There is a common ground among those who know their craft.
In the athlete who is at the top of their game.
In the musician who fills the stadium.
In the chess player who is a world champion.
In the painter whose work spans our age for hundreds of years.
In the writer whose quotes are immortal.
Their most valuable skill isn’t inspiration, but the ability to work without it. Most of their lives they work without talent, but persistence. Spending their lives cultivating an almost irrational appreciation for the discomfort others instinctively avoid.
They don’t ask why they spend years doing the work. They are haunted by not doing it.
They don’t allow themselves to be disturbed. The outside world takes nothing from them. By painting their own lives, they show us how to paint ours.
They develop their intuition as a gift. Whatever they produce has life and presence, a planet all on its own, with its own gravitational field, pulling to itself like-minded particles from the cosmos. Ideas, visions, characters. Images they have never seen. Words they didn’t know they knew.
They remain ignorant about certain things. They don’t mind not knowing. They are not less flawed or finite than you, they just stop waiting, they act with what they have and where they are. They feel in control because they’re living the life they actually have, not the one they wish for.
The girl who wrote about kindness while hiding from the Nazis.
The artist who painted the Mona Lisa.
The lawyer who freed his country from colonization without violence.
The pastor who faced racial hatred repeatedly and finally changed the course of humanity by saying “I have a dream.”
They don’t just live, but they live their own lives. And they make us follow. Sometimes for eternity.
Disappointment doesn’t deter them. Complacency is not an option. Grandiosity doesn’t blind them. They don’t waste time. They allow serendipity.
In mastering their craft, they learn how to see the world differently; they look with wonder and admiration at what is hidden for the rest of us. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured it by saying that “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
Every time they act, they congregate in a higher spiritual space. They notice what’s hidden in plain sight. They hear the silence between notes.
But there’s one more thing they all share.
They have an unmistakable respect in how they listen to you. They don’t say you are crazy. They hear your dreams. They don’t laugh at your ideas, they encourage them. If you get close enough, they show you how to accomplish them.
They want you to see the world as they do. They need you as much as you need them, to lift everyone higher.
The difference between them and you is one: decision. You don’t need more time, you just need to decide. The whole world will offer itself to you, if you keep trying.
Sources
[1] Mastery - Robert Greene
[2] Montaigne - Stefan Zweig
[3] Govt Cheese - Steven Pressfield
[4] Meditation for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman
[5] Farnam Street Blog (Various) - Shane Parrish
[6] “You don’t need more time, you just need to decide” - Seth Godin’s Blog