- 1). Learn your craft and apprentice until its methods are second nature to you. Just as a world-class athlete trains until her body remembers the moves without her having to think about it, craft should become second nature, like standing on your own two feet.There's a neurological reason for this: it's hard to perform two cognitive tasks at once and do them both well. A 1997 study at Northwest Hospital in Seattle Wahington demonstrated this. Physical therapy researchers observed three groups, young and old people who had no problems with balance and older people who had problems with balance. But compared to the other two, the group with balance problems -- those for whom maintaining balance is a cognitive task -- showed a distinct deficit when asked to complete sentences and make visual matches at the same time as balancing. Learn your craft until you are fluent with it. That way you no longer have to think about it and can move into more imaginative realms.
- 2). Take the art seriously, not your ego. People who produce masterpieces obsess about their art. It absorbs them. They may know they are accomplished artists, musicians and poets, but their obsession is with the medium, whether it be oil paints, mathematics, language or music, not the bragging rights. To a master, the art is always bigger than the self.
- 3). Preserve your naivete. Sometimes if no one tells you can't, you can. Stay away from well-meaning or jealous naysayers. They can have the effect of closing the drapes, so that you find yourself looking around and saying, "yes, by golly, it really is dim and dark in here," when just a moment ago sunlight was streaming in.
- 4). Resist the impulse to comply but not to excellence. Be playful, and stay open-minded. You are not painting by numbers; allow happy accidents. They may be the product of your subconscious imagination. But even if an accident is just an accident, you will see possibilities in it that you might not had you not taken risks.
- 5). Be single-minded. Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorom -- which other mathematicians thought for centuries was probably impossible -- but only after giving up everything to spend more than seven years in his attic office working on it. This kind of devotion is not unusual among masters. Beethoven continued to write symphonies even after he was deaf. And most people have heard about Michaelangelo's years of backbreaking work while he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
- 6). Be patient. Van Gogh spent years teaching himself to draw before he would allow himself to pick up a brush. After mulling it over some time, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, Archimedes, suddenly figured out how buoyancy works while entering his bath. Famously, he shouted, "eureka!" But eureka in the bathtub usually comes only after a long period of thinking and trying.
- 7). Teach. The more you explain your craft, the more you internalize and understand its mechanisms, and the better you become.
- 8). Develop the germ of a vision, maybe while you're stirring your coffee or lying in bed. Pursue it, applying everything you have learned. If necessary, let yourself discover the big picture as you work. Obsess about it. Let it swallow you whole.
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