PURSUE MASTERY

Some more self-reveal. We’ll return to politics later this week, when we can discuss Professional Pork Butchering and Sausage-Making.

Til then…

I ran across this earlier this week in the "Pocket" reads that pop up on my homepage.

I would say, from looking back with 20/10 hindsight on the past 40 years of my life, that this is absolutely some of the best advice I have ever read. I know for a fact that "pursuing mastery" in things that interested me led directly to the successful life I have, doing exactly what I love, and paying the bills with it.

“More than 2,000 years ago, in his "Poetics," Aristotle wrote that integral to a meaningful life is striving for arête, or what we might today call excellence or mastery. Aristotle pointed out, however, that achieving arête — be it by throwing oneself fully into a work of art, intellect, or athletics — is not always pleasant: “A virtuous life,” he wrote, “requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.” But he also wrote that it is in such virtuous acts — making ourselves vulnerable and giving something our all — that we lose ourselves.

“Centuries later, in his wildly popular Drive, a book that at its core is about what makes people tick, author Daniel Pink makes a similar case: “Mastery,” writes Pink, “is pain.” Yet, like Aristotle, Pink also argues that mastery is meaningful, that the benefits of taking on a challenge out of one’s own volition and losing oneself in an activity are immense.

“For a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Carol Ryff surveyed more than 300 men and women, in order to identify correlates of well-being. She found that people who had “a feeling of continued development,” and saw themselves as “growing and expanding” were more likely to score high on assessments of life satisfaction and self-esteem than those who did not. Other research shows that when people throw themselves into an activity for the sake of the activity itself — and not for some sort of external reward, like money or fame or Instagram followers — they tend to report long-term well-being and fulfillment.

“Attempting to master a craft may seem inherently selfish, but that’s not the case. In interviews with over 100 highly productive scientists, artists, and other creative types, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that many found meaning in their lives precisely because they lost themselves in their pursuit, or because they turned themselves over to it. He coined this “vital engagement,” or a relationship to an activity that manifests when one becomes fully absorbed in it. Meaning, Csikszentmihalyi writes, “derives from the connection of the individual to a tradition, enterprise, and community of practice that lie beyond the self.”

“The specific craft need not matter. For some it may be running, for others sculpting, cooking, or playing the cello. What does matter is that you respect and honor the traditions of the craft, pursue long-term progress in it, and participate not for the sake of raising yourself up (i.e., an ego boost) but for the sake of transcending the very notion of your “self” altogether. You want to express yourself in the work and lose yourself in the work at the same time.

‘Though some may say that pursuing this kind of mastery is self-serving, or worse, selfish, I’d argue otherwise. I’ve never met someone who is in pursuit of mastery, who pays close attention to their craft and cares deeply about it, who isn’t a good person. Plus, whatever they create tends to end up helping lots of other people anyways.”

I’m an Aspergian, as some of us call ourselves. Born with Asperger’s Syndrome. That wasn’t something known back when I was young - which is probably a good thing, given that the “solution” for any childhood “oddity” back then was institutionalization. Instead, I grew up as the “weird kid,” the one who got laughed at, the one who got avoided. “Weird.” The one childhood crime for which the perpetrator earnestly wishes for capital punishment (and too often succeeds in finding). I think a lot of the anger I createdin my life came from the frustration of people never “getting” me. “Goddamn it! Listen!”

It took a long time to figure out, but the markers were there all along: in sixth grade, when I took that grade’s standardized “Iowa Test,” everyone was shocked to discover that I had the reading comprehension of a college freshman. I didn’t think it was surprising at all, since around half my free time was spent reading. My grandmothers, both teachers, had taught me to read at age 4, using phonics. Thank god! Because my first grade class was the last in the Denver Public Schools to be taught phonics by the teacher, who retired at the end of the year. After that, it was the first of the “edumacation reforms” that have gone on over the past 70 years to create the Confederacy of Dunces we live in today. Sight reading. Which works fine, it you’ve had someone tell you what the new word is and how to say it and what it means. Since that doesn’t happen, the reading student becomes averse to reading and running into all those words they can’t recognize on sight; both my brother and sister, who were young enough that when they got to age 4, the grandmother teacher in our house was no longer there - driven out by Mommie Dearest, who had severe “mother problems.”

The next marker came in Junior Year of High School, after I finished flunking all the math and science classes my father made me take so I could go to college and follow him into a life of scientific endeavor; my total inability in either of those fields - those were the basis of many of his screaming fits: “What’s the matter with you? This stuff is easy!” It was if your Asperger’s manifested as his did, allowing you to do calculus in your head. But after I got through all those D’s, I got to take electives I chose. And I started getting A’s as I took an English Composition class, and every History class I could. And I took Mechanical Drawing - as close to an art class as I would ever get - and I was so good at it the teacher went and got the administration to give me credit for as much as I could do. Result: six semesters of A’s completed in two. But nobody - most of all me - made any connection between the failures and the successes, other than I had the experience of my last two years of school being “happy.” I even discovered girl friends.

