I’m still thinking this one through. A way of measuring a person’s thinking maturity. A brain analogue to what ‘RealAge’ does for a person’s medical age. RealAge is a way of letting people know how healthily they live. Having a RealAge lower than your calendar age is a way of saying you’re living healthily. And vice versa. I’m imagining a similar thing for your brain. Or rather how effectively we do or don’t make use of it.

I think I’ve got several of the necessary components of a ‘Mastery Age’ measure in place. One definite is the Malcolm Gladwell ’10,000 hours to achieve mastery’ meme. Not so much the 10,000 hour number per se because, as I’ve written elsewhere, it seems possible to me to achieve ‘mastery’ of something in a lot less than 10,000 hours if a person works smartly enough. And similarly – as with my guitar-playing efforts – it is very possible to devote 10,000 hours to a subject and quite clearly not achieve mastery. The difference is about how many discontinuous learning experiences you’re able to put yourself through. When I’m playing guitar, I find it too easy to stay in my comfort zone, noodling my way through the same things time and time again. On the other hand, when it came to getting up to speed with some of my innovation-adjacent domains of expertise, I deliberately put myself in contradictory situations to stimulate faster learning.

If the 10,000 hour number means anything, it is perhaps a datum. Like the number of calendar years a person has lived. If we assume a 40 hour-week devoted to mastering a subject, ‘mastery’ of that subject should – assuming a 10,000 hour average – be achieved in around five years. Then, assuming we say the first 20 years of life are about mastering the mechanics of being a sort-of-functioning adult, that leaves, on average, fifty years of adult life in which we could – on average – envisage mastering ten subjects.

In this way, the average person who lives an average actively life to the age of 70 and has used this time to master ten things, they might be said to have achieved a Mastery Age of 70.

A person mastering fewer things could then be said to have a lower Mastery Age. And, conversely, the person that sets out on a journey of pro-active contradiction-chasing mastery could conceivably achieve a Mastery Age considerably beyond their 70 calendar years.

So far so good. But not quite. Because I also think another piece in the jigsaw needs to be some of the #-shaped people model I’ve talked about in this blog and elsewhere (https://triz-journal.com/shaped-people/). The underlying idea of #-shaped is the need to combine both ‘vertical’ domain specialist mastery and ‘horizontal’ domain-bridging generalist knowledge mastery. Somehow the Mastery Age measure needs to account for this parallel need and how well a balance has been achieved. A person that masters 10 domain subjects ought to have a lower Mastery Age than a person that masters five vertical and five horizontal subjects. Now the calculation gets complicated. To the point, I think, where it needs to be done as some kind of automated survey. That’s what we’re working on right now in PanSensic Land.

Meanwhile, I’m figuring, guitar-non-prowess notwithstanding, Mastery-wise, I’m batting below average. My calendar age is 56. My ‘RealAge’, last time I did the assessment, was 48. Which I’m pretty happy with. My Mastery Age, though, seems to be hovering around the 35 mark. Which doesn’t sound so good at all.

Must try harder.

Or re-calibrate the model.