This is what operating in the zone of mastery looks like.
This is an excerpt from The New Yorker – https://lnkd.in/gUQKDnAz – Harumi Marakami’s journey to become a writer in his own words.
A bit of a back story.
Haruki Murakami became a writer after an epiphany during a baseball game in 1978. He decided to write a novel and completed his first book, “Hear the Wind Sing,” which won a new writers’ contest and marked the start of his literary career.
He felt he could be a writer, but he found that he could not write and run his Jazz Club at the same time.
So, even though the Jazz Club was a sure thing and was making more money than writing, he shut down the club to give writing a shot.
The excerpt below lists all the decisions he and his wife took and the adjustments they made that kickstarted his illustrious writing career.
1) The path of mastery burns away all distractions.
2) Make the main thing (writing, in this case) the main thing. Everything else serves the main thing—shutting down the club, moving to a smaller city, etc.
3) But make the process easy – don’t deliberate, dilly-dally or allow anxiety
3) One good thing leads to another, and all energies compound to make a larger, much larger impact – running to stay fit led to quitting smoking led to his becoming a better writer…
…Murakami famously talks about how running improves his writing and vice versa… but that’s for another post.