Graduating 125 from the bottom of a graduating class of 900, the only college that would take me after the Navy taught me that if you had more education - a degree - you got treated better, was the state teacher’s college, which only in that year I applied had changed their entry requirements from “high school graduation” to “graduation with a C average.” But they let me in on the basis that I was applying under the rules that existed when I “should have” applied after high school. But I had to volunteer for a special group that summer quarter - students with “high test scores and low grades.”

They wanted to figure us out - they didn’t, since they didn’t know about Asperger’s either. Of the 40 Aspergians in the group, of which I was the oldest, coming out of the Navy, there were three who met the requirements at the end of the quarter of a “C” average that allowed us to be “regularly admitted freshmen” - the others continued their history of failure. They gave us all kinds of tests in the mandatory Psychology class. One of them involved reading retention. Reading math or science texts, I had a retention of 15%. Reading anything that “interested” me resulted in a score that was “off the chart” for them: 98%-plus. Again, nobody made the connection of looking at my school records, which completely reflected the results of the test.

The first time I read about Asperger’s 30 years ago, it rang a very loud bell to me. It described me to the proverbial “T.” I read everything I could about it, discovered that I was “on the right track” in that I was doing only those things that interested me, which is why life had gone from “How can someone so smart be so dumb?” to paying the bills doing what I loved. It would only be ten years ago that I would get an Official Diagnosis by a therapist who specialized in Asperger’s. So, it turns out all those years I thought I was either crazy or the dumbest sonofabitch in existence were wrong! I wasn’t crazy or stupid - I was simply not a “normie.” Interestingly, Asperger’s also explains a lot of the people I met here in Hollywood, which might explain why the place is both so interesting and crazy at the same time.

All that is background for me to explain why this article hit me the way it did.

“Yet, like Aristotle, Pink also argues that mastery is meaningful, that the benefits of taking on a challenge out of one’s own volition and losing oneself in an activity are immense.”

I can say that airplanes literally saved my life, and created the life I have. Not airplanes per se, but my interest in them, which has been all-consuming. My mother used to love telling the story of how I, at age ten months, said my first word (Another marker! Early vocalization. And why Asperger’s is NOT Autism, no matter what the DSM V says; autistics are non-verbal.), pointed up and cried “O-pane!” when a P-38 flew over the park we were in.

When I was six, my father let me build a simple model, after spending a couple years watching him build models for me. My favorite toys were airplanes. When I was nine, I unknowingly met my destiny, when I found “All The World’s Aircraft,” by William Green, in the book section of the May Co. Department store and managed to convince my father to spend a whole $3.95 to get it for me - my first “serious” airplane book. I say I met my “destiny” then; it would be 25 years later that William Green would publish my first aviation article in his magazine, “Air Enthusiast.” We were good friends-by-mail for the next 25 years before his death.

The one good part of my relationship with my father at that point was he was also a lifelong “airplane nut,” to the point of having been involved in aviation as a youth; he ran away from home the summer of his 16th birthday and joined a flying circus, where he learned to wing walk on a Jenny (returning home after the guy who owned the circus crashed the Jenny). He learned to fly! He worked for the air racer Roscoe Turner during one race season, and then and later came to know a lot of the people whose names you can read in any history of aviation in the 30s. As he put it, “It was a small community, and if you didn’t kill yourself first, you’d eventually meet everybody.” He met Charles Lindbergh. Around the time Bill Green first published me, I met Jimmy Doolittle at an antique airplane show. I was introduced to him as “Tom Cleaver.” Which is also my father’s name (L. Thomas, I’m Thomas M.) - General Doolittle looked at me and said “You’re too young.” It took me a moment to remember my Dad telling me of meeting Doolittle at the National Air Races, and I finally said “I think you mean my father.” That was when I learned that Jimmy Doolittle had a “photographic memory” for people and their names. I ended up having a long talk with him about the old days when he and my father knew each other - to the annoyance of all the others there who wanted to meet him and get an autograph.

This all meant “back in the day” that I only got grief from my mother about “always building those models and reading those books.”

Building a model, I would ask my dad “what did that airplane do”? To which he would say, “Let’s go to the library and find out.” Which led to “Why did that war happen?” and another trip to the library. “What caused that war?” took me even further back. I taught myself history with my models. I had no plans of doing anything with any of it. I loved building the models and getting them as “right” as I could, and I loved escaping the world I lived in to lose myself in those books. To this day, my favorite recreational reading matter is a heavy-duty Serious History Book. A “brick.”

