Mastery –– Robert Greene

Author: Robert Greene

Date Started: [[September 28th, 2020]]

Date Finished: [[February 21st, 2021]]

Type: Kindle

[[More Notes On Mastery]]

We imagine that creativity and brilliance just appear out of nowhere, the fruit of natural talent, or perhaps of a good mood, or an alignment of the stars. It would be an immense help to clear up the mystery— to name this feeling of power, to examine its roots, to define the kind of intelligence that leads to it, and to understand how it can be manufactured and maintained. Let us call this sensation mastery— the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves.

Anybody can become a master, you don't have to be special - you follow the process for years, or decades and you have the capability to be a master. It's in your hands.

In the process leading to this ultimate form of power, there are three distinct phases or levels. The first is the Apprenticeship; the second is the Creative-Active; the third, Mastery.

If there's something that you connect with and go in with, you'll find it over time. If you're always looking for the best or the most, you'll never get started. Don't optimize for optionality, the sooner you get into it the better off you'll be. [[The Trouble With Optionality]]

The big excuse: The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are just products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends. Many take this change in value a step further, giving their passivity a positive veneer. They romanticize the self-destructive artist who loses control of themself.

#comment I'm still not sure how much of the "Life's task" I believe in - I think i have certain fixed notions about what someone's life task could be or how it relates to me. Also how does a "life's task" apply to a generalist, and someone with several interests in a variety of fields. How does one find a specification within the multiple fields their in? Maybe I just haven't found the right combination yet - and there's no hurry either.

1. Discovering Your Calling

• You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task— what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness— your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward— learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the proper career path and everything else will fall into place. It is never too late to start this process.

• The three steps to finding your calling
  • 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 to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.
  • Second, 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 redirection of it— is critical. To help in this stage you will need to enlarge your concept of work itself. Too often we make a separation in our lives— there is work and there is life outside work, where we find real pleasure and fulfillment.
    • This is a big distinction - that separation can exist if you make it exist. This is also the problem with "side hustles".
    • Comparing yourself to other people isn't really the metric you should be using.
  • You have to see your career path as a journey, with twists and turns on the way, instead of a straight line. You begin by choosing a field or position that roughly corresponds to your inclinations. This initial position offers you room to maneuver and important skills to learn. Once on this path you discover certain side routes that attract you, while other aspects of this field leave you cold. You adjust and perhaps move to a related field, continuing to learn more about yourself, but always expanding off your skill base. Like Leonardo, you take what you do for others and make it your own.
• Strategies for finding your "life's task"
  • Return to your origins: for many of the masters, their inclination presented itself clearly during childhood. What were you obsessed with when you were younger?
  • Occupy the perfect niche: Find where your interests align in a field to identify a particular niche that you can dominate.
  • Avoid the false path: We’ll all be attracted to fields for the wrong reasons: money, fame, parental influence. We have to rebel against these forces and be honest about what our interests are.
  • Let go of the past: Avoid the sunk cost fallacy, if something is wrong for you, abandon it. You’re not wedded to your past choices. Don’t feel like you have to rigidly stick with a plan that you set before.
  • Find your way back: You’ll be tempted to deviate from the path throughout your pursuit of mastery, even if you do mistakenly veer away, you can always come back.

2. Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

• Your whole life is a kind of apprenticeship to which you apply your learning skills. Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention. The creativity that you gain in learning a skill so deeply must be constantly refreshed, as you keep forcing your mind back to a state of openness. Even knowledge of your vocation must be revisited throughout the course of your life as changes in circumstance force you to adapt its direction.
• Everyone who's been successful has had a mentor - whether that's a person or a collection of books when that's out of reach.
• Deep observation: observe who's doing well in the field, and study as much as you can about other people. Absorb it and internalize it.
• Skill acquisition: you want to reduce these skills to something simple and essential— the core of what you need to get good at, skills that can be practiced.
  • The initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it.
  • Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.
  • It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it.
  • As you learn and gain skills you can begin to vary what you do, finding nuances that you can develop in the work, so that it becomes more interesting.
• Experimentation: deliberate practice, [[Deep Work - Cal Newport]]
  • Take the skill and apply it yourself, break out of the rules and create on your own.
  • You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.
  • Let your ideas marinate - the not-active work time will allow thoughts to consolidate and the quality of the work goes up.
• In acquiring any kind of skill, there exists a natural learning process that coincides with the functioning of our brains. This learning process leads to what we shall call tacit knowledge—a feeling for what you are doing that is hard to put into words but easy to demonstrate in action.
• [[cycle of accelerated returns]] in which the practice becomes easier and more interesting, leading to the ability to practice for longer hours, which increases your skill level, which in turn makes practice even more interesting.
• Strategies for Completing the Ideal Apprenticeship
  • Value learning over money
    • Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come—far more than the paltry increase in pay you might receive at some seemingly lucrative position that offers fewer learning opportunities.
    • It is a simple law of human psychology that your thoughts will tend to revolve around what you value most.
    • Train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy.
  • Keep expanding your horizons
    • Meet a lot of people, read a lot of books and ideas, etc.
    • If you read the same books as everyone else, you'll think the same way as everyone else. [[don't read what everyone else is reading]] - you become the media you consume.
  • Revert to a feeling of inferiority
    • Assume you know nothing and that you can learn anything from anyone.
    • [[The Hardened Mind]]
      • If we feel like we know something, our minds close off to other possibilities. We see reflections of the truth we have already assumed.
      • Children are generally free of these handicaps. They are dependent upon adults for their survival and naturally feel inferior. This sense of inferiority gives them a hunger to learn.
    • That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.
  • Trust the process
  • Move toward resistance and pain
    • [[Antifragile - Nasim Taleb]]
  • Apprentice yourself in failure
    • Be okay with making a mistake, even failed projects are good opportunities for learning.
  • Advance through trial and error
  • Combine the "how" and the "what"
    • Get a full understanding of the skill, not just the recipes or tools, don’t leave parts of it unlearned.
• [[The Defining Decade - Meg Jay]] In this new age, those who follow a rigid, singular path in their youth often find themselves in a career dead end in their forties, or overwhelmed with boredom. The wide-ranging apprenticeship of your twenties will yield the opposite— expanding possibilities as you get older.

3. Absorb the Master’s Power: The Mentor Dynamic

• The mentor-protégé relationship is the most efficient and productive form of learning. The right mentors know where to focus your attention and how to challenge you. Their knowledge and experience become yours.
• Poor is the apprentice who does not surpass his Master.
• We must admit that there are people out there who know our field much more deeply than we do. Their superiority is not a function of natural talent or privilege, but rather of time and experience.
• What took ten years on your own could have been done in 5 with proper direction.
  • #comment what does this mean for self-learning? mentorship makes a huge difference in comparison to self directed learning, but what if those resources aren't accessible?
  • If you work on yourself first, as Faraday did, developing a solid work ethic and organizational skills, eventually the right teacher will appear in your life. Word will spread through the proper channels of your efficiency and your hunger to learn, and opportunities will come your way.
• When you're a novice, you need recipes and clear guidelines. Experts rarely communicate well because they're functioning only on intuition. [[Intention vs. Intuition]]
• Strategies for Deepening the Mentor Dynamic
  • Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations: find someone who supports your life's task, and understands the bigger picture.
  • Gaze deep into your mentor’s mirror: understand the feedback, overcome your ego in the criticism you receive.
  • Transfigure their ideas: think for yourself and integrate what they're teaching you elsewhere. Avoid their bad habits.
  • Create a back and forth dynamic: work on the relationship together. You have to provide something to the mentor.

See People As They Are: Social Intelligence

• The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. [[The Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday]]
• Understanding Mastery is also learning to read and interact with people. No matter how good you are, if you can't communicate your ideas or thoughts, it doesn't matter.
• Specific Knowledge: Reading people
  • Pay less attention to the words people say, but to the tone and the body language.
  • After you have known people for a while, try to imagine that you are experiencing the world from their point of view, placing yourself in their circumstances and feeling what they feel.
  • Often it is the quiet ones, those who give out less at first glance, who hide greater depths, and who secretly wield greater power.
• General Knowledge: The 7 Deadly Realities
  • Envy - you don't want to be too threatening.
  • Conformism - tribal mindset might set in
  • Rigidity - the best strategy is to simply accept rigidity in others, outwardly displaying deference to their need for order. On your own, however, you must work to maintain your open spirit, letting go of bad habits and deliberately cultivating new ideas.
  • Self-Obsessiveness
  • Laziness
  • Flightiness
  • Passive aggression
• