4 Cornerstones of the Professional Mindset

I’ve lived a life defined by fleeting passions. Or phases as one of my best friends recently put it. There was the chess, and martial arts, and long distance running, and snowboarding, and writing, and Starcraft, and poker, and rock climbing, and writing, and…

Activities that I became absolutely obsessed with, pouring immense quantities of time, focus, and energy into. Perhaps that’s the unique feature of my ADHD, or perhaps it’s a flaw in my root code. Who knows?

One thing that stands out about this eclectic mix of activities, however, is that I got pretty damn good at each and every single one of them.

So good, in fact, that I managed at one time or another to get paid for performing each activity. I suppose by applying the absolute minimum definition, that would qualify as being a professional.

One of my best friends has (lovingly?) referred to me as ol’ Anthony ‘semi-pro’ Vicino. I don’t know what it means to be semi-pro at something, but I think for our purposes here today, it’ll serve as a suitable title.

Now let’s stop here before we go zipping down the slip-n-slide of how awesome I am, ’cause I’m not telling you any of this so that you’ll be impressed. Nope. Not at all. In fact, I went through a lot of internal dissonance, sitting here at Barnes and Noble, debating whether I wanted to share any of this shit about myself.

Discussing my accomplishments makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I think it’s important for the purpose of setting the stage. So that you can understand and perhaps accept that what follows is not just the ramblings of a guy who thinks he knows what it takes to go pro, but rather, a personal perspective on the hard work, dedication, passion, and practice techniques required to be better than just good.

What follows is an outline of the mindset, behaviors, and tactics required if you want to be more than just amateur.

What follows is a blueprint for what it takes to be a professional.

The Professional Mindset

This is the first, and perhaps most important, thing you must understand about what it takes to become a professional. It is a seductive temptation to look at people who have achieved massive amounts of success and simply assume that they fell into it.

They got lucky. They had the right genetics. The talent. They knew the right people.

We are great at conjuring these sorts of excuses about other people’s success. We do this because, to us, they just randomly appeared on the scene one day. We have no context for how hard they worked to get where they are.

We have not spent the last ten years glancing over their shoulders, watching them day-in, day-out, honing their craft. We have not witnessed first hand the sacrifices, the frustration, the set-backs, and the failures they have inevitably encountered.

And because we have not witnessed these key events, it is easy to assume they simply never occurred.

If you allow yourself to believe this, then when you inevitably face sacrifice, frustration, and failure, you will assume you are a special snowflake. That you are unique in your suffering. And in your solitude, you will quit, falsely assuming that it shouldn’t be so hard.

But guess what, Gertrude?

It is that hard.

Guess what else?

It never gets easier.

Sorry, Gerty.

So here is the first cornerstone of developing a Professional Mindset: It is a marathon, not a sprint.

It takes time and energy and sacrifice and absolute commitment to become better than just good.

Commitment to a Process

Ernest Hemingway did not just wake up one day wielding one of the most potent pens of the 20^th century. He plied his craft over years of dedicated hard-work. For a long time he was considered merely a good writer.

But he didn’t stop there. He kept working. Trudging up the long hill to mastery through consistent, concerted effort. Did he ever arrive at the pinnacle of mastery? Well, in his own words:

Don’t be so presumptuous as to assume you will ever master anything. Any and all activities are too infinitely complex for such a crude distillation.

But that’s a good thing. Because it means there is always room for growth. Always room for improvement.

So keep your head down and focus on the task at hand. Strive towards mastery, but never accept that you have done enough.

Amateurs practice as much as they have to. Professionals never stop.

To that end, study what others have done to get to where you want to be. Learn from them. Obsess over them.

Do not, however, make the mistake in thinking you can copy their method. We must all walk a different path to the mountaintop. What worked for Ernest, may not work for you.

Still, there are valuable lessons to be learned in understanding how others have achieved what they have achieved.

