The Mastery Mindset: Passion, Love, Mastery

Three words run this building. They’re on the wall, they’re in the mission statement, and they’re the reason a student who came in to get better at auditions leaves better at being a parent. Passion. Love. Mastery. The first two people understand on sight. The third gets misread constantly, so here’s what we actually mean by it.

The three values

Our mission is to inspire others to “act with passion” and realize their true potential as human beings, through connecting personal development with mastery level training in the art of acting. The values underneath it, in the words we use:

• We choose to “act” with passion.
• At the center of everything we do is love.
• We commit to a never-ending pursuit of mastery.

Never-ending is the operative word. Read it again, because it’s the part people skip.

What is a mastery mindset?

When someone is a master of a craft you trust them on sight. You want to be around them, work with them, learn from them. So it’s natural to want to be one, and to ask how you get there. Here’s the catch: you don’t. There is no there. The best in the world at anything know what others refuse to admit: there is always room for improvement. Does that sound discouraging? Don’t let it. It’s the most freeing news you’ll ever get, because it means the goal was never a destination. The goal is the direction.

A mastery mindset, then, is the decision to be a little better at the thing today than you were yesterday, and to keep making that decision after the applause, after the booking, and after the day nobody noticed. It’s what I mean when I say an actor’s purpose is growth, discovery and mastery, and it’s why the answer to what you need to be an actor is never a piece of equipment.

About that 10,000 hours thing

Malcolm Gladwell made the number famous in Outliers, drawing on Anders Ericsson’s research on expert performers. Ten thousand hours of practice to master a skill. It sounds like a long time, and it is, and it also misses the point that Ericsson himself spent years trying to make: the hours were never the variable. The kind of practice was. Deliberate practice, at the edge of what you can do, with feedback, is what produced the experts. Ten thousand hours of the same comfortable thing produces someone who is very comfortable.

Which is a relief, honestly. You don’t need to count hours. You need to make the next one uncomfortable and honest, and then do that again.

Why the process is the point

Ask anyone who has gotten good at anything and the conversation turns to process fast. How they practice, what they track, what they do on the days they don’t feel like it. That isn’t an accident. We are all looking to improve, and the people who actually do are the ones who fell in love with the work of improving rather than the picture of having improved. What’s so great about mastery you didn’t earn? The sweat and the failures and the boring Tuesdays are what make the wins mean anything.

So what’s the answer?

What mastery means for you is yours to decide. What it will cost is not: it costs wanting it badly enough to do the work when nobody is watching, and being humble enough to hear the note when they are. You’ll never be a master. None of us will. But every week we are handed another chance to move closer to the better version of ourselves, and taking that chance, over and over, is the whole mindset. Happiness lives in the progress.