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‍✈️How to Achieve Mastery (without 10,000 hours)

‍✈️How to Achieve Mastery (without 10,000 hours)

It took me 3.5 years to understand this.

Mohammad Khan
January 11, 2025

Hey—It's Mohammad.

It’s a chilly 11:45 pm night here. The gentle thump of snowfall outside. I had ice cream recently. Never too cold for ice cream.

Read Time: 4.6 minutes

When it comes to writing, rules are a safety blanket.

“Show, don't tell.” Clear. Concise. Classic writing advice.

I used to think great writers sat down, thought deeply, and crafted these rules through pure literary wisdom derived from the gods.

I studied story structures.

The Hero's Journey. Save the Cat. Three-Act Structure. Each promising that if you just followed their formula, readers would connect with my writing. I spent months studying these story structures. Mapping out character arcs. Following the theory to a tee.

But the stories I wrote felt off. They were published but I didn’t like writing them like I was putting together an IKEA furniture set but the instructions were in Chinese.

What was I even doing?

Like clockwork, I get an existential crisis where I question everything. Terrifying because I lose a tether and start floating in mental space. The reason most don’t question rules is because questioning the rules means questioning everything you've been taught about what makes writing 'good. And there’s a chance you could be wrong.

But after 3.5 years of actually writing stories, I discovered something the Wright Brothers knew about flight: Being wrong about the rules could mean being right about something else entirely.

It’s the early 1900s.

Other aviation engineers were spending money on laboratories and equipment, the Wright Brothers were fixing bikes.

When they used the accepted mathematical constants, their calculations said their plane should fly. Reality disagreed hard. And by hard, I mean crash landing onto sand or tearing up their gliders like an angry toddler ripping up paper.

Most engineers would have checked their math.

The Wright Brothers checked their assumptions.

They built their own wind tunnel. Tested hundreds of wing shapes. Using the new data, they created new equations that actually worked.

Their flights improved and in 1903, they took flight.

My stories worked the same way.

While others were perfecting their story structures, I was just writing.

Every day.

Most writers would study more techniques.
I started checking my assumptions.

The more I wrote, the more I realized that good stories don't come from following preset formulas. Readers connected with my unconventional stories not because they followed the 'right' structure, but because I'd developed something more fundamental through practice: an intuition for how stories actually move people.

Just like the Wright Brothers trusted their experiments over accepted equations, I learned to trust my storytelling instincts over writing formulas.

The 2:1 Rule of Mastery

For every piece of theory you learn, test it at least twice in the real world.

When the Wright Brothers studied flight equations, they didn't just read them - they tested them in their wind tunnel. When those tests failed, they didn't just theorize new equations - they built and tested hundreds of wing designs.

Think of theory like a map. It's useful, but you wouldn't claim to know a city just by memorizing its streets. You need to walk them.

Here's how I apply this:

When I learn a story structure → Write two stories using it
When I discover a writing technique → Try it in two different pieces
When I read about engagement tactics → Test them in two different formats

The 2:1 Rule of Mastery isn't just about improvement - it's about impact.

Every time you test a theory in the real world, you're building the intuition to know which conventions are holding us back and which new approaches might push us forward.

Your turn: Take that writing rule you've been following blindly. Instead of just knowing it, test it twice this week. See what you discover.