Mastery
Robert Greene
Description
The ultimate form of power is mastery.
Step 1: Undertake a rigorous apprenticeship under a master in the field.
Step 2: Absorb the hidden knowledge that comes with years of experience.
Step 3: Surpass the master in brilliance, rewrite the rules to your advantage.
Key words: Mastery, Success
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My Notes
Most of the time we live in an interior world of dreams, desires and obsessive thoughts. But in this period of exceptional creativity, we are compelled by the need to get something done that has practical effect. We force ourselves to step outside the inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world. At these moments, suddenly exposed to new details and ideas, we become more inspired and creative.
With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or shear effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish. The intense connection and desire allow them to withstand the pain of the process – the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack.
People get the mind and quality of brain they deserve through their actions in life.
The process of realising your life’s task comes in three stages;
Stage 1 – First you must connect or reconnect with your inclinations, that sense of uniqueness. The first step then is always inward. You search the past for signs of that inner voice or force. You clear away the other voices that might confuse you – parents and peers. You look for an underlying pattern, a core character that you must understand as deeply as possible.
Stage 2 – With this connection established you must look at the career path you are already on or are about to begin. The choice of this path – or re-direction of it – is critical. To help in this stage you will need to enlarge the concept of work itself. You want to see your work as something more inspiring, as part of your vocation. The word ‘vocation’ comers from the Latin meaning to call or be called. The voice that is calling you is coming from deep within. Your work then is something connected deeply to who you are.
Stage 3 – You must see your career or vocational path more as a journey with twists and turns rather than a straight line. Like Leonardo, you take what you do for others and make it your own. Eventually you will hit upon a particular field, niche, or opportunity that suits you perfectly. You will recognise it when you find it because it will spark that childlike sense of wonder and excitement; it will feel right.
Once found, everything will fall into place. You will learn more quickly and more deeply. Your skill level will reach a point where you will be able to claim your independence from within the group you work for and move out on your own. You will determine your circumstances. As your own Master, you will no longer be subject to the whims of tyrannical bosses or scheming peers.
It is a harshly competitive environment. We must learn to develop ourselves. At the same time, it is a world teeming with critical problems and opportunities, best solved and seized by entrepreneurs – individuals or small groups who think independently, adapt quickly and possess unique perspectives. Your individualised, creative skills will be at a premium.
Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become – an individual, a master.
When it is possible, you make a move to the narrower field. You continue this process until you eventually hit upon a totally unoccupied niche, the narrower the better. In some ways, this niche corresponds to your uniqueness, to what sets you apart from others.
In either direction, you have found a niche that is not crowded with competitors. You have freedom to roam, to pursue particular questions that interest you. You set your own agenda and command the resources available to this niche. Unburdened by overwhelming competition and politicking, you have time and space to flower your life’s task.
Let go of the past – In dealing with your career and its changes, you must think in the following way: You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company. You are committed to your life’s task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly. It is not up to others to protect or help you. You are on your own. Change is inevitable. Since you are on your own, it is up to you to foresee the changes going on in your profession right now. You must adapt your life’s task to these circumstances. You do not hold onto the past ways of doing things. You are flexible and always looking to adapt.
The road to mastery requires patience.
In the end, the money and success that truly last come not to those who focus on such things as goals, but rather to those who focus on mastery and fulfilling their life’s task.
When you’ve finished your life’s task, your second life will then commence, and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of your life.
Keys to mastery
On can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of yourself. Leonardo Da Vinci
The principle is simple and must be engraved in your mind; the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title or diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character – the first transformation on the way to mastery.
You enter a career as an outsider. You are naïve and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities and limited experience. Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world surrounded by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end you will master yourself and all your weaknesses. Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come. You will move towards challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. Constantly look for challenges that push you past your comfort zone. See your apprenticeship as a journey that will transform you.
You move from observation to analysis, honing your reasoning skills.
Knowing your environment inside and out will help you in navigating it and avoiding costly mistakes.
You are like a hunter; your knowledge of every detail of the forest and the ecosystem as a whole will give you many more options.
You will develop a habit of stilling your ego and looking outward instead of inward.
We learn best through practice and repetition.
The more we speak and practice the more fluent we become.
The initial stages of learning a skill invariably involves tedium. Yet rather than avoiding, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stages of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise.
Gain as much feedback from others as possible.
You will become one with the tool or instrument or thing you are studying.
Experimentation – take on more responsibility, initiating a project of some sort, doing work that exposes you to the criticisms of peers or even the public.
You have learned how to learn.
In the future the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them.
You will choose a place that has people and mentors who can inspire and teach you.
It is often the height of wisdom to find the perfect mentor and offer your services for free.
Do it all yourself, and with great energy.
You must struggle against any limitations and continually work to expand your horizons.
To apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, as part of you even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.
