What a Break!

So far after completing mid-terms and college applications, it was time to have a little winter break. Throughout the break I didn't do anything particularly productive, especially academically. I spent most of the break working and enjoying the few weeks I had to enjoy a nice Christmas dinner and New Year party. Yet, even though I was soon to come back to school and get back to the rigorous curriculum, I still read a chapter of Daniel Pink's novel called Mastery. In this section of the novel, Pink describes an incident in which a young boy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that " grown-ups had really no idea how to live.", due to Nazi Germany's growing power to take control of most of the European continent. That after the war, Csikszentmihalyi started to see a turning point on how people lived. He did a lone experiment in which he recorded what he did and was feeling at the time that, back in those days, his pager would ring. Such that a form of mastery takes place in one's life to take control of their own lives. Pink also describes the three ways of Mastery: Mindset, Pain, and Asymptote. Mindset is defined as having realized that there are different ways as to how people believe in something to be true. For example intelligence. Some think it happens within and someone is " born" with such knowledge, while the other view is that one can increase their intelligence by practicing or studying and doesn't just stick to what they know, but reach out for more. Pain has to due that to gain mastery, it's going to be hard and long procedure that causes frustration, anxiety, drowsiness and stress. Such that one would want to give up even though they work hard and hard to reach an objective that has gained little improvement. But in that sense, effort is what causes to counter the effects of pain. And ,lastly, mastery is an asymptote due to the fact that one can do as much as they can and work hard to gain mastery, but they are not fully there.
Through all this, it's true about what Pink says. In order to become better or master the subject in which one wants to reach, it's going to be a hassle, but if one puts in the effort, even if it's great with little improvement, they can become better at what they're trying to reach.