Masters of Merit
Getting to competent is quick and it feels wonderful. Getting past competent is slow, unrewarding and where nearly everyone stops.
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Getting to competent is quick and it feels wonderful. Getting past competent is slow, unrewarding and where nearly everyone stops.
The first stretch of learning anything is generous. A person picks up a chisel, a saucepan or a bow and within a season can do things that were impossible at the start. Progress arrives without being asked for. Every hour of work produces a visible change, and the change is easy to feel. This period is short, and it is misleading, because it teaches the learner that improvement is what happens naturally when you keep turning up. What follows teaches the opposite. The distance between beginner and competent is measured in months. The distance between competent and good is measured in a different unit entirely, and no amount of enthusiasm shortens it.
Competent is a comfortable place to live. A competent cook feeds people well. A competent carpenter hangs a door that closes. A competent player holds their part in an ensemble without embarrassment. Nothing about that position demands improvement, and the ordinary pressures of a life (work, money, family, tiredness) do not push a person out of it. So the skill parks itself at exactly the level where it stopped being uncomfortable, and it stays there, serviceable and unchanging, sometimes for the rest of a working life. This is not failure. It is simply the default, and it happens quietly enough that most people do not notice the moment it happened.
Improvement stops being automatic long before it stops being possible.
Most of what people call practice is maintenance, and maintenance does not move a level.
A great deal of what transfers between practitioners was never spoken aloud.