There’s a state preserve near my house. I’ve seen the trails when I look out west from my upstairs balcony, and I’d been wanting to explore…🕵🏻♂️
So one day, I did.
I walked along the edge of my neighborhood until I found a path that connected to the main trail…
Then I took that trail out into the preserve.
It started out great.
But in the last few years, I’ve gotten away from hiking regularly…
And while I probably won’t start hiking daily anytime soon…
It felt good to get out and venture into the “unknown.”😊
Now “unknown” is, of course, relative…
Because while to me, the trail I was going on was “unknown”…
To many locals, it’s very much known and familiar…
And we'll come back to that point in a moment.
Anyways though, I walked on for about 3 miles, and then I decided to turn around (I didn’t bring any water and just wanted to get a feel for things)…
But as I was heading back towards my neighborhood, something unexpected happened…😬
I got lost.
And as I was walking back, I must have gone onto one of those without realizing it.😏
I’ve done a ton of hiking, have a good amount of trail experience, and I can only think of one other time I got even semi-lost in my life…
So this was a surprise…😲
But I also don’t want to be overdramatic…
This wasn’t really like a “oh s***, I might die” type of lost…
It was more of a “This is annoying, I might have to walk to one of the houses I see in the distance and then call my wife,” type of lost.
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, though…
I was able to work my way back to where I’d come from, and I eventually found my way to the main trail…
And then I walked home and drank a big bottle of ice cold water.
And that’s really it.
Except, since that happened, I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship and mastery…
Going back to those experienced locals, for whom the trail is known…
If I’d been with one of those folks, then I wouldn’t have gotten lost…
Because they know the terrain. They’ve been there before. They could have guided me.
Nothing profound there…
But then I extrapolated things out even further.
I don’t know how deep the preserve goes…
But the deeper you go, I’d assume the fewer people who know the trails so intimately…
And then I thought: What if I were to go to a different preserve or wilderness area entirely?
In that case, the local who was a great guide at the first preserve could be just as lost as me in the second.
And this made me think of mentorship.
There’s the obvious lesson here, that a good guide can help you stay on the path and avoid getting lost…
But the more nuanced reality is that different terrains require different guides…
And the more “remote” that terrain is, the fewer guides there are available to help you…
Plus, for those more remote terrains, the right guides will need to possess considerable technical knowledge and expertise as well.
This applies to so many areas of freelancing, entrepreneurship and business…
Really, it applies to any endeavor.
When it comes to learning a new skill or starting a new venture, there are often many guides who can help you get started…
But as you venture further along the path towards mastery, the number of experts available to you grows increasingly small.
Eventually, with true mastery, you perhaps no longer need a guide or mentor for the path that you’re on.
But if you’re wise…
You’ll continue to pay attention to the others who have made it as far as you have.
You'll find that, even though you’ve both ended up in the same place, those others often do things a bit different than you.
Not all the time, there will be a lot of similarities…
But you'll notice smaller variances as well.
And some of the time, you'll think those variances are inconsequential, inefficient, or even bizarre…
But other times, you may find those variances to be brilliant.
There were actions, habits, and processes you could have deployed along the way…
Things that would have made your progress even faster…
If only you’d known they existed when you first started out.
And when it comes to growth and development, the path never ends…
You can always go further too…
But only if you want to.
In the beginning of your journey, you’ll actually cover much more ground…
Because there is such a vast world of knowledge and experience ahead of you…
And so the friction is minimal.
Every new thing you discover, every new realization, all those “aha” moments and obvious things you didn’t know…
Every time they enter your brain, you’re pushed further along the path.
As you approach mastery however, your speed inevitably slows down.
It’s as if the path you’re on takes you into a deep canyon where there appears to be a rock-walled-dead-end.
Perhaps the first time you hit one of these walls…
You find that with a little digging, it crumbles…
And all it took was your two fleshy hands.
With subsequent layers though, you notice that the breakthroughs become harder and harder to attain…
A shovel replaces your hands…
Then the shovel stops working and you need a drill…
Until one day the drill bit goes dull, and you need TNT.
On-and-on-it-goes…
And yet what you'll likely find…
Is that at the very height of mastery, where the breakthroughs are the hardest to come-by…
Success always seems to come back to precision.
An explosion won’t make a dent in those last walls…
But a tiny diamond-cutter will…
A carefully guided laser.
Something extremely focused.
At the apex, making progress requires chipping away, painstakingly, to go any further.
And eventually, you’ll be left with a decision:
Do I keep chipping?
Perhaps there’s a breakthrough yet to be had. Another layer of soft dirt just behind the wall. If I keep going, maybe I’ll then accelerate rapidly into another level I never thought possible, perhaps I’ll make a quantum leap.
Do I turn around and help others go where I've been?
Am I satisfied with how far I’ve come? When I look up, way up, and I can’t see the sky or any other people, do I really want to continue on alone? Or do I want to turn around, to go back and meet other adventurers, and help show them way forward? Do I want to give them the tools to use, share the pitfalls to avoid, and teach them the little nuances that will make their journey easier?
Or do I go somewhere new?
My other option is to find entirely new terrain.
But do I really want to start over again? To become a beginner again? Do I love the journey so much that I don’t mind the years of time and dedication to make it back to that canyon and those metaphorical walls?
There’s no right answer to those questions…
Yet, if you go far enough down the path towards mastery, this is the decision you’ll someday face.
– SPG
P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link