Mastery is understanding and reacting to increasingly greater nuance within a field.

When you begin learning chess, you are taught to always protect the king. This is a good rule – not protecting your king can leave you open to attack, and is often a critical error made by novice players. But there are times when you shouldn’t protect the king. Perhaps the extra move or two that you spend tucking him safely away in the corner allows your opponent to create weaknesses on the other side of the board.

Masters understand the rule, but also when exceptions apply. These exceptions turn into new rules, which in turn spawn new exceptions. Seeking out these exceptions and actively codifying their patterns of behaviour into your practice is the foundation of all self improvement.

Instinctively, humans are aware of how rules can be problematic. We as a collective have developed words such as “pigeonholing” or “stereotyping” to describe the application of a rule without accounting for the infinite levels of nuance that exist.

Despite this, we continue to carelessly repeat sweeping generalisations to everyone we encounter, and act like it’s good advice. We say things like “if you don’t get good grades, you won’t get a good job”, or “don’t start arguments”. Billionaire Richard Branson dropped out of school at age 15, and respectful arguments are one of the most important mechanisms for correcting faulty thinking. But nuance doesn’t scale.

The same rational can be applied to criticism. Your painting isn’t bad – but perhaps your choice of colours could be improved. Or your brushstrokes require a little more precision. Stop internalising broad criticisms and start unpacking the specifics. Feedback is important, but feedback is typically more generalised than what you actually require in the moment. Learning which principles to apply in a specific scenario is the art of separating the signal from the noise, then deliberately acting upon the signal.

This is the framework for improving at anything, and doing so in a methodical manner is the most effective way to clear the fog.