Now, because I care about you and your time, I’m going to help shortcut your learning and share a secret, a pattern you will notice when you study enough successful people. It is this: They all committed to a process.

So it is that we arrive at our second pillar of Developing a Professional Mindset: Don’t look at what people have. Look at what they did to get it.

Demystifying the Act

The idea of a muse is the single greatest tragedy ever to befall the creative arts. The belief that we must wait for inspiration to strike has filled more graveyards with wasted potential and untold stories than any war, famine, plague, or rabid Dachshund.

There is nothing holy about the medium through which you choose to pursue mastery.

The chess board is nothing but 64 squares and some wooden pieces. It is not an altar upon which we worship.

The blank page is an eternal vessel awaiting your spark of the divine.

A professional distances herself from her instrument. She understands that it is nothing more than the vehicle through which she expresses her conscious intent.

And that’s how you must approach any activity you wish to become professional in. There is nothing inherently special about the act of snowboarding. It is not magical. It is not other-worldly. It is merely a means for expressing your will and ability.

When you come at an activity from this perspective, you are more clearly able to see it for its constituent parts. You can break it down to its simplest form.

A great story is not an ephemeral being beyond our comprehension. It is comprised of certain definable, discrete building blocks. Learn these blocks.

Do not become enchanted with the act.

Do not wait for motivation to strike, only then to let loose a storm of effort in a short period of time. It is better to do 100 pushups everyday, than to do 1,000 only on Saturday. Doing the work only when you’re motivated means you’ll never be consistent enough to become professional.

With this in mind, we introduce the third pillar of Developing a Professional Mindset: Frequency trumps quantity.

Resistance will ALWAYS be there.

Steven Pressfield coined the term resistance in his book The War of Art, a book I would say is mandatory reading for any individual striving to be professional.

The form that resistance takes is thoughts in your head…and the thought says, “I’m not worthy of doing this…It’s been done a hundred time before.’…When we hear those thoughts, the mistake we make is we think that they’re our thoughts, but they’re not. They’re resistance. They’re a force of nature. – Steven Pressfield

No matter how good you become at whatever endeavor you deploy your abilities, know this: You will never defeat the resistance.

It will be there every single day. Without fail. It does not tire. It does not falter.

And therefore neither can you. You must show-up every single day and fight that resistance. You must overcome it. You must not falter.

To be great requires nothing less.

This is hard, I know. It’s the reason most of us will never become truly great. Resistance eventually wins out.

Hell, I let resistance beat me for over a year.

It’s okay, because it’s not a war that ever ends. That is, unless you stop fighting it. Rest assured, however, you can always pick up where you left off. You can always recommit yourself and dive back in.

One of resistance’s most pernicious tricks is in convincing us that, since we’ve already failed, we are therefore a failure.

We are not. And the professional knows this.

The professional knows you must fail your way to success.

Because of this, it is imperative that we look inward with fierce determination to root out the cause of our shortcomings so that we might point to them, shed light on them, and bit-by-bit, overcome them.

Create a plan. Make a schedule. Then stick to it at all costs.

Amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals never deviate.

The ability to show-up every day, to stick to a schedule, and do the work is so valuable that is is literally all you need to become better than 90% of the population.

And with this we arrive at our fourth and final pillar of Developing a Professional Mindset: Never accept excuses.

The Road Goes Ever On

This is a different type of article for me. It’s one I feel passionately about, as these cornerstones of developing a professional mindset have guided me well through life. Take from them what you will, but know that no matter what it is in your life you hope to accomplish, no matter how big the task, how audacious the goal, it is possible.

If somebody else has already achieved the thing you’ve set before yourself, then take solace in the knowledge that it can be done. It’s not easy, but it is possible.

Now go do the work.

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[box] It’s time to turn the microphone over to you, My Dearly Beloved Reader. Get down to the comments and tell me about what it is you are striving for. What path are you taking to becoming professional?[/box]