
The path toward mastery: How to become an expert in a field - iuliangulea
https://iuliangulea.com/blog/the-path-toward-mastery-how-to-become-an-expert/
======
Knuthtruth
It seems to me the pyramid needs to be flipped upside down. The amount of
knowledge needed at mastery is much higher than at the base level when you are
learning the elements. It is oversimplified to say the least. Seems like an
average post that appeals to a layman who is searching the Internet for an
short guided answer to mastery. I didn't buy it.reads like any other self help
book or guide. Sorry. Lastly the 10000 hour thing is far deeper than that.
Please read the context behind it. Overall decent for a first post on a hobby
blog.

~~~
movedx
> Lastly the 10000 hour thing is far deeper than that. Please read the context
> behind it.

[https://www.6seconds.org/2018/02/09/the-great-practice-
myth-...](https://www.6seconds.org/2018/02/09/the-great-practice-myth-
debunking-the-10000-hour-rule-and-what-you-actually-need-to-know-about-
practice/) \- Perhaps this is can help shine some light on the author's
original comments regarding the 10,000 hour rule?

> It seems to me the pyramid needs to be flipped upside down. The amount of
> knowledge needed at mastery is much higher than at the base level when you
> are learning the elements.

You're confusing knowledge with experience. At the top end of a career you
need a lot of experience to build solutions, but that experience is built up
(slowly) by understanding first the fundamentals, followed by how-to build
tools and solutions, finally abstracting them behind frameworks or SaaS
products.

You have to understand TCP/IP before you can fit out an office with a network.
You have to understand Python before you can use Django. And you have to
understand Django before you can build a SaaS product. And you need experience
before you can build anything good.

> Overall decent for a first post on a hobby blog.

I might come across as a bit condescending calling it a "hobby blog". It's
sort of putting down the OP's efforts, I feel.

EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the
comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

------
keyle
The medieval explanation was far more revealing than the pyramid that came
after.

I highly recommend "everydays" as a way to mastery. I've done in arts and
music and I'm still mind blown at how fast and proficient I got.

The rules are simple: do one thing every day, that you can be held accountable
(aka. in public). Such as a daily jam on twitch or soundcloud, a piece on IG.
Keep it up, after 2-3 days you get much faster, after 10 days you do it
flyingly, after 30 days I find the curve flattens a bit as you're pretty much
as proficient as could be. Time to then start another goal as "everyday". If
you miss one day, don't sweat it. Pretend that day didn't happen.

~~~
dgb23
I agree with your first sentiment especially.

I’m fascinated by the master apprentice relationship in craftsmanship and
other things like meditation practice (zen). It is a really powerful and -
excuse this wishy washy term - natural principle.

But I think it is not as prevalent as it should be when it comes to
programming and software development, which is a beautiful mix of problem
solving, craft/skill, and the arts of communication and organization. It is
driven by experience/practice and pragmatism but also creativity and
synthesis. This paradox yearns for mentorship.

Gladly we have some excellent thinkers and communicators in our culture and
history. And the internet. But I feel as an industry we don’t do as much as we
should to further our craftsmanship.

~~~
m_kos
I agree. I have been unsuccessfully looking for a SWE/programming mentor for
years. I am now back in school, working on a PhD at a CS department and I am
still facing the same problem. Curiously, I have had no difficulty finding
mentors in other areas, e.g., modeling, psychology. I often wonder if I am
doing something wrong or is mentoring simply not a part of the SWE culture.

------
talonx
>>There is a widespread belief that putting in 10,000 hours will make you an
expert, but that myth has been proved wrong many times).

No, that is a misinterpretation of what deliberate practice involves. Most
shallow interpretations like this one just talk about the time involved, and
not about the other important factors like continuous feedback and focused
practice, and then call it a myth.

~~~
bayesian_horse
I'd say the 10000 hour thing is an oversimplification. There is no clear-cut
definition for either "expert" or "deliberate" practice, so those statements
can never be proven or disproven.

To me it is inevitable that some people embark on a journey of mastery only to
discover that there is some kind of barrier that they can't overcome just by
thinking or working their way out of it. Plenty of clear-cut examples, lot's
of more murky ones. Some barriers are predictable, some aren't.

