I think I've mastered
procrastination english (as a non-native speaker). I can read and write about complex subjects, have fluent conversations, understand a large amount of idiomatic expressions, detect nuances, etc. Last two times I was tested I scored on the highest range and only 2 points off the maximum score (that is, 99.7%). Often I seem to have more vocabulary and less spelling mistakes than a sizeable number of natives, which is somewhat distressing.
Alas I've never felt this as being that much of an achievement because it seems to be such a widespread skill and because I've been taught since before I even remember. I just grew into it. I've always been in bilingual schools; many of my science and history classes were in english, and I loved those classes. I also devoured books and particularly the vocabulary sections. I think it was around 1994 we got cable TV which had lots of american TV with subtitles, which of course was a huge boon, and when my father changed his win 3.1 to 95 I started to use it to browse the internet...
TTM (time to mastery): 10 years at the very least (more like twice that) of frequent exposure. Though never actually lived in a native-english place for more than a few weeks.
I think I've mastered digital photography. I can make good looking shots that are technically correct in full manual mode, know how film and digital cameras work and what all that stuff in the menus means, know the specs jargon, know what's required for studio lighting, portraits, landscapes, architecture, sports, macro... and can explain the subject matter to other people (unlike monstrous amounts of people in the internet who dumb things down or make numerous egregious mistakes). I also know how to post-process images properly (my photoshop-fu is quite strong) and prepare them for display or print. It's not like I'm doing national geographic covers or winning prizes, but I do have plenty shots worthy of large prints, that would easily sell if I ever cared to sell them. Well, I actually did win 1st
and 3rd place on a contest at university, but I think the bar wasn't particularly high...
I started taking photos in 97 when on a family trip to Spain (I was 9 years old then). My father bought me a 110 format camera, largely keeping me off his new Sony Cybershot (which being one of the earliest consumer digitals, was almost as expensive as it was shitty). I spent some years taking pics with various point and shoot digitals until at some point I enrolled in a class and learned how to use a SLR. I was lucky that the teacher was old school and taught history of photography and didn't dumb down technical matters (which is rather common). After that I got a DSLR, read a couple of books and kept shooting. I learn some tricks from websites, mostly about lighting and raw, but its largely a matter of practice. There's something about capturing a moment in time that tickles my Si-Fe just so. Photoshop I learned at university for my major though.
TTM: 15 years of sporadic shooting, easily over 50k shots (that's an average of 9 photos per day). 8 years of somewhat frequent photoshopping. Ofc its the thinking before and after the shots that matters, one could easily burst shoot hundreds of shit photos in a couple of minutes and gain nothing whatsoever...
I'm also on the (endless) process of mastering history and theory of Architecture. Certainly I am far, far from the erudite 60-year old masters with doctorates from 10 universities and 20 books penned, and it's truly hopeless to try to know it all considering the (literally) thousands of years of history, and the exponential growth of both architectural production and thought since the industrial revolution... but at least I've reached a critical knowledge mass where I am now paid to teach introductory courses at an undergrad level, which I guess is the closest to an objective lower bound measure of mastery as can be.
Obviously I studied this for years at university, but I certainly went above and beyond what was required of me; to the point that by my senior year I was debating and even correcting my teachers (many didn't appreciate that
). Mostly its been a matter of reading a lot. An obstacle is that, besides needing to have tons of time to read, most of that knowledge is not at all available online, so you're stuck with physical books, most of which are quite expensive and need to be imported (and then, a whole lot of what you read is just trash). But most challenging of all is that architecture is a peculiar field which informs itself with knowledge from a vast amount of other fields, so that in order to understand its history, and in particular the history of its theory, you also have to understand the cultural, intellectual, political, technological context, which requires knowing about the history of all sorts of stuff to make sense of what people were writing at a particular era. How can one comprehend the writings of, say, early 20th century modern architects without knowing about the history and theory of socialism, the philosophy of positivism, the Meiji restoration, psychological behaviourism, political geography, the 1920s obsession with sunbathing, Husserl and Heideggers' phenomenology, cholera and the growth of microbiology, transatlantic cruise ships, jazz music, cubism, or Einstein's relativity and space-time continuum? It's an ever branching rabbit hole; you need to become somewhat of a walking encyclopaedia, which suits me just fine. I never did plan to pursue an academic career on this, it's just a side effect of my natural INTP tendency to absorb information into a cohesive knowledge net.
TTM: Probably a lifetime, but 9 years so far, largely involving countless hours of mostly reading dozens and dozens of books, articles, lectures, wikipedia pages
...
Has Richard Dawkins mastered evolution? Has J.K. Rowling mastered creative writing?
nothing,
) So this technique is not intended to change your behavioral patterns, which is probably better left for a separate thread, but rather to eliminate the mental block that forces you to force-feed yourself your school library, after you've already decided to study.
