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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, August 14, 2000 Volume II Number 33
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FOCUS - Apprenticeship
I’ve been around long enough now to be getting a sense of what it is that makes a person more or less successful in their career of choice.
I’ve seen it both ways. More successful and less successful. You’ve got the mediocre, the lukewarm, the colorless, the also ran. Perhaps these make up the reluctant majority. No one wants to admit that his or her life is basically plain vanilla. And then you’ve got that prized minority – the energized, the focused, the makin’-it-happen front-runner. Life in thirty-one flavors.
What makes the difference?
There is, I think, no more fundamental or basic principle than this: the most successful among us are perpetual students of their own craft. No matter how familiar. No matter how much formal education. No matter how much natural talent. The learning never stops.
If you develop this smug posture that says to the rest of the world “I’ve got this thing wired. My colleagues are boring. The continuing education a snore. It’s all been said before. There’s nothing more to learn.” If your methods and presentations and speeches are the same as they have been for years, if your techniques and tools are slipping into technological oblivion, if your routines are growing more and more predictable, if risk is less and less appealing, if you listen little and reminisce much, if your line up of new prospects in the pipeline is vanishing, if you are letting your cutting edge approach grow dull – then your effectiveness is drifting into a rollover nosedive. Your fields are drying up and withering away.
You may not even know it.
Yet.
On the other hand, if you are restless, curious, and eager to learn, if you are associating with people more successful than yourself, and listening and observing and watching, if you are reading new materials, and learning to use new tools, and willing still to step out of your comfort zone, if you are stretching yourself in new ways, and reaching for new goals and attempting new methods – then the cutting edge is still sharp. You are clearing new ground, planting in new soil. You are ready to progress to the next level. Your rate-of-climb indicator is in plus territory. Tomorrow, there will be another harvest.
Better than the last.
You are learning from those who have gone
before. It’s hardly a new idea.
There’s no better growth
method than watching and then mimicking someone who has mastered the skills.
Someone ahead of you.
It’s an ancient concept. The benefits are everywhere around. Take a look at an historic building. Check the design. The architecture. The craftsmanship. The art. The flow. The impression.
Those who captured that design, and took it from the plans to the finish, in all likelihood, were once apprentices. They are probably gone now… but their work lives on as a testament to their craft.
The skills of the artisan are passed from generation to generation through apprenticeship.
A lost art.
* * * * * * *
Tiger Woods made the cover of TIME Magazine this week. In a summer of Presidential politicking, headline choices by candidates and political parties, not to mention Olympic games and airline crashes and summer fires and Nobel prizes, why a golfer?
Tiger now bears the title, “The Greatest Golfer in the World.” The coronation is complete. Tiger wears the crown. It’s official. It’s on the cover of TIME.
How did that happen? A twenty-four year old?
Is it a bit early? And where does he go from here?
* * * * * * *
If you let people know you are going to London, veteran traveler friends will tell you about “Hop On Hop Off.” The Brits have a wonderful economy of simple descriptive language – the double Decker bus is just as it says. The name probably came from Kipling.
You purchase your ticket at Trafalgar Square. The goal for day one of your visit is uncomplicated. “Hop On” at the historic center of the city – home of the National Art Museum, St. Mary’s of the Field, the Tube, more pigeons that you’ve ever seen - then “Hop Off” whenever the urge strikes. And it will strike.
It takes you through town. Up and down the busy city streets. If the rain stops, you climb the stair to the uncovered upper deck and take it all in. Your guide fills in the gaps with narrative on the sights. Parliament. Big Ben. Westminster Abbey. Harrods. The Ritz. Hyde Park. The Thames River. Buckingham Palace. The Mews. Winston Churchill’s favorite Pub. Number 10 Downing Street. And then all the way across to the London Bridge and the Tower of London – home of the Crown Jewels and gruesome tales of colorful beheadings.
But our most memorable Hop Off that first day in London was St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The
first impression is its sheer size. Monumental.
A massive stone stairway rises off the busy city street to tall heavy
doors. The famed architect and
builder, Sir Christopher Wren, commissioned by the King in 1668 to rebuild St.
Paul’s, ruined by the Great London Fire of 1666, wanted to build a church
after the design of Rome’s famous Pantheon.
More than a fifteen hundred years before, the designers of the Pantheon
created a dome which soared over one hundred feet above the floor for the
Emperor Hadrian. In the seventh
century, the Pantheon was dedicated as a church.
Wren wanted to duplicate the style, but nearly forty years in the
making, he would dwarf the world-renowned Roman edifice with an imposing floor
plan in the shape of a cross, and a great vaulted dome that would be suspended
to reach a breathtaking three hundred forty two feet above the floor.
When Queen Elizabeth and her staff planned the wedding of her son, Prince Charles to Diana Spencer in 1981, Her Royal Majesty knew Westminster Abbey, the place of the coronation of Kings and Queens, would simply be too small. All of London’s aristocracy would attend. World leaders, too. The rest of the world’s populace would watch on television. So she selected a larger venue than the historic Abbey – St. Paul’s Cathedral.
When Carolyn and I climbed those stairs, and passed through the towering heavy wooden doors into the great cathedral, I felt as Saul (Paul) must have felt as a boy the first time he went to Jerusalem and walked up to the Temple. Never in my life had I experienced such earthly manmade majesty. The huge Roman columns standing so tall. Who shaped them? Who carried them in? How did they stand them up? The woodcarvings. The gravestones. (Christopher Wren himself is buried right there in the church.) The statuary. We walked up to the organ chambers, thousands of polished pipes stood erect, at the ready. And from the console, world-class musicians fill the cavernous room with sound. The bellows blow. Rumbling bass notes rattle the rafters. Tiny whistling pipes ring out counter melodies. I pictured row upon row of robed clergy, royal courtiers, stuffy black, gray, and blue suited laymen paired off with coiffured ladies wearing glorious hats and straight suited jackets and skirts and demure high heels and netting gently falling over faces all sitting in rows and standing and sitting and singing from little hard cover books all in a choreographed service celebrating some such holy thing as did their parents and their parents before them for generations on end.
