4. Become monomaniacally focused on knowing all there is to know about one or two things.

The secret to Mastery is concentration of attention. Period. Practice insane amounts of hours. Anders Ericsson is the world's pre-eminent researcher on exceptional performance. His research (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell) showed that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to make an expert. Put in the time and out will come the expert. Go to your edges. Elite athletes, violinists, writers and chess players all do the same thing: every day they have specific times that they push their skills to the edge. And by relentlessly pushing their talents past what's comfortable, their talents quickly expand.