student or journalist

As we gain mastery, in order to progress way ahead of others, we need to accrue additional knowledge with respect to our chosen field. We need to get acquainted with the tools of the trade and figure out how things work. There are two ways for doing this.

The first requires us to be a student, where we seek a mentor in our field and learn from them. We soak in all the knowledge that we can and get trained under them. While this may work for a while, it’s not a sound strategy for the long-term.

In order to become extraordinary and stay that way in our field for the long haul, we need to take the second route — we need to become a journalist. We need to investigate and study the top performers and figure out the secret tactics that they employed to reach and sustain their current status. Like a detective, we need to train ourselves to see what is in plain sight but still hidden from the naked eyes of the vast majority of people. As we gather clues and figure out the patterns that superachievers follow and experiment with them, we become better at our craft and our lives. With time, our perennial success becomes inevitable.