Escape From Excellence

I recently picked up a copy of This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin at the Harvard Bookstore. I was disappointed. Levitin points out that in study after study of musicians, athletes, and other peak performers, it takes 10,00 hours to reach virtuosity, what he also calls mastery. That’s three hours per day for a decade. Or eight hours per day for a shorter time. Apparently if you do that, you will develop virtuoso level skills, you will master your craft. So this means that everyone who has worked full time for four years is a master? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, this 10,00 hour investment is only good enough to achieve excellence. But excellence is not virtuosity. Mastery is virtuosity, and mastery is about a lot more than skill. Virtuosity without mastery is callow, adolescent, and ugly. It leads to tasteless, ghettoized excess. Just ask Yngwie Malmsteen.

I attended the New England Conservatory for a few years. The freshman class was made up of blindingly good kids who wowed everyone back home. The senior class was even better. The problem was that most of the young ones, including me, sounded like skilled typists or impersonators. Few became real artists, and those that did are really something. Don Byron was a classmate. John Medeski came a bit later. There were others. But most wallowed in focusing on skill development or in emulating masters. These young people were certainly excellent, and to be admired for their effort, commitment, etc. But mastery? Not usually. Mastery is qualititatively different than excellence. It is different in kind, not in degree. Excellence takes 10,000 hours (at least), but mastery can occur in a moment. Any time spent chasing excellence after the Falling Point keeps us away from reaching mastery. It only increases costs and undermines performance. Mastery requires outting al that skill in the service of your Dynamic Essence.

Don’t confuse excellence with virtuosity. Virtuosity takes mastery, and that’s a whole ‘nother world.