“Reading those books” - coming home from school to the safety of my room or the basement workshop - was my education. In those days, kids were allowed (or at least I was) to travel all over the city by bus. We had a bus line that stopped on our corner, that went downtown, where it stopped at the Denver Public Library main branch. I took the trip every other Saturday, spending the day wandering the stacks, marveling at books, choosing the ones to check out and take home. I did that right up to high school graduation. I lived in the “629" section (aviation in the Dewey Decimal System) and the 545s (World Wars I and II) The other Saturdays were spent at the movies that came to the old Park Theater on South Gaylord Street, our neighborhood shopping area. I watched everything that got shown, not knowing I was attending “film school” and learning the definitions of “good work” and “bad work.” I did that till the theater closed when I was 14; after that I took the bus downtown to go to the movie palaces.

Another thing was that I read about the people involved, and the pilots I read about became my childhood heroes, my “models” for what to do with myself. And here’s a funny thing: when I grew up, I eventually met all the guys I had read about (who were still alive). And we all liked each other, and I became long-term friends with many of them. (I have a theory about that “missing generation” I wrote about: if the evolution of my family had been like others, I would have been a generation-contemporary of these people; I might have been one of them.)

“Other research shows that when people throw themselves into an activity for the sake of the activity itself — and not for some sort of external reward, like money or fame or Instagram followers — they tend to report long-term well-being and fulfillment.”

I never thought in all that time that I was “mastering” history, and writing (you cannot write well if you do not read widely - reading is the study of “publishable writing”) of doing anything with it. My knowledge and understanding of history first led to my involvement in “contemporary history, first-person,” politics. To this day, I don’t know how a guy who couldn’t “read a room” managed any success in the least in that field, or in Hollywood.

When I started getting published in aviation magazines, I didn’t think anything of it, it seemed “the thing to do.” A nice little hobby that was just its own thing. In the meantime, I was pursuing writing more “seriously” in other fields. Writing about rock ‘n’ roll, as an interviewer of musicians, then eventually stumbling over my own shoe laces into movie writing. But the aviation history writing was always going on. Thirty years ago, my friend “airplane buddy” Budd Davisson (“the legendary Budd Davisson” - he hates it when I call him that, but it’s true) got me to become a contributor to his magazine, “Flight Journal.” I always thought of the aviation writing as a way to write what I wanted, while pursuing a career that involved mostly writing what others wanted.

Twenty-odd years ago, at a low point in the movie and TV career, I ran across the internet, discovered other modelers (I forgot to mention, I wasn’t one of those boys who gave up models for “beer and girls” - I was one of the geeks who kept on.), and then discovered a website where I could build models and write history about them, which I still do. I became well-known in a small niche.

And then one day, I got an e-mail from an editor at Osprey, asking me if I’d be interested in writing a book in their “Aces” series. The offer included a nice check...

‘Though some may say that pursuing this kind of mastery is self-serving, or worse, selfish, I’d argue otherwise. I’ve never met someone who is in pursuit of mastery, who pays close attention to their craft and cares deeply about it, who isn’t a good person. Plus, whatever they create tends to end up helping lots of other people anyways.”

Nowadays, schools identify kids with Asperger’s early on. They’re required by law to protect them and take steps to help their unique educational problems, because the kids are covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act. They get taught “coping strategies” to deal with the fact they’re social klutzes. It’s now known that if you let an Aspergian follow what interests them, they’re likely to do something surprising. And they are very likely to make a good life of it.

Instead of it happening by chance.

As it did for a kid who liked radios and built his own crystal set the year before he ran away to join the flying circus, who ended up with 150 patents in his own name as a government scientist, one of which is why you have never worried even once that the pre-stressed concrete freeway you’re driving on will crumble beneath your tires: my father, the Original Creative Genius In His Field.

As it did for a kid who liked airplanes and the people who fly them and liked to write about them.

“Attempting to master a craft may seem inherently selfish, but that’s not the case. In interviews with over 100 highly productive scientists, artists, and other creative types, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that many found meaning in their lives precisely because they lost themselves in their pursuit, or because they turned themselves over to it. He coined this ‘vital engagement,’ or a relationship to an activity that manifests when one becomes fully absorbed in it. Meaning, Csikszentmihalyi writes, ‘derives from the connection of the individual to a tradition, enterprise, and community of practice that lie beyond the self.’”

Commentary is limited to the “weirdos” who are the Paid Subscribers, an easy crowd to join - $7/month or a bargain-saving $70/year ($14 off).

For those who might be interested, here’s some of that “other writing”: https://modelingmadness.com/review/allies/cleaver/gb/spit/tc5bf.htm