Mastery—Learning with the World’s Best Masters

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

 

Preface

 

Preface

What if we had, at our fingertips, in brief and accessible form, what the world’s greatest masters of their craft and art had to share with us? Wouldn’t we jump at the chance to learn from them? What might we learn, and how might that learning enrich our lives?

We learn as we have been taught.  Who we learn from, how we learn from them, and what we learn count immeasurably. These things matter because, to a large extent, we become what we learn; our learning makes us who we are.

Each of us can learn from the world’s great masters—past, present, and future. The best masters inspire as well as instruct; they encourage and motivate. We learn from their ideas and their ideals, from their principles and their practices. We learn, too, from their character, from their lives and actions. We learn from what they commit themselves to, from what they stand for, as they teach by living example.

The most important thing we can take from them may be how to learn better ourselves and how to help others improve their learning. We can learn how to become masters of learning and masters of teaching.

For the masters included in Mastery!, I consider briefly why they do what they do—what motivated them—along with how they have done those things. I consider, too, something of what we can learn from them. I explain key ideas and values, accompanied by brief excerpts from their writings and sayings.

Not all of these masters devoted their lives to conveying knowledge, and skills, though many did. Some were reformers who created practical strategies for learning; others formulated designs for instructional policy and practice. Still others used multiple technologies to convey their mastery; they used television, film, websites, podcasts, print and digital magazines, video games, and more to reach audiences of millions, as have Tim Gunn, George Lucas, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, John Madden, and Sal Khan, for example.

What does it take to reach a masterly level of art and craft such that doing some things well seems as natural as breathing? Half a dozen considerations, I think, are relevant to mastering any art or craft, fashion and design, cooking and broadcasting, music and dance, medicine and engineering, management and magic —across a multitude of disciplines, including rhetoric and literature, the visual and performing arts, mathematics and philosophy, history and religion, economics and psychology, science and technology, and more.

 

1. Masters of every type continue to grow as individuals and as members of varied learning communities. They remain curious, inquiring into all manner of subjects and disciplines, not just their own specialties (though without neglecting those—keeping up their disciplinary and domain “chops” and perfecting their expertise).
2. Masters sustain their passion for creating memorable experiences for others, especially for their followers and advocates. They amplify their constituents’ learning, adding immeasurable value.
3. Masters demonstrate and model. They explain and explore. They engage their followers dialectically in dynamic interplay. And they do these things consummately well.
4. Masters also excite and incite those they instruct. They set minds aflame and hearts ablaze. Master release their followers’ imaginations. They summon them to the mysteries of learning and performance; they inspire them to strive for excellence.
5. Masters stretch their followers, pitching ideas and lessons just beyond their reach, rousing their effort and will to do things not considered possible. Masters enable others to do things they may not be able to do themselves.
6. Masters awaken powers and ambitions in their followers, while inducing in them an incentive for pursuing their dreams. Masters help others discover what they truly love themselves.
7. In the process of achieving expertise, masters of every imaginable art, craft, and skill achieve mastery of themselves.

In The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, Adam Gopnik suggests that there is something magical about mastery, which involves accomplishment through accumulated practice, a summation of traditions of practice. Mastery of any art or craft, Gopnik suggests, grows out of generating flow from learned fragments, creating fluency from sequences of small steps. He suggests that mastery “involves everything we do” and “engages the totality of ourselves.” Mastery is more than having acquired fluency with a discrete set of skills; rather, it shows forth “a unique human presence” (8).

Like other masters of their craft and art, master educators are not mere sources of knowledge, but are, rather, exemplary models of a fully realized and embodied set of productive practices (9-10). Gopnik suggests, further, that mastery needs to be demonstrated in performance, fulfilled in practice.

Mastery requires accepting the challenge courageously, what Gopnik calls “catching the bullet” (201-205). The final mystery of mastery is that the master takes the plunge, leaps into the unknown, accepts the risks, whatever they may be, and in the process, shows how it’s done.

In Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel explains how the master remains always with the student, even as the student becomes proficient at what is being learned—archery, calligraphy, swordsmanship; art, music, languages; engineering, mathematics, science; architecture, medicine, nursing; interpreting literature, analyzing visual objects, developing business acumen, building things, improving writing and thinking skills—and every other ability imaginable.

Herrigel explains that the physical teacher disappears, but the teacher’s spirit remains, as “teacher and pupil are no longer two persons, but one” (65). It’s a stage of learning where the pupil subsumes the teacher, incorporates the teacher.

In experiencing a sense of mastery, we attain a command of a discipline, a subject, a process, along with a deep and pervasive understanding of reality, of others, of ourselves. We experience a sense of confidence and empowerment that derives from what we have learned to do. This heightened ability occurs gradually over time, with practice. We undergo an apprenticeship in which we learn the fundamentals of whatever art and craft we are pursuing.

Like others who have written about high levels of accomplishment and performance, Robert Greene suggests that in undergoing an apprenticeship, masters of all kinds actively experiment to enhance their abilities and powers (Mastery 2-3). Greene identifies three stages of apprenticeship: “Deep Observation (The Passive Mode), Skills Acquisition (The Practice Mode), and Experimentation (The Active Mode)” (56).

Those who achieve mastery do so through an intensity of effort motivated by a powerful inclination toward and a deep love for a particular skill or goal. These characteristics enable those on the path to mastery to persist through difficulties, hardships, and all manner of challenges. Would be masters possess the patience to persist in a passionate pursuit of their goals.

The way to become a master is to never cease to be responsive to the enticements, to remain always a student of a practice’s mysteries. These are the goals towards which all masters, I believe, should aspire. In achieving these goals, each of us can be, in George Steiner’s words, an “accomplice to transcendent possibility” (Lessons of the Masters 102).

 Table of Contents

 

Mastery—Learning with the World’s Best Masters
Volume I: Major Influences Past and Present

Preface

PART ONE     Established, Time-Honored Authorities

Introduction
Extraordinary Figures, Sine Qua Non
Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci

 

Chapter One.          Ancient Authorities
1      Plato and Aristotle
2      Sappho and Cleopatra
3      Arete of Cyrene and Hypatia of Egypt

Chapter Two          Religious Figures I
4      Confucius and Sakyamuni (Buddha)
5      Muhammad and Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Chapter Three        Religious Figures II
6      Moses and Maimonides
7      Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus

Chapter Four           Christian Thinkers I
8      Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas
9      Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan
10   Martin Luther and Ignatius of Loyola

Chapter Five          Christian Thinkers II + 1 Muslim and 1 Atheist
11   Desiderius Erasmus and al Ghazālī
12   Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche
13   Simone Weil and Dorothy Day

Chapter Six            Western Writers I
14   Homer and Virgil
15   Michelle de Montaigne and Francis Bacon

Chapter Seven       Western Writers II
16   John Milton and Thomas Jefferson
17   Jane Austen and William Wordsworth
18   Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy

Chapter Eight         Influential Educators I
19   John Amos Comenius and Horace Mann
20   Johann Sebastian Bach and Zoltán Kodály
21   Margaret Fuller and Jane Addams

Chapter Nine         Influential Educators II
22   Neil Postman and Maxine Greene
23   Leon Kass and Martha Nussbaum

Chapter Ten           Influential Thinkers I
24   Baldassare Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli
25   John Locke and Immanuel Kant
26   Samuel Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Chapter Eleven       Influential Thinkers II
27   Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill
28   Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
29   D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton

Chapter Twelve      Movers and Shakers I
30   Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and François Fénelon
31   Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe

Chapter Thirteen    Movers and Shakers II
32   Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois
33   Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
34   Rabindranath Tagore and Chinua Achebe

Chapter Fourteen   Educators Across Disciplines I
35   Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (Anthropology)
36   Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson (Psychology)

Chapter Fifteen      Educators Across Disciplines II
37   Martin Buber and Parker Palmer (Religion +)
38   Susanne K. Langer and Jerome S. Bruner (Philosophy/Psychology)
39   Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jonathan Haidt (Philosophy/Social Psychology)

Chapter Sixteen      Extraordinary, Exemplary Characters I
40    Marian Anderson and Jackie Robinson
41    Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey

