Trusting the Mastery Mindset
"I've had so many shitty songs." - Zach Bryan
To be great, you almost have to be a little psycho.
You’ll sacrifice years of your life for something that might not even work out. You’ll say no to “normal” things like TV and dogs. You’ll be called selfish and obsessed.
Every week, I sit down for at least 10 hours to refine an essay that almost nobody will read. It’s a little insane!
You know how athletes always talk about “the process?” Process over outcome, they say. Show up every day. Put in the reps. But sometimes I get crippled with confusion: what if nobody will ever read my writing? Is this essay just another passing piece of content that’ll be lost on the Internet tomorrow?
Usually when I have these thoughts, it means that I’m getting too attached to the outcomes. A writer and mentor once told me that realistically, nobody will read most of my stuff. Anyone can publish online, which means that there’s an abundance of noise, apathy, and mediocrity. [1]
To be great, I have to keep going.
Think about it this way: was Tom Brady ready for the NFL after his first year of football? Of course not. But he trained like a pro for decades. And in the world of writing, I’m an immature infant—growing fast but feeling tiny.
Yet I have faith in mastery.
Mastery
It’s this foolish-feeling sense of hope that if I stick with writing long enough, I’ll be great. I believe that consistency compounds and that mastery is more rare now than ever, even in a time when it’s most accessible.
“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.”
— Derek Sivers, How to Live
As the yolked entrepreneur Alex Hormozi once said, it’s unreasonable that you wouldn’t be great at something if you stuck with it for a decade. Like building a biceps muscle, it takes months and years to really see some bulging.
But most people quit.
Why? Because you have to be a bit insane to pour your life energy into something that will have no obviously tangible result. Still, I struggle with this. How can I reconcile the fact that I’ll spend thousands of hours writing, and I might not see any payoff for years? [2]
To answer that, let me tell you about the real reason behind a famous country musician’s overnight success.
“I’ve Had So Many Shitty Songs”
On February 15, 2023, Zach Bryan’s tour around America sold out in 30 seconds. He made $44 million dollars in under one minute.
But there’s something I never knew about him: he was in the Navy for 8 years. And around 5 years ago at the age of 22, Bryan wrote songs and posted videos on Twitter when he wasn’t learning how to launch missiles.
In his interview with podcasting legend Joe Rogan, he talked about people hating on him for being an “overnight success.” Even though he’s crushing it at 27, Bryan said that people don’t realize what it takes to be a writer and get good at writing songs.
“People forget about the four or five hours a night I spent after a shift in the Navy,” he said. “I’m saying that that’s the one thing in this life that I know I’ve earned, because I’ve had so many shitty songs.”
Even Zach Bryan wrote shitty songs?
That soothes my sympathetic nervous system. He wasn’t an overnight success—those don’t really exist.
It’s music’s manifestation of the survivorship bias: you only see the winners without realizing that there’s a lot more losers. Odds are, he probably wrote thousands of songs before bangers like “Heavy Eyes” and “Heading South.”
On the journey, Bryan said you have to keep going. Even if your songs suck ass. Even if your writing reeks. “You have to write the bad jokes and you have to write the bad songs and you have to keep going, because if you don’t, you’re never gonna write the good ones.” [3]
Tell The Universe and Let Go
In his 2014 commencement speech at MIU in Iowa, comedian Jim Carrey gave some life advice to new college grads.
“As far as I can tell, it’s just about letting the universe know what you want and working toward it, while letting go of how it comes to pass.”
He stressed the idea of detaching from the outcomes. “Your job is not to figure out how it’s gonna happen for you, but to open the door in your head. And when the door opens in real life, just walk through it.”
Ok. As a Type A overthinker, I sometimes think about how this uncertainty is certainly scary. But over the past year, I’ve realized that following my intuition and making decisions through the lens of writing has already led me to unpredictable places and people.
A friend once put it this way: I don’t have the map, but I do have the compass—writing. That’s actually a gift to have at the young age of 21. I’m not sure where it’ll take me, but I have a deep conviction that I’m onto something.
For 2024, I’m going to publish weekly. Read daily. And as I write this, I’m just settling into my new home in Austin, Texas, where I seek to surround myself with other Internet weirdos and writers.
Like Zach Bryan, I’m gonna work my ass off and write a lot of shitty essays. Like Jim Carrey, I’m gonna place a tremendous amount of trust in my intuition. In writing. In Austin. In myself. And, yes, even in the pure insanity of the mastery mindset.
Notes
[1] An amazing tool I found to detach from outcomes: Twitter Demetricator. It’s a Chrome extension that blocks Twitter metrics like Retweets, Likes, and notifications on the app. Thanks to Noah Zender for the tip!
To set reasonable expectations, I think it’s wise to set a long time horizon and assume that it’ll take 5 to 10 years to be successful and build an audience that I can uniquely serve. So in the meantime, especially in the first few years, I need to fully detach from all outcomes and build my skills.
[2] But you also have to love the work. Jerry Seinfeld once said that “your blessing in life is when you’ve found the torture you’re comfortable with.” I found it with writing. Sometimes it stings, but I love honing the craft every single day in some way.
For finding work you love, Paul Graham has this great essay called “How to Do What You Love.” He talks about how there’s a belief we learn in school in life that work = pain. Of course, that doesn’t have to be true. But many of us, including me, were conditioned to think this way.
He also talks into finding jobs and making a living. There’s two routes. You can either find work that’s aligned with what you love to do as you develop more skills, or just find another job. I’m still experimenting with both of these methods.
[3] I found this story on Joe Rogan’s podcast with Zach Bryan from 2023.
His comment about writing shitty songs might get conflated with writing lots of bad stuff. This isn’t what he means, though. Bryan probably did the best job for every song. But as he leveled up his skills, the songs seemed horrible looking back. In other words, cringe is a sign of progress.
Steve Jobs once said, “we don’t ship junk.” My goal is to do the highest quality work I can for every essay. Over time, I’ll build my skills. But the funny thing is that when I read these in a year, I’ll see some of the shittiest writing ever! If there’s any tangible benefit to mastery, it’s gotta be that—retrospective cringe.
If you read this far, you’re my type of person!
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Thanks to
and for reading drafts of this.Thanks to
for the compass-map idea. Thanks to Tommy Christie for your support and perspective from your 30s. Thanks to Dante Ausonio for helping me develop these ideas about the psychopathy of obsession.
Love it. Resonates. Bangers in the notes too. Hope you’re settling into Austin so far! So exciting
So honored to be a friend!
Steer by compass is the advice for the times we are in - and I love how you have absorbed it into your writing philosophy.
I will continue to champion your writing because it is so honest and earnest. You always have at least one person reading your essays!