Hello, Steemians and today I want to talk with you about general mechanics of self-improvement.
Introiduction
The situation looks so similar: you work on some skill and succeed at the beginning, but then you stuck into plateau.
Is that time to quit this all?
During this article I'm going to convince you in opposite! Let me first explain you how, in my opinion, mastery works.
Levels of mastery
From first sight it depends from time and in my view the levels of mastery are the following:
Let's describe them:
First notable level is novice.
Actually it can be from 2 up to 20 hours to achieve.
The main feature of this step is that now you know how to do something:
how to write some code, how to say "Hello" on Chinese or how to make a checkmate by single queen.
Well, you spend some more and more hours. You really like you practice and then ... boom! - next step!
You are on the second step - you are an amature right know.
You are the fear of all newcomers :D However, your abilities are overestimated and that's because some strange people look at you with a smile. Maybe one day you'll be among these strange people.
The main feature of amature step is your neglect of details. Amature guitar player is not bad but often he lose the tempo or something like that. Amature chess player is not noob, but he often miss the opportunities. It can be hard to find a work using your amature skills.
It requires a decent time to achieve the next level, the specialist.
The main feature of this level that you can earn money using this skill right now. You can do it after 500 hours or 1500 hours, who knows? Definetely, after you found a work - you are a specialist.
After this moment you are in giant desert. Next step waits for you really far away?
You can do your work, you earn money for it. The main question is :
Do you have enough patience to work on every small mistake?
Be careful, don't fall into trap of empty repetitions - your self-improvement should be clever and creative!
After a long time you will be rewarded - you are Expert.
What's next? Yopu can stay here and make a lot of money, but if you are truly into your business - make it brilliant.
Give yourself all to it!
Day after day and week after week and maybe you'll get near to the mystic Mastery. It's all about 10000 hours rule.
Actually, now it should be clear for you that these levels are determined non-linear by time.
The law of growing as professional is exponential.
Every step is steeper. Every move require much more time and efforts than previous.
So when you put an efforts and stagnating you should first ask yourself : How much time really did I spend?
You can check it on my example:
Here I wanted to give you examples and "counterexamples" of exponential theory.
But is this real counterexample? Don't forget about quality of efforts!
So my russian speaking skills are actually not out of rule.
As I said you need to study new in clever way and I'm sort of stagnation in russian language skills: everyday life boring talks are not enough to give me a mastery. In reality, as a user of Russian language and native speaker I'm somewhere between specialist and expert.
Conclusion
I think in this small article we all learned something new. Be patient, persistent, be creative, live your life and come near to mastery. What do you think? Do you agree to exponential theory of skills? What skills do you want to improve?
Share your opinion in comments and follow my blog 