How to find your craft and master it
I can’t get this video out of my head. This is pro golfer Phil Mickelson explaining all the variables he considers when hitting a golf shot:
This is what a master of craft sounds like. Not only does Phil know all these details intellectually, but he’s learned them practically - with probably 100,000+ hours of practice on the golf course.
His theoretical knowledge and practical application come together to form craft - the disciplined pursuit of mastery in a specific skill.
A true craft is:
Intentional – You don’t get better at something by accident. You seek to get better by constantly evaluating and incorporating the new information you get through practice.
Creative – You must apply your unique judgment and taste. It’s about your choices - often thousands of them. If it’s not creative, AI agents will do it.
Iterative – Improvement comes from cycles of feedback, failure, and small, incremental progress.
Practiced – It requires not just theoretical knowledge but practical intuition developed over time.
Instinctual – Mastery comes from your honed instinct about what’s “right.” This goes beyond logic.
When I say someone is a “master of their craft,” I don’t just mean they’re good at something. It’s much deeper than that. They have an intimate, instinctual understanding of it that comes from years of engagement.
Find your craft and commit.
In a world that’s flooded with quick dopamine, it’s getting harder and harder for people to muster the focus and discipline necessary to master a craft.
But how do you find your craft?
A lot of people get stuck here. They overthink it. They believe there’s some magical moment where their perfect craft will reveal itself like a calling from the heavens.
That’s not how it works. You don’t find your craft by thinking about it.
You find your craft by doing things.
By experimenting. By trying and failing and noticing what sparks something inside you. Here’s a better way to approach it:
Follow your curiosity.
Instead of trying to find your “passion,” follow your curiosity.
Passion can be overrated. It fades over time like a hot coal going cold. But curiosity is endless. If anything, curiosity just leads to more questions, driving you deeper into the rabbit hole.
So, what are you naturally drawn to? What do you read about for fun? What do you find yourself daydreaming about?
For example, I’ve always been curious about storytelling. As an avid fiction reader, I knew there was a hidden structure behind all great stories. But I didn’t know what it was or how it worked until I decided to try and TELL a story myself in the form of a movie treatment.
And that’s how I found my craft (screenwriting) - by being curious about stories and trying to write one.
Try everything (but pay attention).
Don’t just consume - create.
If something interests you, dive in. Start a project. Write. Code. Design. Build. Play around.
The key is to pay attention to what keeps pulling you back.
Everyone has things they get obsessed with. Some people get obsessed with storytelling. Others with making music. Others with designing systems.
The trick is to notice when time just evaporates as you’re doing the thing. That’s when something doesn’t feel like work - it feels like play (but looks like work to other people).
For me, this is writing. I’ll open a screenplay and look up three hours later not knowing what’s happened. That’s a BIG signal you’re working on the right stuff.
Look at what you loved as a kid.
There’s often a thread between what you enjoyed as a child and what you’re naturally wired to do. Did you love drawing? Writing stories? Tinkering with things? Teaching others? Sometimes the clues are there - you just forgot to pay attention.
It took me a decade to get back to what I loved as a teenager. When I was 17-years-old, I wanted to be an actor because I loved movies. That love for movies pulled me from acting school to film school in my early 20’s.
Then, I took a decade detour. I worked in reality TV for a few years, then spent five years making car commercials. Finally, at 30, I quit it all to pursue the dream I had at 17 - I came back to movies, this time as a writer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has one of my favorite quotes of all time:
“For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”
What problems do you love to solve?
Work, at its core, is just solving problems. The best work happens when you actually enjoy the process of solving a certain type of problem.
Do you love designing beautiful things? Making complex ideas easy to understand? Figuring out how things work? Entertaining people? Inspiring them?
When you align your craft with the problems you love solving, work becomes play.
Keep it playful (at first)
You won’t know your craft from day one. Most people stumble into it after following a series of curiosities. The trick is to not overcommit too early. Let yourself play. Experiment. Don’t put pressure on yourself.
Try things without worrying about how you’ll monetize them. The pressure to “turn it into a business” too soon can kill the very thing that makes it exciting.
Ask yourself: would you still do it if someone paid you not to?
I got this from Alex Hormozi. If someone offered you $1 million to stop doing your craft, would you stop?
I can honestly say I wouldn’t take the money to stop writing. Because I plan on doing it until I die. That is a HUGE indicator that I’m working on the right stuff.
The biggest mistake people make is waiting for their craft to come to them. It doesn’t work that way.
You discover your craft in motion.
So go out and make something. Keep creating. And soon enough, you’ll notice what you can’t stop doing. That’s your craft. Now, go master it.
Obsess over craft, not outcomes.
Success in creative domains is non-linear - you do not get one “unit” of success for every “unit” of hard work you put in. Instead, you’ll get seemingly random, significant payouts of success over time.
So, it’s best not to worry too much about outcomes in the beginning, and instead focus on mastering your craft. The success will come as a by-product of mastery.
Mastery over metrics.
Don’t look for external validation. Instead, stay focused on the thing you really want to do, even if it doesn’t reward you with dopamine.
Tara and I have seen this first hand in the sketch comedy world. Many successful sketch comedy influencers want to act and write for film and TV. But because they’ve successfully built an audience through short form sketch (which is not easy - good on them), they feel obligated to continue to create for that audience. And that leaves them very little time to put in the work it takes to successfully pivot into the film and TV world.
Not just that - their brains have been re-wired for regular dopamine hits from likes and comments on their videos. It would be very hard for them to step into the world Tara and I work in, where we “ship” one or two scripts per year, and get a “great job” email from a producer once or twice a year.
I call it a dopamine dessert. And I’m extremely grateful for it because it means I can focus on a single project for six months in a vacuum without quitting. That’s a superpower.
Process is the reward.
If you woke up tomorrow morning and suddenly had everything you wanted, you’d be disappointed.
In any creative domain, the process IS the reward. That doesn’t mean a win doesn’t feel good - it feels GREAT, but it doesn’t last.
For me, the thrill and struggle of writing a new project is the best fucking feeling I’ve ever had. Don’t mistake that for pleasure. It is NOT pleasurable. It’s difficult and frustrating, but extremely satisfying.
It’s like a great workout. The workout mostly sucks - with some moments of pleasure from endorphins, serotonin, and adrenaline. Yet, workouts are addicting because they are satisfying.
Make the process your reward.
Craft is slow and hard.
And that’s the point. Jerry Seinfeld often talks about how hard writing is, and that’s the point:
“If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show (“Seinfeld”) was successful because I micromanaged it - every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.”
Craft is not supposed to be efficient. Or “optimized.” It takes time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to make something great.
Tara and I worked on our first screenplay for two years. We worked on our second screenplay for two years. That’s four years on two projects, 110 pages each.
We’re not fast. We’re not “efficient.” Our process isn’t “optimized.” But we are producing great work. And it’s hard.
There are no shortcuts.
So choose your craft, and master it.