Skill Development

I have a deep appreciation for mastery. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort to become truly masterful at something. It doesn’t matter so much what that thing is, whether it’s a sport, a musical instrument, a language–spoken, written, or programming computers. The path to mastery is the same: it demands time, practice, sweat, tears, trials, tribulations, and a whole lot of hard work.

As a kid growing up, I studied music in school and played a few different instruments. One instrument I always wanted to learn was the guitar, which I never did because I could only play what the school had available for free, since my parents couldn’t afford to buy me my own.