Brad Stuhlberg’s book The Path of Excellence is a great read and it offers what the subtitle promises:

💬 A guide to true greatness and deep satisfaction in a chaotic world.

By now I’ve read many similar works and I’ve found there’s often something strangely missing. There’s usually heaps of good advice about acquiring expertise and wisdom, about learning and improving, and about following through; plenty too about commitment, discernment, patience and resilience. And these are all important factors if you want to attain excellence and some sort of mastery.

Well, OK. But there’s almost no mention of the need to find a teacher, coach or mentor — and to work constructively with them. And in this particular case I find it slightly weird. After all, the author is himself a performance coach, so why not at least mention the great benefits of working with a coach?

I see this as the most crucial aspect of learning, of trying to get better at something.

Learning is social: we learn best from other people, directly. That’s a key reason I was driven to write my own book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning.

Reading all these American books on learning and improvement, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a bias towards individualism at work here. Not that there’s anything wrong with individualism, but surely it isn’t the whole picture. Learning involves teachers. Is this claim so radical that it can’t be mentioned?

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. There’s a well-tested path and it’s clearly expressed in these three phases of the learning-teaching journey.

So sure, read another book about excellence. There are plenty to choose from.

But also, find the right teacher.

Now read:

What Billy Strings learned from his father

What Herbie Hancock learned from Miles Davis

The greatest experts are serial beginners

There’s a flaw in how we learn about expertise

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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