Mastery Archetypes: #2 The Hacker
Good enough for the task at hand and impatiently needing quick results...
George Leonard describes four archetypes, or categories of personality traits, in his book ‘Mastery’, published in 1992, and which has been the main inspiration behind Ordinary Mastery. The four archetypes relate to different ways of approaching our tasks and interests.
The four archetypes are The Dabbler, The Hacker, The Obsessive, and The Master.
Today we are meeting The Hacker…
The hacker archetype refers to someone who has a strong desire to achieve competence in a particular skill or activity. However, unlike the master, the hacker is characterised by a focus on immediate results and a lack of patience in the long-term pursuit of mastery.
Some key traits of the hacker archetype include:
A time-sensitive desire for quick results:
Hackers are driven by the desire to achieve results quickly, often neglecting the long-term commitment and discipline required for true mastery, content to stay on the plateau forever.
A tendency to rely on shortcuts:
They will try to find quick and easy solutions to problems, rather than dedicating their time and attention to developing a deep understanding of the underlying principles.
A lack of patience:
Hackers tend to lack the patience required for mastery and may become frustrated with the slow and incremental progress that is part of the journey. They are likely to skip steps in order to have just enough knowledge for the task in front of them.
A focus on surface-level knowledge:
Hackers often focus on acquiring surface-level knowledge, rather than developing a deep and comprehensive understanding of a subject.
An aversion to repetitive tasks:
Repetitive tasks may be seen as a chore by hackers, satisfied that they know enough to get by they will lose interest in the pursuit of mastery.
What’s the matter, David? Never taken a shortcut before?
“What’s the matter, David? Never taken a shortcut before?” - this one-liner from Shaun, played by Simon Pegg in the zombie parody film, Shaun of the Dead, is indicative of the hacker mindset. There are just garden 20 fences to jump to reach the sanctuary of The Winchester pub, but Shaun’s hacker pride soon turns to humility as the first fence collapses under his weight.
More from George Leonard on the hacker
The hacker seems happy with good enough. They may have an OK forehand and lack the motivation to work on their backhand. In terms of work and relationships, they have more of a functional and practical attitude, if the job or the partner sufficiently serves their fundamental needs of income and security, they will settle for what they have, rather than developing and growing to see what else can emerge. They become content with the unchanging and unchallenging plateau.
In many situations, the hacker mentality may be the optimal approach. And maybe the Pareto Principle is at play here, where 80% of the required knowledge can be gained with 20% of the effort. The path of mastery may be justifiably seen as sub-optimal, where the master must spend an additional 80% effort just to gain the remaining 20% of deep knowledge. Every decision we make involves a trade-off in how we allocate our time. The hacker mindset can serve as well, as long as we don’t confuse it with the mastery mindset.
The hacker and our external ecosystem
'Time and tide wait for no man', as the saying goes. Setting ideas of reincarnation aside for a moment, we each have limited time on this mortal coil. Time is a great equaliser, no matter your wealth, status, good looks, or charm, there is no getting out of the fact that you will one day expire.
Time is one of the external uncontrollables and uncertainties we have to deal with as our ordinary lives unfold. Out of all four of George Leonard’s mastery archetypes, the hacker is probably the one for which the march of time is an ever-present consideration for how they pursue an activity.
The typical response of modern society to the scarcity of time is the ‘get rich quick’ scheme. We are constantly exposed to quick hacks, advertisers rush to sell us a product or a service that will remove all our ills with a quick fix. The path of mastery can’t be bought and sold.
My own internal hacker
I worked for a while as a Software Engineer where, if I’m honest with myself, was more of a hacker than a master. I worked with colleagues who had the patience of a purist to understand the core principles of application design, and really dug into the languages, tools, and techniques they worked with. I just wanted to get things to work and move on, and I wasn’t ashamed to seek answers to my problems on StackOverflow (any Software Engineer will recognise the embarrassment of not being able to work something out yourself and search for a hack on StackOverflow). I used languages, tools, and techniques just to get an outcome, working functionality, sometimes with messy code, without spending the time to learn the deeper fundamentals.
Since moving into the management and leadership side of Software, I’ve recognised the folly of my hacker ways and as a manager I try to steer myself towards the path of mastery, trying to understand as much about people management, leadership and organisational culture as I can and supporting engineers to adopt the mastery mindset in their own careers.
From hacker to master
The hacker archetype can be a barrier to achieving mastery, but as a ‘Jack of all Trades’, they might well be successful in life and feel little compelling need for mastery. Their focus on quick wins combined with a lack of patience can prevent them from developing the deep understanding and consistent discipline required for real mastery. However, through self-awareness and with an effortful shift in perspective in terms of their sensitivity to time, it may be possible for hackers to develop the traits necessary for journeying along the path of mastery.
If a person wants to move from hacking to mastery in certain areas of life, perhaps they would do well to think of the proverb ‘A stitch in time saves nine', slowing down and learning something deeply in the short-term in order to be less hacky and more proficient in the long-term.