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Have you ever really mastered anything?


Wilbur

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Yeah once, wrapping lunches.  Let me explain...

When I went back to school I took a job for a local school district in their central kitchen.  We made the food and then delivered it to the schools kitchens who would then prep it for serving.  We also made thousands of lunches in plastic containers wrapped in Saran Wrap. Pull a sheet, place it on the plastic container and seal & place it in a larger container for shipping.  Oh and you had to do this with gloves on...

Nobody liked wrapping the lunches as it was a pita and a bad wrapper slowed the line down.  I sucked at it at first but got to be an exceptionally fast wrapper that I could wrap both sides of the line so They only needed me instead of 2 and sometimes 3 people to wrap.  

So yeah I truly mastered the task of wrapping school lunches.  

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I once called myself a master jeweler. I like to think I earned the title.

There is a saying from somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I don't think I will ever master my current craft as technology changes much faster than jewelry design and manufacturing techniques.

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I am a certified master chemist and spent time as an industrial chief chemist and lead gifted-talented teacher.

Otherwise, I'm a jack-of-all-trades and have occasional fun at a way-below-master level in other sciences and things investing, carpentry, plumbing, and sports playing/coaching.

I have studied and played music a lot: piano and guitar including formal studies at John Hopkins University's world-class Peabody Institute's Adult Program where, in addition to classical piano performance, I formally studied music history, theory, and composition. But watching how others performed compared to me in a short course in improvisation taught by Grammy Award winning professors (including Leon Fleisher) showed me how far I am from being a master of music. I was told to sit down at a piano and play a fish happily swimming in a lake, excitedly jumping into the air, splashing back down then swimming on. So I played a quick, easy tune based on the notes in the very pleasing, harmonic C, F, and G major chords, jumped to discordant 7th and minor chords to represent excitement, ran up and down the C-scale to simulate the jump and reentry, then went back to C, F. and G major stuff. I thought that was clever. But then I was asked to stand at the open strings of the grand piano and play a melody on them with my hands.  Clearly, I was not a master of improvisation and it sure didn't come out like the Yehudi Menuhin's quote that was on the board: Improvisation is not the expression of accident, but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.

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It has taken many decades of intense focus, training, and practice, often at the expense of personal relationships and health, but all of the hard work has paid off as I have finally mastered the art of not mastering anything!  So that means I 

wait a sec, I just.........

crap!

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