Chapter Seventeen  Extraordinary, Exemplary Characters II
42   Yogi Berra and Yoda, Jedi Master
43   Sister Mary Clarence and Pete (Maverick) Wilson
[Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Cruise]

PART TWO    Visionary, Modernizing Authorities

Chapter One         Influential Scientists
1  Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton
2  Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein

Chapter Two        Medical Practitioners and Researchers I
3  Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton
4  Elizabeth & Emily Blackwell and William Osler

Chapter Three      Medical Practitioners and Researchers II
5  Lewis Thomas and Atul Gawande
6  Frank Wilczek and Jennifer Doudna

Chapter Four        Social and Political Reformers I
7  Mary Wollstonecraft and Emma Willard
8  Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass

Chapter Five         Social and Political Reformers II
9   Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
10  Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu

Chapter Six            Educators and Educational Theorists I
11  John Henry Newman and William James
12  John Dewey and Maria Montessori

Chapter Seven        Educators and Educational Theorists II
13  Lev Vygotsky and Ivan Illich
14  Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Paolo Freire

Chapter Eight        Writers and Teachers I
15  Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
16  Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin
17  Adrienne Rich and E. B. White

Chapter Nine         Writers and Teachers II
18  Mary Beard and Garry Wills
19  George Saunders and Mary Karr
20  Marilynne Robinson and Robert Alter

Chapter Ten           Musicians and Teachers
21  Nadia Boulanger and Andrés Segovia
22  Shinichi Suzuki and Dorothy Delay

Chapter Eleven      Choreographer and Musician-Teachers
23  Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine
24  Yo-Yo Ma and Wynton Marsalis

Chapter Twelve      Actors and Artists
25  Konstantin Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen
26  Dorothea Lange and Frida Kahlo

Chapter Thirteen    Architects and Museum Directors
27  I. M. Pei and Maya Lin
28  Philippe de Montebello and Laurence des Cars

Chapter Fourteen   Game Changers I
29  James A. H. Murray and George Grove
30  Vince Lombardi and Phil Jackson
31  Peter Drucker and Margaret Wheatley

Chapter Fifteen      Game Changers II
32  Henri Petroski and Jeanne Gang
33  Ken Burns and Neil deGrasse Tyson
34  Bryan Stevenson and Saru Jayaraman

Chapter Sixteen     Contemporary Influences I
35  James Beard and Julia Child
36  Grace Hopper and Steve Jobs

Chapter Seventeen  Contemporary Influences II
37   Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber
38   Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee
39   Sal Kahn and George Lucas

Chapter Eighteen   Contemporary Gurus I
40  David Ogilvy and Jack Foster
41  Roger von Oech and Edward de Bono

Chapter Nineteen   Contemporary Gurus II
42  Richard Feynman and Edward Tufte
43  Diane von Furstenberg and Tim Gunn

Epilogue          Family Mentors—Edward S. DiYanni and Mary H. DiYanni
Coda                Teaching Credo & Quotations

Appendix A     My Influential Teachers and Mentors
Appendix B     Teaching and Learning with Colleagues and Friends

Notes
References

Volume II: Humanities, Sciences, and More
Preface

PART ONE     Humanities +
Literature

Chapter One
1.     Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer
2.     Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
3.     Walt Whitman and Robert Frost

Chapter Two
4.     J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis
5.     Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston

Chapter Three
6.     Gwendolyn Brooks and Kenneth Koch
7.     Tillie Olsen and Shirley Chisolm
8.     Adrian Rich and E. B. White

Chapter Four
9.     George Orwell and Annie Dillard
10.  Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco
11.  Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chapter Five
12.  Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia
13.  Michael Hogan and Adrian Barlow
14.  Sheridan Blau and Lawrence Scanlon

Rhetoric & Language

Chapter Six
15.  Mina Shaughnessy and Mike Rose
16.  Kenneth Burke and Ann E. Berthoff

Chapter Seven
17.  Deborah Tannen and John McWhorter
18.  Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman
19.  Pat C. Hoy II and William V. Costanzo

Chapter Eight
20.  Robert Boynton and Robert Gottlieb
21.  John McPhee and Jhumpa Lahiri
22.  Steven Pinker and Cornel West

