August 2nd, 2011 by KP

Key 3: Get a guide / Training / Guidance / Mentorship

Charisma & conviction, two keys of a master in their craft. Take notice of that when you choose your guidance or your mentor.

What are you practicing? What if you’re practicing wrong? Then you get very good at doing something wrong. So it’s a good idea to get a teacher/guide/roadmap/MENTOR. You will eventually learn that you are doing something wrong one way or another, but determining how long that will take to learn that lesson is leaving it down to fate.

A guide, training, or a mentor will auto-correct you as you go, zapping your errors the second you make them, fine tuning your “skill” in the moment rather than taking days or weeks or trying something and finally realizing it’s not done by doing X it’s done by doing Y. Mentorship will fix your mistakes in a fraction of the time it will take you to figure it out on your own.

If you take from one person it’s called stealing. If you take from many people it’s called research.

Spend your time taking & learning from the best of the best, the ‘kings’, the superstars, the masters of the craft, and then once you take everything from them, you spend the time in the dark shedding yourself away from them. This is when it becomes “you” rather than you becoming who you learned from. You gather your research, cherry pick what suits you, what you like, adapt it to yourself, then you go. Like Charlie Parker said:

“Master your instrument, master the music, then forget all that shit and just play.”

As an apprentice of your craft, you should never stop learning during the entire apprenticeship. Then when you reach the top, to stay at the top, guess what, you STILL never stop learning & exploring & expanding your knowledge base of your craft. If that isn’t the case, then you shouldn’t be doing it anymore. Remember, the key to growth is getting outside of your comfort zones & getting uncomfortable, so that once you’ve spent enough time being uncomfortable, what used to be outside of your comfort levels is now inside your comfort zone. If you’re not growing you’re dying. So in order to forever be growing, you have to continue to forever not be you.

Everyone that has made it to the top of their game has encyclopedias of knowledge on their craft. Vaults of information & learning aids that they have studied & studied & studied. This isn’t a coincidence. Find anyone, any video, any book, anything, that you can learn from in your craft. If you’re going to be here, then there’s a necessity to make a difference. It takes such a desperate obsessive focus, you have to focus with all of your fibers with all of your heart, with all of your creativity.

Be motivated by your fear of fear. Hate it when you are afraid or scared to do something. Attack your fears.

As the old adage goes, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The separation of talent & skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, that are trying to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours & hours & hours of beating on your craft. There’s no easy way around it, no matter how talented you are, your talent WILL fail you if you’re not SKILLED. If you don’t study, if you don’t work really hard, if you don’t dedicate yourself to being better every day, you won’t be able to communicate your artistry with people the way that you want to.

Never show up unprepared.

Surrender yourself to the art to the teacher, but that doesn’t mean you turn over your life to the teacher, you don’t want a guru. You still have to keep the autonomy inside yourself. You are finally the ultimate authority on your own practice.

The separation between failure and success in life is a knife’s edge. That knife’s edge is your attitude, which has the power to shape your reality. If you view everything through the lens of fear, you get reasons to not move forward, to not take action, and to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crisis, a problem, or a hurdle, as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle. The chance to strengthen & toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative fearful attitude into a positive fearless attitude purely by a mental process this will result in positive action as well.

KP