Mastery: Love or Fear or..?

Mastery: Love or Fear or…?

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In that book I’m studying THE ART OF PRACTICE (and unfortunately, I’ve gotten a note that at least one reader found the author’s site offensively marketing-heavy. Beware) there are two apparently contradictory statements. Rephrased, they are:

1. “Masters” are motivated by love. Eternal novices by fear.
2. Human beings are twice as motivated to move away from the things they don’t want to happen than motivated to go toward the things they do want to happen.

I’m simply going to ask myself what it would mean if both of these are true.

The first thing that comes to mind is that to the degree both are true, it is normal and “typical” to develop a middling level of skill at things. Enough to remove the fear that motivated you. But then, going further is actually a risk: practicing new skills means neglecting old ones (or so the voices in our heads say). So we will practice more to KEEP WHAT WE HAVE than we will to GAIN A NEW LEVEL OF MASTERY.

So we get stuck in a rut. I experienced that in the martial arts.

1. I was afraid of racists and bullies.
2. This led me to practicing martial arts — until I got good enough that the fear of external attack diminished.
3. At that point, I started attracting the attention of the black belts, who wanted to spar with me, triggering new fear
4. Which made me miss…