But that was imaginary. As we visited, the room was occupied by tourists. Just wide-eyed tourists with cameras and waist pouches and Bermuda walking shorts and tennis shoes, just like us.
The floor sparkled with a glossy finish. Cut stone. And at the center of the cross-shaped floor plan a colorful mosaic – a star bursting outward from a center point. Above, the rotunda, the interior of the dome. And a balcony around the perimeter of the base.
I looked at my watch. It seemed that we’d spent too much time at St. Paul’s and that we ought to Hop On again to see what other wonders might be waiting down the road.
In the gift shop, a large cutaway drawing caught my eye. It illustrated the internal structural design of the huge cathedral – the high walls, the stained glass, the ceiling beams high above, and most impressive of all, the dome. Ah, the Dome.
The cutaway showed the dome’s interior wall and exterior covering. A large space separated the two, wide at the base and then narrowing upwards toward the pinnacle. And between the two walls, a system of braces and beams designed to support the enormous weight of the half sphere. Inside, enough room for catwalks and a stairway. In the drawing, there were people on those stairs, and on the balcony inside, then on the lookout at the very top of the dome. That must be a fantastic view of the city, I thought.
So I asked the clerk, “is there a stair in the Dome?”
“Why yes,” she said.
“Can we go up?”
“Of course. The entrance is just over there.” She pointed.
That’s all I needed. I grabbed Carolyn’s hand, and off we went. There’d be another bus, I told her. And we climbed. And climbed. It was a museum of craftsmanship. When this magnificent structure was built hundreds of years ago, there had been no cranes. No computers. No CAD software. No concrete pumps. It was the Seventeenth Century – they did it. Perfect acoustics; perfect plumb.
Sixty-five thousand tons of stone, standing on eight pillars solid as the Rock of Gibralter.
We stood on the interior balcony that circled the inside base of the dome – Carolyn on one side, me on the other. They call it the Whispering Gallery. We could hear our whispers, each from the other side. Then, after more climbing, at the very top of the dome, there was a small interior room. Outside on the Golden Gallery, a circular banister allowed for a three hundred sixty degree view of the Old City from the highest point. It looked like a tiny round gazebo planted outside on the tip of the Dome.
(In 1708, after forty years on the project, Wren was hauled up to this point once a week to inspect the finish work. On a day of celebration, at age 76, he watched as his son laid the final stone.)
Back inside, at the center of the floor, there was an eight-inch round of clear glass. A guard stood watch. I looked up, then down at the small porthole in the floor. It was the center point of the dome. I got down on my knees to take a look. There, through the glass three hundred forty two feet below was the center of the star mosaic on the floor of the mighty cathedral. I looked up at the guard in astonishment. “Dead center, looks like to me,” I said.
He replied, “every year, engineers drop a plumb line through that hole to the floor. They check to see if there has been any movement of the great Dome. In over three hundred years, it hasn’t moved four inches.” Amazing.
The work of craftsmen. Architects. Draftsmen. Artisans. Masons. Stone cutters. All of whom started out as an apprentice.
* * * * * * *
When Tiger put on the Green Blazer at Augusta in 1997, he was twenty years old. He was a Stanford drop-out turned pro. In the fifteen PGA tournaments he played that first year, he won four, including the Masters. In his rookie year, he earned an unbelievable $1.8 million dollars in tour winnings. Not to mention another $60 million in endorsements from Nike among others. And in the vernacular of his generation, he also told his closest friends “my swing sucks.”
Sucks?
How can it be that a champion, on top of his game, thinks there is still more to learn? It was risky, others before him tried and failed, but Tiger called in a new coach. A new team of teachers. New mentors. And he told them, “I want a new swing.”
And he got to work. He redefined the way he strikes the ball. He’d been young. Aggressive. He needed finesse. He needed to hit the fairways more consistently. He needed to sharpen up his short game. He needed to land closer to the pin from the fairway to nail the birdie opportunities. And he knew that such a fundamental change in his game just might sideline him for a year or even two as a front-runner.
And it did.
For two years, Tiger won tournaments. But not the really big ones. Until this year. TIME put him on the cover because in the two years he took to revamp his game, he has now emerged as nearly untouchable. The strategy worked.
Fresh off the incredible 1997 Master’s Tournament win, Tiger Woods returned to the status of Apprentice. Mentoree. Learner.
And now they call him the greatest golfer in the world. The highest money winner, ever. The major wins. He’s still only started as a golf pro.
But he still claims he’s not yet at the top of his game. Even today, he remains an apprentice.
* * * * * * *
On this Monday morning, I need to warn you.
You’re not there yet.
You cannot sit back and say, “I’ve got it figured out.” If you do, it’s over.
No matter how many awards you’ve won. No matter how much recognition you’ve received. No matter how much income you’ve banked. No matter what promotion just came through. You and I still have a lot to learn.
Be an apprentice.
You may have achieved last year’s goals. There are new goals to set. There are new mountains to climb. If you put it in neutral, you won’t maintain your speed. It will drop off. You’ve got to find the next gear.
I just finished two new books. Both of them made the same point. On a spiritual plane, if you call yourself a disciple of Jesus, you will be his apprentice. You will watch the way he lived his life. How he dealt with people. With situations. How he built the edifice of his life. And you will learn from him.
He was the Master Teacher. The Master Craftsman. The Master Artisan.
Find yourself a good Master.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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