phone every single day to get better (and check out #The100DayProject for inspiration)
Work on your impostor syndrome: You belong. Get to know people who are doing what you’d like to be doing so that you can see: they are humans just like you who likely push through their own impostor syndrome and feelings of inadequacy on a regular basis. “I never went to photography school. I don’t have any special skills. Who am I to get this assignment?” — these were my thoughts when I started working with Nat Geo. I kept reminding myself that I belong in this space.
Most importantly, do not quit. Keep going on your path. Most of us quit too soon. And the ones that stay on the path eventually gain mastery in their field and reach the vision that they had imagined.
Onwards,
Yulia
This week’s joy links:
I’m reading Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence by Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova (lest we blindly follow the 10,000-hour rule on our road to mastery)
I’m listening to Mgzavrebi, a Georgian 🇬🇪 music band (bonus: scenes from sun-drenched Georgia that make you feel like you’ve just taken a trip there)
I’m watching Killing Eve, a bloody, sexy thriller in which two smart, powerful women face off while becoming obsessed with each other (what could go wrong?!)
Issue #19: Becoming a Master