Mastery of Craft: The Only Goal

Recently I’ve been playing around with this idea of goals, achievement, success, mastery, craft etc.

And how they aren’t aligned in a lot of cases.

If you’d have asked me a few years ago what my goals are, I’d likely have said specific ones around business, investing, health, relationships etc.

They would have been pretty balanced, but they would have also been kind of dry. Especially on the business side. “Make X amount of money a month” essentially.

The goals were always primarily around profit per month or net worth, those are the 2 I track and optimise for on the business side still.

But over the past 6-9 months and in particular in the past 2-3 months there has been a lot of reframing around this goal setting methodology.

I still think monetary goals and financial success are important, but I think it’s a by-product of the-one-thing approach now.

The mastery of a craft.

This one-thing approach can just be “mastery” as a goal.

It’s not just about the money its about solving the problems around it.

Here’s 2 personal examples of this master of craft idea for me personally.

Mastery Of Betting

I’ve had a Google doc called “mastery of betting” that I work from everyday on the sports betting projects.

I’ve had this doc for about 5 years and it could just as easily be called “sports betting business” or “betting to do list”.

It’s basically just core ideas and timelines of things that need to be done around key dates, who in the team is working on what, and just generally the processes and systems that are being worked on or going to be solved in the future.

Nothing fancy in short.

The reason why I didn’t just call it “to do list” or “SB project”, and instead called in mastery of betting is because I want to have mastery of the craft of betting.

It wasn’t actually so much about the money, although that is the measuring stick in this case, it was more understanding and solving the game of sports analytics, data and the markets.

Which is measured by profitability, win rates, ROI and other obvious financial metrics.

But also it feels better to “be right” about a sporting event.

FD Business

Another business I started 6 months ago, is something called “FD”.

To some friends, this is literally just a business that I call “the random crap” business.

I’m going through the motions of this, and it’s somewhat working still.

But when you start a business and refer to it as the “random crap” business, you are not exactly going to be purpose driven about it.

The business now makes about £1,200/month net profit on £5k revenue, takes about 2 hours a week and runs itself.

The issue is, I don’t care about this business in the slightest.

It’s only about the money.

I love the game of business, but this particular one, it’s just about “number go up”.

I don’t think that’s the way to build something real.

As with a lot of my more recent posts, with concepts around doing one thing only, building one product, everything just improves as a result of this thought process.

Do one thing incredibly well, invest thousands of hours to achieve mastery and become a master of your craft.

Because everything else is just noise anyway.

People who we respect the most are not the ones who make the most money but instead the ones who are masters of their craft.

Ironically these people usually go on to become incredibly successful as a by-product of becoming masters of their craft….

I’m not exactly going to walk away from everything I’m not passionate about, and the word “passion” I have an issue with when it comes to business, but that’s a conversation for another day.

Instead, it’s simply about building something great.

Becoming a master of your chosen craft, that’s the only goal.

But.

Your craft doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be “be a great sports bettor” or “Build a great ecommerce brand”.

It can be more complex and detailed.

Understanding Your Craft

My craft is building edge-mentality based digital income producing assets.

This is NOT the most effective way to “do one thing” or maximise earnings.

I made a lot more money focusing on one thing originally than I did by splitting focus, only getting to similar financial levels in the past 9-12 months vs 4 years ago.

But I’ve built systems, projects and businesses now that I’m actually happy about, business models I actually like and enjoy working in.

Whether that’s mastery of betting or “random crap” business or an Ecommerce brand with a very close friend.

And as always, remembering 2 key things;

1.) It doesn’t matter anyway, we all die.

And,

2.) It’s just training and learning for the big one.

The one thing that when that opportunity comes along, the one that has the potential to be a game changer….

That when that arrives or is created, that you have the resources, skills and people in place to nail it.

It’s all just training for the big one.

Cheers.