To understand
the final law of mastery, you need to know a little algebra and a little art history.
From algebra, you might remember the concept of an asymptote. If not,
maybe you’ll recognize it below. An asymptote (in this case, a horizontal asymptote) is a straight line that a curve approaches but never quite reaches.
From art history, you might remember Paul Cézanne,
the nineteenth-centuryFrench painter. You needn’t remember much—just that he was significant enough to have art critics and scholars write about him. Cézanne’s most enduring paintings came late in his life. And one reason for this, according to
University of Chicago
economist David Galenson, who’s studied the careers of artists, is that he was endlessly trying to realize his best work. For Cézanne, one critic wrote,
the ultimate synthesis of a design was never revealed in a flash rather he approached
it with infinite precautions, stalking it, as it were,
now from one point of view, now from another. . . .
For him the synthesis was an asymptotetoward which he was forever approaching without ever quite reaching it.17
This is the nature of mastery
Mastery is an asymptote.You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can
never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully.
Tiger Woods, perhaps the greatest golfer of all time, has said flatly that he can—that he must—become better. He said it when he was an amateur.
He’ll say it after his best outing or at the end of his finest season. He’s pursuing mastery. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is that he understands that
he’ll never get it. It will always hover beyond his grasp.
The mastery asymptote is a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain But it’s also a source of allure. Why
not reach for it?
The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization.
In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
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