Five For Your Hive: Pursue Mastery
Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki, That's The Beauty of It, Eliud Kipchoge, Every Sentence is Like The Pangs of Birth
Pursue Mastery
In one of the greatest sitcoms of television history, Seinfeld—co-created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld—ran for nine seasons. At its peak, it averaged 30 million viewers per episode (sitcoms in the same period averaged 15 million per episode). In coming up with the comic lines for the show, Seinfeld credits his deliberate and consistent way of writing content: he saves everything he sees in the triviality of daily life, and then makes it funny. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit,” Seinfeld writes in Is This Anything?, “whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas—the big yellow legal pad—I kept it in one of those old-school accordion folders.” In a recent interview, David Remnick asked, “It is possible that you've probably made a dollar or two from Seinfeld, and yet you still work so hard. Why?” “Because,” Seinfeld replied, “the only thing in life that's really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession.” “The things that money buys are fine,” he continued, “They're good. I like them. But having a skill [is the most important thing].” To ensure that he never loses the skill of stand-up comedy, he would spend hours each day writing jokes. For forty-five years, he pursued mastery by diligently being aware of the details of life and recording them on his big yellow legal pad. “I know a lot of rich people…They don’t feel good, as you think they should and would. They’re miserable. Because, if they don’t master a skill, life is unfulfilling. So I work because if you don’t, in standup comedy, if you don’t do it a lot, you stink.” Surpassing the norm in the pursuit of mastery, focusing your energy and time into your craft, and emerging top in your game—that’s the idea for today.
Six Hours A Year
For three decades, the record-breaking Ichiro Suzuki maintained an extreme obsession with baseball. But before all that, when he was twelve, he decided that he wanted to become a professional baseball player. To help him fulfill his dream of making his way into the professional league, his father designed a series of training programmes for him to master his hitting technique. Every day after school, Suzuki would, from 3:30 pm to 7:00 pm, “hit soft toss and take fungo drills in a nearby park.” He would then go home, eat his dinner, finish his homework, and head out to the batting cage from 9:30 pm to 11:00 pm to continue practicing. Ichiro had, his father said, “six hours a year to play with his friends,” while the rest of the time was dedicated to hitting baseballs. “He really didn’t have time to fit into group dynamics,” Robert Whiting writes in The Meaning of Ichiro. In 2017, Ichiro received a text from someone who asked if he could come down and study his stretching system. Not recognising the number, Ichiro ignored it. Later on, one of the coaches asked, “What’s the guy’s name?“ “Some guy named Tom Brady,” Ichiro answered, “Who the f— is Tom Brady?” By his retirement in 2019, Ichiro emerged top in his game: at the age of forty-five, he notched a record of 4,367 hits as a professional player—3,089 in Major League Baseball and 1,278 in Nippon Professional Baseball—the most of any player in baseball history. He would go on to become the first Japanese-born MLB player to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
That’s The Beauty of It
Chef Wylie Dufresne apprenticed under some of the world’s greatest chefs. Be it a comedian, athlete or chef, asking questions is always part of the learning process, and you eventually would have to start asking questions about the process. Dufresne asked a lot of questions. But then, he realised that, even after working in so many different restaurants, the greatest chefs don’t really know what’s happening in the cooking process. So, when he felt like he could no longer break the ceiling, he began seeking answers on his own, but with a tinge of creative ingredients: soaking in chemistry, physics, and biology, Dufresne pursued the art of cooking by trying to understand the principles and mechanisms that could influence the entire cooking process. He spent countless hours with experts across disciplines—food science, mathematics, design, art—seeking answers and learning what the experts knew about how they do what they do. Over time, after countless experimentations across a wide variety of fields, Dufresne developed his own line of unique dishes. When asked about his unfamiliar creations, he admitted that, even though he has had a deep understanding of the cooking process, it was still incomplete. “That’s the beauty of it,” Dufresne says, “There’s just no way we’ll learn everything about everything. It’s too vast.” “So if you’re interested and you are curious,” and if you’re committed to pursuing mastery, if you desire to emerge top in your game, “you have [the] opportunity to learn forever. That’s exciting to me. That’s what’s always driven me.”
Maybe They Never Are
Despite his fame for being the first man to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon with a time of 1:59:40 (at a pace of 4:33 per mile), Eliud Kipchoge has a thing about celebrating. He “sees it as something sinister, something dangerous,” Cathal Dennehy writes, “a self-indulgent act that might derail his mindset, make him think, somewhere in his subconscious, that he has arrived, the inference being he has nowhere left to go.” After the INEOS 1:59 marathon, there was a no-expense-spared party to celebrate his achievement. Of course, Kipchoge was there, expressing his gratitude, handing out trophies to the 41 men who’d paced him, followed by a thank-you speech. Once the formalities were out of the way, the DJ turned up the music, the alcohol flowed, and the food was laid out. Everyone was having a good time. But Kipchoge “didn’t touch a drop of alcohol…and once his speech was made, the man responsible for the entire celebration quietly exited the room, going back to his hotel for an early night.” During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Kipchoge retained his Olympic gold medal with at least 80 seconds in front of his closest rival. The race took place in Sapporo, over 800 km from Tokyo. Tradition requires that the men's marathon medals be awarded at the Olympic closing ceremony. Kipchoge and the other medallists were flown to Tokyo that afternoon. After waiting a few hours at the airport, they were driven to the stadium. In a dull room with hours to wait, the Olympic medallists did what most people would do: they used their phones to read the congratulatory messages, or check social media. All except one. Kipchoge placed his phone in front of him and sat quietly, content in silence, for hours. All this begs the question: “If he can’t bask in the glow of his achievements,” if he can’t spare himself a breather to tap himself on the back and say well done, “when is Kipchoge truly content?” “Maybe that’s the thing about all-time greats,” Dennehy writes, maybe in the pursuit of mastery, “Maybe they never are.”
Every Sentence is Like The Pangs of Birth
More than just a children’s author and illustrator, Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) was a perfectionist. If you have read any of his books, you’ll notice a distinctive style of prose and drawing that neatly defines the author. Yet, one cannot help but wonder that if it indeed sounded so simple, so childlike, writing children’s literature would seem like an easy task. And yet, his books have sold over 650 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than twenty languages. When it comes to the expression of craft—baseball, cooking, writing jokes—the best work always comes across as effortless. But beneath the craft is an unseen level of commitment to mastery, the upholding of good skill. “I know my stuff looks like it was rattled off in twenty-eight seconds,” Geisel once said, “but every word is a struggle and every sentence is like the pangs of birth.” He estimated that for a typical sixty-four-page book, he would produce over a thousand pages of text and images. He would revise his text over and over and over again, and would spend months developing a character and days talking about the placement of a comma. The question is, how many jokes are you willing to write? How many balls are you willing to bat? How much energy and time are you going to channel into the mastery of your craft, because, beyond the fame, beyond the money, beyond the achievement, the most important—the most valuable possession—is good skill. It is the most fulfilling.