Think about the skills you have today - basic motor skills like scratching your head, opening a jar of pickles, to extremely complex functions like driving a car. Speech and language skills are considered to be some of the most complex skills in the human repertoire.  And there are the more admired and highly regarded skills of the advanced athlete, musician, and artist. Some of these skills appear pretty mundane because we use them all the time and they don't bring us big applause or sense of accomplishment (anymore) and others are just for fun and some do bring us a level of exhilaration that keep us coming back for more. All these things we have learned through what in the marshal arts realm is called the path of mastery. Think about what it took to learn anyone of these; parents (instruction) and hopefully enthusiastic parents (made it fun) and repetition or practice. If you can learn these skills you can become a master at just about anything.

George Leonard, in his book, Mastery, outlines what Mastery really is and what it takes to accomplish some level of mastery over just about anything. Most of his learnings and teachings come from his experience as a long time marshal arts student and teacher. His book has been extremely instrumental to me in becoming a significantly better orienteer.

Leonard’s book is small, not a very difficult read, and packed with lots of good stuff to think about and apply over time. The book it divided into three parts:

1)      The Master’s Journey (what is mastery)
2)      The Five Master Keys
3)      Tools For Mastery

And in several parts I’ll provide a summarized version of Leonard’s ideas doing my best to map his ideas and analogies to orienteering.

Part One: The Master’s Journey

I’m going to change the order of things for a bit and talk first about what we really want to do in orienteering. There is a decision to be made, if we haven’t already made it subconsciously. Do we like orienteering and are we going to stay with it. Assuming you’ve decided to stay with it the decision is what level will you participate? You can dabble, you can obsess, or you can master.

Going for the Mastery means more than dabbling, more balanced and less intense than obsessing, yet demanding time, consistency, and practice - not like practicing for 30 minutes everyday - well, kind of - but more like a doctor "has a practice". It's just what they do.

How we participate in life is a question that comes up in our lives over and over. It’s ok to dabble – this allows us to experience a number of different things in life without having to be a professional at each of them. We live in fast times and like to do a lot of things, however, time is limited and we can only do so much – which activities will we choose and why? But it's good to have something, maybe a couple of things, in life for which we go for some level of mastery.

Their is a richness that comes with the territory of mastery that just can't be found on either of the other two paths. Goals and accomplishments are good things. However, they usually exist in the past or the future. The "practice" is always in the present.

The tough part of this decision is that we are conditioned in our culture to value the quick fix – which can only provide the illusion of accomplishment and only a scent of satisfaction. Leonard makes a strong case that the only real short cut to true mastery is a long-term approach – what I would call a moderate long-term approach. What happens when you take a short cut off the short cut? We either never get to our intended destination or we end up taking a much longer route. (And if you are going to take a true short cut it really helps to double check that you are in fact on the right path; I tried taking a short cut my first time climbing King’s Peak in Utah. 30 minutes up a bolder field only to have to climb down at least 30 minutes to get back on the trail and then double-timing to try to catch Jim- now about an hour ahead.)

Mastery starts with baby steps – identifying the primary tools and skills needed; where are all the controls on the car and what do they do; doing laps in a parking lot with someone watching and instructing us. In orienteering – what are the essential tools – the map, the compass, and the coach or mentor. The primary skills – map reading, taking a bearing, pace counting and later (a strategy skill) route choice. The former needing to be mastered before the later. That is, route choice isn't going to be incredibly valuable if you take off in the wrong direction or you don't know what the green hash marks mean. 

Leonard recommends not competing to win until you have a reasonable control over these primary skills. The process is incremental and you can’t skip stages. Leonard also makes the case that barring medically diagnosed mental limitations, we are all geniuses and we can all achieve mastery. There will be moments of frustration and moments of exhilaration – most importantly you will learn more about yourself in the process than you can imagine - if you're paying attention.

Here is a quick summary of the Master’s Curve. The generalized curve is a plateau (over time) with short spurts in growth, immediately followed by what looks like a minor set back. In other words, lots of time at one level, then all of a sudden it looks like 4 steps forward and then a settling into 1 step back (or only three steps forward.) And then, more time at the next plateau. Again, the process is incremental. You can’t work on route choice (effectively) until you have foundational skills pretty well under control (map reading, taking a bearing, and pace counting.) And at each new level we probably experience another round of frustration as we have to start “thinking” again – at least thinking again in a new way - taking our "practice" to a new level, which may give the illusion that things are temporarily falling about.

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Over time, the journey, for many, seems to achieve a certain richness or higher quality (as does the student) when the whole person becomes involved and integrated into the activity – a graceful sense of purpose when the muscles, mind and spirit join together in unison – which orienteering offers quite naturally. ¨