We must constantly ask the questions – how do things work, how do decisions get made, how does the group interact?
Mentor Dynamic
Your goal is always to surpass your mentors in mastery and brilliance.
To learn requires a sense of humility.
Understand: all that should concern you in the early stages of your career is acquiring practical knowledge in the most efficient manner possible.
By nature, mentors feel emotionally invested in your education.
This knowledge needs to be heated up and come alive within you, transforming itself into something active and relevant to your circumstances.
The good mentors allow you to develop your own style and then leave them when the time is right.
At each phase of life, you must find the appropriate teachers, getting what you want out of them, moving on, and feeling no shame for this. It is the path your own mentors probably took, and it is the way of the world.
You must get the sharpest dose of reality that is possible from your mentor. You must go in search for it and welcome it.
Get them to give you the proper challenges that will reveal your strengths and weaknesses and allow you to gain as much feedback as possible, no matter how hard it might be to take.
Leonardo Da Vinci said, “poor is the apprentice who does not surpass his master”.
Social intelligence - See people as they are: social intelligence.
Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible.
Social intelligence is nothing more that the process of discarding naïve perspective and approaching something more realistic. It involves focusing our attention outward instead of inward, honing the observational and empathic skills that we naturally possess. Seeing and accepting people as they are.
Don’t focus on what other people have done to you. Instead focus on yourself – how you saw others, how you ignore signs.
Then with this new clarity, adjust your attitude to others. Observe, and by being as tolerant as possible, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behaviour when necessary.
Social intelligence is two things.
First – Specific knowledge of human nature; to read people, to get a feel for how they see the world and to understand their individuality. (the person in front of you)
Second – General knowledge of human nature – understanding the overall patterns of human behaviour.
Rely on yourself to get things done and you will not be disappointed.
By remaining focused and speaking socially through your work, you will both continue to raise your skill level and stand out among others.
In general, you never settle on one image or give people the power to completely figure you out. You are always one step ahead of the public.
Thinking of it as a theatre. By creating a persona that is mysterious, intriguing and masterful, you are playing to the public, giving them something compelling and pleasurable to witness.
We need to possess the ability to see ourselves as we really are.
What should matter is getting long term results.
The mind
If we think about our childhood. Our minds were completely open, and we entertained all kinds of surpassing original ideas. Colours seemed more vibrant and alive. We had a powerful desire to turn everything around us into a game, to play with the circumstances.
Although they have a profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approaching problems.
The dimensional mind – such a mind is not constricted to limited experience or habits. It can branch out in all directions and make deep contact with reality. Creating instead of consuming.
The dimensional mind – has two essential requirements: one, a high level of knowledge about a field or subject; and two, the openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways.
To aid in this process, it is often wise to choose something that appeals to your sense of unconventionality and calls up latent feelings of rebelliousness. Perhaps what you want to invent or discover is being ignored or ridiculed by others. In opting for something that has deep personal appeal to you, you will naturally move in an unorthodox direction. The sense of having doubters can serve as a powerful motivating device and fill you with an added creative energy and focus.
You may know your task, but you are never exactly sure where your efforts will lead.
Think of yourself as an explorer. You cannot find anything new if you are unwilling to leave the shore.
You must follow the route of all creative thinkers and go in the opposite direction.
Sherlock Holmes “solves a crime by paying attention to what did not happen”.
The best way to neutralise our natural impatience is to cultivate a kind of pleasure in pain – like an athlete, you come to enjoy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits and resisting the easy way out.
Take pleasure in the laborious research process; you enjoy the slow cooking of an idea, the growth that naturally takes shape over time.
Your task as a creative thinker is to actively explore the unconscious and contradictory parts of your personality, and to examine similar contradictions and tensions in the world.
By delving into the chaotic and fluid zone below the level of consciousness where opposites meet, you will be surprised by the exciting and fertile ideas that will come bubbling up to the surface.
Conclusion
It is not the move of the pieces of the chessboard but the entire game, involving the psychologies of the players, their strategies in real time, their past experiences influencing the present, the comfort of their chairs they are sitting in, how their energies affect each other – in a word, everything that comes into play all at once.
Through intense absorption in a particular field over a long period of time, Masters come to understand all of the parts involved in what they are studying. They reach a point where all of this has become internalised and they are no longer seeing the parts but gain an intuitive feel for the whole. They literally see or sense the dynamic.
The ultimate distinction you make is between yourself and the world. There is the inside (your subjective experience) and there is the outside.
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.
Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective.
We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up. Going deeper into their otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and grasp their reality. The ability to understand from the inside-out is an essential part of mastery.
Our ideas will become closer to nature, more alive and organic. In any way possible, you should strive to be part of this universalising process, extending your own knowledge to other branches, further and further out. The rich ideas that will come from such a quest will be their own reward.
