Morgan’s Leadership In Action
The topic that comes up for me is Purposeful Practice. I have a book on my shelf called "Mastery: the Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment" by George Leonard. Mr. Leonard talks about how the pursuit of excellence and mastery at anything requires a lot of practice, patience and a willingness to embrace the plateau. The plateau is that long, dreadful stretch between blips of progress. In our instant gratification culture, we want success to come easily, quickly and in linear fashion.
Opera singer Beverly Sills once said, "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
Ask anyone who is truly excellent at whatever they do and they will probably tell you that there have been many failures along the long, lumpy road to success. That there have been many many many hours invested in progressing their proficiency.
Odd as this might sound, one of my proficiency projects has been the improvement of my hand-lettered posters for SCIL. Fortunately (or not) I have several friends who are old-school sign painters. They understand layout and how to execute lettering with a brush and paint. The good news is that I have access to their wisdom, experience and examples. The bad news is that they are so very good at their craft that it's intimidating and disheartening to experience my crawl of progress. I have to be careful about comparing my work with theirs, for if we compare, we despair.
The summarized version of this story is that by investing in books, online courses, hundreds of dollars in German markers, brushes, paints and paper I have prepared myself to begin practicing in earnest.
As we know, nothing happens if nothing happens. I've actually been diligently practicing the basic strokes with my brushes and paint on paper and the progress is encouraging. The increments are small and SCILsters mightn't even notice what's happening. I do, however, and I'm encouraged by the wee steps forward.
I had a triathlon coach named Stephen Farrell many years ago. When a bunch of us were panting and sweating at an indoor cycle training session he shouted to a guy in the back of the room, "Hey Gary, isn't it amazing what a little focused training will do?!"
Indeed it is. Every day my alphabets get better and better. The more posters that the SCILsters take home, the more incentive there is to make more.
Make more and make 'em better!
Written by Morgan McArthur, SCIL Facilitator
