Sunday Selection 2025-03-16
I've been thinking about mastery a lot lately. This started with a change in career direction and a re-evaluation of my personal goals over the last year (which I will write about in detail at some point). It was further catalyzed by a number of things that I've encountered over the last year that have really resonated with me. Today I'm sharing some of the "source material", so to speak, while I gather my thoughts for a more detailed post later.
Blue Eye Samurai (particularly episode 7, Nothing Broken)
Blue Eye Samurai was a hit anime on Netflix last year. The whole show (8 episodes so far) is worth a watch, but one part in episode 7 stood out to me. At this point, the main character, the titular Blue Eye Samurai, is in a rough spot, where it seems like everything has gone wrong. The mentor figure/adoptive parent in the show gives this advice about being an artist:
To be an artist is to do one thing only. Look at me, I cannot fight, or weave, or farm. I make swords. I cook for strength to make good swords. I study the sutras to cleanse my heart to make good swords. Swords, pots, noodles, death. It is all the same to an artist. An artist gives all they have to the art, the whole. Your strengths and deficiencies, your loves and shames. Perhaps the people you collected.
There may be a demon in you, but there is more. If you do not invite the whole, the demon takes two chairs, and your art will suffer.
I only know how to make swords. Each morning I start a fire. And begin again.
Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery via Thorsten Ball's Joy and Curiosity #24
Jerry Seinfeld, without a doubt, is a master comedian. Seinfeld, in his 70s, and fabulously rich, continues to practice his craft, traveling regularly and performing as a live comedian. In this article, Trung Pham tracks down an old Esquire magazine article that Seinfeld has mentioned as influencing his views on mastery. The article pulls out key parts of the article, and places it in context with Seinfeld's career and practices, giving us a very grounded perspective on why mastery is important and a worthwhile pursuit, and how to go about achieving it (as well as how to avoid falling into some common pitfalls).
I recently learned about the concept of kodawari: the disciplined pursuit of perfection, while being attuned to the fact that perfection is impossible. For me, it is another step on the path of focusing on the process and the daily actions, rather than the destination or goal. Curiously, I learned about this while reading an article about the Sigma BF camera, a camera that seems to be pursuing the platonic ideal of a digital camera.
About a Nightingale is one of Craig Mod's pop-up newsletters: a daily newsletter over a short period of a time that followed one of Mod's explorations through the less-well-trodden paths of Japan. These newsletters are members-only, so I don't want to point to the whole thing, but I wanted to share this excerpt from the final issue where Mod talks about why he prefers to do his walks alone over a number of days:
The point of creating patterns or rhythms of full days (and doing so in sequence — this is critical, the sequence part, the unbroken part, the sustained part) is to produce an “imprinting” of that fullness on the mind and in the muscles. And then to bring back that fullness into the play of “non-work” time. To bring that register of fullness to the people I love, my step-daughter, my parents, etc. So these are important days because they inform so much else in life!
And you have to fight to create this time. Life (now more than ever given current events and global chaos) conspires to steal from you days and hours and years to “work.” Conspires to steal from you the ability to hone that “fullness meter” in your heart or brain or wherever it lives.
Like artistry, mastery, and kodawari, fullness is another concept and experience that I am working to have more of in my life.