Politics, Society, History

Chapter Nine
23.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
24.  Franz Fanon and Hannah Arendt

Chapter Ten
25.  Edward Said and bell hooks
26.  Lani Guinier and Tim Wu

Chapter Eleven
27.  Giambattista Vico and Denis Diderot
28.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Hilary Mantel

Chapter Twelve
29.  Jill Lepore and Yuval Harari
30.  Walter Isaacson and Richard Cohen
31.  Robert A. Caro and Doris Kearns Goodwin

Arts—Music, Dance, Art & Architecture, Theatre, Film

Chapter Thirteen
32.  Leontyne Price and Leonard Bernstein
33.  Robert Shaw and John Eliot Gardiner
34.  Jacques d’Amboise and Twyla Tharp

Chapter Fourteen
35.  Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child
36.  Naomi Lewin and Robert Sherman
37.  Willie Ruff and William Zinsser

Chapter Fifteen
38.  Vincent Scully and E. H. Gombrich
39.  Elliot Eisner and Rob Kapilow

Chapter Sixteen
40.  William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw
41.  Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler
42.  David Mamet and August Wilson

Chapter Seventeen
43.  Peter Brook and Richard Taruskin
44.  Sir Ken Robinson and A. O. Scott

PART TWO    Sciences +

Math and Medicine

Chapter One
1.     Leonhardt Euler, G. H. Hardy & Srinivasa Ramanujan
2.     Eugenia Cheng and Steven Strogatz
3.     Paul Lockhart and Eric Mazur

Chapter Two
4.     Richard Selzer and Paul Farmer
5.     Oliver Sacks and Robert Coles

Chapter Three
6.     Danielle Ofri and Perri Klass
7.     Jerome Groopman and Avicenna (Ibn Sinā)

Sciences, Natural and Social

Chapter Four
8.     Richard Feynman and Edward Tufte
9.     Carl Sagan and Stuart Firestein

Chapter Five
10.  E. O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould
11.  Brian Greene and Alan Lightman

Chapter Six
12.  Dan Ariely and Robert Frank
13.  Gregory Bateson and Clifford Geertz

Chapter Seven
14.  Daniel Kahneman and Howard Gardner
15.  Alison Gopnik and Paul Bloom

Education, Theory and Practice

Chapter Eight
16.  Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel
17.  Elizabeth Peabody and Mary McLeod Bethune

Chapter Nine
18.  Gabriela Mistral and Jaime Escalante
19.  Carol Dweck and Peter Johnston

Chapter Ten
20.  Robert Scholes and Michael Sandel
21.  Theodore Hesburgh and Ruth Simmons

Chapter Eleven
22.  John Holt and Hope Jahren
23.  A. S. Neill and Joseph Albers

Chapter Twelve
24.  Carl Rogers and Fred Rogers
25.  Robert Maynard Hutchins and Roosevelt Montás

Chapter Thirteen
26.  Benjamin Bloom and Lawrence Cremin
27.  Linda Darling-Hammond and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Potpourri—Sports, Self-Help, Magic, Floral Arranging, Hospitality, Gastronomy, Criticism, Creativity, Commentary, Television, and Travel

Chapter Fourteen
28.  John Madden and Bob Costas
29.  W. Timothy Gallwey and Brené Brown

Chapter Fifteen
30.  Harry Houdini and Ricky Jay
31.  Gregor Lersch & Klaus Wagener and Ella Lawton Grant Campbell

Chapter Sixteen
32.  Conrad Hilton and Danny Meyer
33.  M. F. K. Fisher and Pauline Kael

Chapter Seventeen
34.  Adam Grant and Michael Michalko
35.  Thomas Friedman and David Brooks

Chapter Eighteen.
37.  Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson
38.  Arthur Frommer and Rick Steves

Epilogue          Family Mentors—Edward S. DiYanni and Mary H. DiYanni
Coda                Teaching Credo & Quotations

Appendix A     My Influential Teachers and Mentors
Appendix B     Teaching and Learning with Colleagues and Friends

Notes
References