The Road to Subject Mastery
Do you understand and know how to master a subject or topic of interest? Anyone who has been reading The Invisible Mentor blog for some time now, know that I constantly refine the concept – it is a work in progress. Many of you may not have noticed that the new tagline is “Bite-sized learning for people on the go.” I am using the tagline as a guide for the kinds of posts that I publish. I want to publish content that will help you to achieve professional success. With the rate at which things are changing, you have to constantly update skills and acquire new ones – that’s why I thought this would be a good post. I have been using CurationSoft content curation software, and it is introducing me to articles and blog posts that I wouldn’t unearth with a simple Google search.
Skills Mastery: In this blog post, I learned about the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition. The model includes five stages: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The author, Russ Doty, explains each of the five stages. This information is new to me, so I found it quite interesting because it sheds light on the journey to subject and skills mastery.
The First Key to Mastery: Finding Your Life’s Task: To enjoy and be satisfied with your career, it’s important to find a vocation you love. Sometimes you will have a sense of what you should be doing. There are some steps to guide your path in this post, but the article itself is more philosophical in nature, but it’s worth the read.
Guided mastery at work: I liked this article because it uses a technique from one area and applies it to another. Psychologists use guided mastery to cure phobias, and that technique is being used with great success to master any subject. This brings home the importance of reading broadly, so that you can learn about techniques and methodologies from other fields. This article introduces an important topic, but doesn’t provide the steps to guided mastery – the reader has to do more work. The article mentions a TED talk, which I am including here.
How to Build Your Creative Confidence | David Kelley | TED Talks
How to Build Your Creative Confidence Video, Transcript
Personal Mastery: Personal mastery is one of the five learning disciplines that Peter Senge identified. The other four learning disciplines include: Mental models, Shared vision, Team learning, and Systems thinking. This is a short blog that explains personal mastery.
The Mastery Process: How Our Skills Grow: This article is important because it reminds us that we have to practice and apply knowledge for lasting comprehension. Once you understand the process of mastery, you can apply it to many diverse situations.
“Skills and abilities only develop when knowledge is applied directly and used creatively in meaningful situations, not on multiple choice tests. This is as true for basketball and piano playing as it is for cooking, reading, karate, mathematics, parenting, democratic decision-making and brain surgery.”
Books Mentioned
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Andy Hunt
Mastery, Robert Greene
The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge
Get Started Here – I want to help you get started on your learning journey. Read The Invisible Mentor 2015 Reading Challenge, then Join the Facebook Group for the Reading Challenge today, connecting the ideas from the books you read!
In the meantime, THANK YOU for your time… Thank you for sharing this post, and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest! What was your biggest takeaway from today?
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