Mastery
Mastery of a craft can only be achieved when individuals hone their skills to the utmost and become competent experts. To acquire knowledge of a specific skillset, the individual needs to devote a lot of time and concentrated effort to learn as many intricacies, nuances, and details about their craft. They also need to assimilate that information into their abilities to wield the art necessary to perform it. They need to constantly keep up with the pace of development within that craft to retain their state-of-the-art skills. The context of blockchain development involves: Keeping up with the current standard development stacks. Looking into newly emerging technologies. Developing a deep understanding of the field to critically assess the pros and cons of using a specific technology or architecture.
Many principles behind mastery and the journey of achieving peak human performance are studied in various areas of study like neurology (for learning-related matters), psychology, physiology, social sciences, self-development studies, and more.
A good entry book that has remained relevant for decades is Robert Green’s book ‘Mastery’. It details the steps that the most capable people have abided by to achieve greatness and mastery of their craft throughout human history. You can find a good summary of the book’s principles here.
The main sections of the book are:
- Discovering Your Calling
- Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship
- Absorb the Master’s Power: The Mentor Dynamic
- See People as they Are: Social Intelligence
- Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active
- Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational: Mastery
Becoming a master of blockchain development or its specializations is a never-ending process. However, the possibilities for what you can create are endless, and all of its skillsets are highly valuable and sought after.
I’m personally excited about what the masters of the future will be able to build and how that will enable the future of human coordination, public goods, and regenerative crypto-economics.
Rationality
Rationality is the quest of trying to find the truth systematically. A great book about rationality is ‘Rationality: From AI to Zombies’ by Eliezer Yudkowsky (thank you, Rai, for the recommendation).
From the book: “When we talk about rationality, we’re generally talking about either epistemic rationality (systematic methods of finding out the truth) or instrumental rationality (systematic methods of making the world more like we would like it to be). We can discuss these in the forms of probability theory and decision theory, but this doesn’t fully cover the difficulty of being rational as a human. There is a lot more to rationality than just the formal theories.”
The book is comprised of 6 smaller sections:
- Book I: Map and Territory
- Book II: How to Actually Change Your Mind
- Book III: The Machine in the Ghost
- Book IV: Mere Reality
- Book V: Mere Goodness
- Book VI: Becoming Stronger
You can read the sections sequentially as they originally come from blogposts he wrote. Each section goes through different areas of rationality. A great summary of the book can be found here.