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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Robert Twigger
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Twigger, Robert, 1964– author.
Title: Micromastery : learn small, learn fast, and unlock your potential to achieve anything / Robert Twigger.
Description: New York, New York : TarcherPerigee, 2018. | Originally published: London : Penguin Life, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039317 (print) | LCCN 2017056050 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504306 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143132325
(paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Cognitive psychology. | Ability. | Expertise. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology. | SELF-
HELP Personal Growth Success. | SELF-HELP Personal Growth Happiness.
Classification: LCC BF201 (ebook) | LCC BF201 .T85 2018 (print) | DDC 153.1/52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039317
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The memory of Rabia Basri 714–801
The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination.
Max Planck, 1918 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Micromastery
What is Micromastery?
Inside a Micromastery
Dynamic Learning
Locate Hidden Micromasteries (They Are Everywhere)
Help Yourself
Multiple Micromastery and Synergy
Polymathic Paradise
Creativity Explosion
Micromastery Central
1 Do a Line Sketch That Looks Creditable
2 Do an Eskimo Roll
3 Find the Depth of a Well or a Deep Hole
4 Chop Through a Log (or Even a Tree)
5 Learn How to Climb a Rope
6 Surf Standing Up
7 Talk for Fifteen Minutes about Any Subject
8 Lay a Brick Wall
9 Write Dialogue
10 Make a Clay Skull
11 Bake Excellent Artisan Bread
12 Make a Sword Hum Through the Air
13 Make String from Nettles
14 Sing Solo, Even If You Are Tone Deaf
15 Master the Bench Press
16 Learn “La Marseillaise”
17 Do a Soccer Elastico
18 Build a Superstack of Wood
19 Develop Film Using Coffee and Salt
20 Do a High-Speed Getaway J-Turn
21 Make Sushi . . . That Actually Looks and Tastes Like Sushi
22 Tell a Story That Will Enthrall Any Child
23 Immobilize Someone with an Aikido Hold
24 Juggle Four Balls
25 Master the Three-Card Trick
26 Grow a Bonsai Tree
27 Make a Perfect Soufflé Every Time
28 Make a Perfect Cube of Wood
29 Mix a Delightful Daiquiri
30 Walk the Tango Walk
31 Make Fire by Rubbing Two Sticks Together
32 Make Your Handwriting Beautiful
33 Micromaster Bargaining
34 Hone a Kitchen Knife So That It Is Razor Sharp
35 Lead a Small Group in the Wilderness
36 Learn to Read Japanese in Three Hours
37 Become a Street Photographer
38 Brew Delicious Craft Beer
39 Make Your Own Shirt
Micromaster Your Life
Permission to Be Interested
Your Many Selves
Punk Micromastery
Micromastery vs Global Pessimism
The BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST Picture
About the Author
Micromastery
What is Micromastery?
Start with the egg, not the chicken
YouTube has clips of The Great Egg Race, a long-running TV show in the
1980s, hosted by an amiable German-born egghead called Dr. Heinz Wolff. Like
a forerunner and more inventive version of Scrapheap Challenge, contestants
had to build a gadget with limited resources to meet the challenge set out at the
start of the show. In the early series all the tasks involved an egg that mustn’t be
broken, the first task being to make a machine to transport an egg the farthest
distance possible using only paper clips, card, and rubber bands. It was such a
simple idea, yet it gave rise to incredibly inventive machines. And it all started
with an egg, something rather small and humble.
Life can be overwhelming. We want to do as much as we can, see the world,
learn new things—and it can all get a bit too much. I reached a point in my life
when I felt that I could no longer be interested in everything. I had to shut some
of life out, and I didn’t like that. I was living under the assumption—the false
assumption, as it turned out—that to know anything worthwhile took years of
study, so I might as well forget it.
But something inside me rebelled. I still wanted to learn new things and make
new things. They didn’t have to be big things—I was happy to leave that till
later. Start small, start humble.
Start with an egg.
So I was thinking about how long it would take to learn how to cook really
well. I recalled a chef telling me that the real test is doing something simple—
like making a perfect omelet. Everything you know about cooking comes out in
this simple dish. So I decided to switch the order around. Instead of spending
10,000 hours learning the basics of cookery and then showing my expertise in
omelet making, I’d start with just making an omelet.
I really focused on making that omelet. I separated it from the basic need that
cooking usually fulfills—filling my stomach—so that it now occupied a special,
singular place in my life. It had become a micromastery.
A micromastery is a self-contained unit of doing, complete in itself but
connected to a greater field. You can perfect that single thing or move on to
bigger things—or you can do both. A micromastery is repeatable and has a
success payoff. It is pleasing in and of itself. You can experiment with the
micromastery because it has a certain elasticity—you can bend it and stretch it,
and as you do you learn in a three-dimensional way that appeals to the
multisensory neurons in our brain.
It’s the way we learn as kids. You never absorb all the fundamentals straight
away—you learn one cool thing, then another. You learn a 360 on a skateboard
or how to make a crystal radio. My father was a teacher, and he hoped to
encourage me when he told me that he would buy me the parts to make a
transistor radio when I could explain how a transistor worked. My interest died
immediately. I knew how to make the radio and have fun with it, but having to
explain it was something difficult, adult, and alien. And wrong. (Dad, I forgive
you.)
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively
about “flow”—a state in which time seems to be suspended because our interest
and involvement in what we’re doing are so great.* A micromastery, because it
is repeatable without being repetitious, has all the elements that allow us to enter
a flow state, which produces great contentment and enhances physical and
mental health.
Learning a micromastery doesn’t commit you in that deadening way that
buying a beginner’s textbook does. By its limited nature, it gives you permission
to remain interested in the world. It doesn’t mean you have to commit to doing
that thing for what feels like forever, and at the same time it spares you any
worries that you’ve wasted your time.
Do you know the feeling of doing an introductory course on something, which
you give up on, and then a few years later you try to tell others what you learned,
but you can’t remember? A micromastery isn’t like that. It’s with you forever—
and it’s nice to have something to show others. For instance if you learn a
martial art you need something to shut people up with when they say, “Go on,
show us a move.”
A micromastery has a structure that connects in a crucial way to important
elements in the greater field it is a part of. It reveals relationships and balances in
the elements of the task that mere words and explanation, textbook-style, cannot.
Its repeatability and gameability—people like that omelet, ask for another, you