And mastery doesn't even equal success. Many master painters had no success in
their life time. Many successful artists have questionably mastery.

------
vlttnv
Great post! Something I have found very valuable for myself is accumulating
experience. Having gone through a process, task or problem even once brings a
lot of knowledge and insights. If I had to put it in numbers, I'd say mastery
as a whole is 50% knowledge about the layers on one side of the pyramid and
50% experience, at least for me.

------
idoby
There's a certain truth to be considered that there are some things you will
never be able to master, not even after 20000 hours. Usually people identify
these things early on in life, but sometimes it takes a while.

For example, I realized early on that I would never be able to become a
fighter pilot.

~~~
dsabanin
I found myself actually being able to do things I thought early on I could
never become good at, and pretty well.

If anything, now I treat that unpleasant feeling of perceived impossibility of
something as a strong indication that I should pursue it. It never let me
down.

I think pretty much the only thing that disqualifies you from becoming a
fighter jet pilot is an untreatable bodily impediment. Well, also pacifism,
but that’s chosen :)

~~~
idoby
It might become treatable soon, but I'll be too old anyway. Good thing being a
pilot was never a dream of mine :)

------
bayesian_horse
I think the author confuses experts at performing particular tasks and experts
for some field of knowledge.

And then goes on to reiterate the age old wisdom that you need to practice,
and especially the fundamentals, to gain expert skills.

To become expert at either teaching a skill or a subject matter, or even
advance the field, I think the most important activity is to find out and
understand what and how they are doing and thinking.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants is a good first step even if just to
survey where to leap next.

------
drewcoo
That seems to misunderstand the path from apprentice to journeyman (singular)
to master. Look to actual (not software) engineers for that. They still do it
and they somehow managed it even with present day educational standards.

There is also a deep misunderstanding of what the Internet is. It's not a
"third dimension" or a set of marketing hype. It is an engineering marvel.
Which again drives home that the author has no grounding in engineering.

This "pyramid of mastery" is roughly as sensible as organizing your bookshelf
by color. It might please the eye of a layman, but makes no sense to the
knowledgeable. There is no sense of sweep and scope of concepts and instead
everything is labelled by size of something a novice can easily identify.
Never mind that this shape would be an inverted pyramid given the current
taxonomy and concept of size, it just doesn't make sense as a path toward
mastery.

Then there is cyclic learning, not drawn because apparently it would spoil the
oversimplified diagrams.

I don't understand this piece. It's not trying to sell me anything. If it
were, it would be better designed to a purpose. For charity's sake, I'll
choose to believe it's an apprentice's draft, a first effort at prose.

~~~
jimmaswell
> actual (not software) engineers

Why do people (many software engineers) insist on putting down software
engineering like this? I see things like "bad" languages being popular and
instances like leftpad cited, as if other disciplines never have clunky
standards or silly incidents.

~~~
something2
As a software engineer with an electrical engineering degree , I think there
are other factors that make software engineering "less" engineering-y.

One of the biggest things that comes to mind for me is that in software
engineering a junior engineer can legally build, deploy, and launch a critical
project.

In other engineerings, projects require sign-off from a licensed (P.Eng in
Canada) engineer. And the engineer that signs off on that project is the one
held liable for its success or failure.

Personally, I've loved software engineering for the above as it's let me grow
my career much more easily, but I do think of it as a stark difference in
engineering and "software engineering".

~~~
movedx
> One of the biggest things that comes to mind for me is that in software
> engineering a junior engineer can legally build, deploy, and launch a
> critical project.

Except in my experience this rarely happens. Maybe your experiences are
different?

You're also potentially forgetting something: if their software breaks down
it's very, very unlikely to cause a death. There are far, far, far, far fewer
cases in which software engineering failures have resulted in death versus,
say, structural engineering.

Building a bridge that takes people over a river? Better get that right...

Building LinkedIn? Let's hope we get it right but if we don't, some people get
mildly annoyed and the share holders lose their money. It's not quite the same
impact, but still downtime isn't ideal.

EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the
comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.

~~~
movedx
Love the down votes but not the rebuttals. Stay classy, Reddi-um Hacker News.

EDIT: Apologies to all. This isn't the right attitude for HN and I'll refrain
from this kind of behavior in the future.

