Shuhari: from learning to mastery
I wrote the below story the other day on my LinkedIn page:
From the series “things I’ve learned from my children” (or at least observing them truly reinforced what I already thought was true)…
Shuhari (the states of learning to mastery) really works. Offer the basics, train it, let it roll, when ready combine things… at the best spirit Myagi-San and Karate Kid. Mastery will come with a few big leaps and many small steps.
In the video (see in the original post on LinkedIn here) is my second daughter, Sofia, learning to master cycling without training wheels. If I knew the tricks I now know, I’m not sure that I’d have introduced training wheels to begin with, but that’s a different story (and I still have my boy of currently 3 to validate the new thinking). This was a breakthrough moment. It only took around a handful of training sessions (which were not long at all, 10-30min). I must confess I was skeptical we would get there that fast, but trusted the process, observed, introduced something new when she got better at the current move.
I’m so proud of her! She has been a little fighter from the get-go, born premature and small at 34 weeks (after nearly stopping growing at week 30 or so), spent her first 3 weeks in pre-natal ICU, she has often been on catch-up mode, but she relentlessly eventually gets where she wants.
May she never stop learning and (try to) mastering things!
Now, what does that have to do with business and work - you might ask. I hope at least at the most trivial level there was good enough of a hint there: the path of learning the basics, getting good at it, and eventually combining those in creative and context-effective manner is open for everyone, in the road towards mastery.
But I think there's more worthwhile reflection to that. As I feel somehow this might be a lost art these days of speed and ambition of fast-tracking… This craft-like approach towards learning the complex - which is more and more predominant in an era of information, technology, connectivity, and all of that.
To be clear - I myself would confess being a victim of the same, of not being patient enough, of trying to minimize effort and just do about enough so that opportunities would open up, and move on to something else. In that sense, this is as much of a note to me as anyone else reading it.
Anyway,, the point here is not offering solutions necessarily - just bringing up the insight and the out loud thinking out here… But perhaps there might some practical implication which I may suggest for now:
The seemed obvious or basic migth be worthwhile reiterating with some frequency;
There's nothing wrong with taking a step back and being back to basics here and there, so to unlearn, or re-learn, whatever applicable in context, to perhaps open up a new innovative path towards mastery;
And that, ultimately, I wish all of us the same as I did for my little girl on the very last sentence of the original story…
May we never stop learning and (try to) mastering things!