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For those that pursue mastery, one of the great challenges is how to consistently improve. It’s easy when the ball is rolling, but to borrow an expression from the gym, plateaus are hard to overcome.

Let’s break it down.

There are several layers to any practice. The first basic layer is productivity. If you do the thing, in any capacity, that is a win. A basic formula for consistent improvement is consistent productivity, I.e. do the thing on a regular basis.

There is an inherent problem here however. To again borrow from weight-lifting culture, the possibility of overtraining is very real. If the only fruit of your labour is the feeling of being productive then it is easy to get exhausted.

A deeper reward system is required.

The next layer to practice is learning. If you’re doing the thing and you are learning, then you get to witness yourself improve. This is a far deeper connection to the practice. It is enough to dramatically increase your sense of happiness while doing the thing and also have the feeling that doing the thing increases your overall feeling of happiness in life.

Here however there is a problem. The problem is a learning plateau. Again, when the ball is rolling, things feel incredible, but when things start to stagnate and it is hard to learn something genuinely new, it can feel overwhelming and one can start to lose interest. Of course it is reasonable to just push through and wait for the next learning milestone, and this works a lot of the time, but after doing this enough times, eventually overtraining can set in again.

An even deeper reward system can be of great benefit here.

The final layer to practice, at least to my practice (I would be delighted to discover deeper layers, but I’m not there yet), is the emotional response. Let’s be real: gaining mastery in anything requires massive repetition. So much repetition that if the goal is the destination then it can be very overwhelming  and stressful. The goal needs to be the journey. With both of the first two layers, productivity and learning, the goal is very much the destination. One is working towards something by being productive and learning. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very exciting pursuit, but it’s missing something.

Something wonderful can happen when one gets really involved in a practice. They can start to bring about an emotional response in themselves in the practice of the thing they are doing. Take meditation for example. A very simple formula for an extremely rewarding meditation practice is “sit until you experience joy”. This changes the pattern – it’s no longer about the long term rewards – the reward of joy in a single session is more rewarding than the vision of long term reward.

When a practice is done with the intent of creating an emotional response it is enough to sustain a very high level of enthusiasm towards the practice over the long term, throughout the many repetitions required to gain mastery. A sure path in my opinion.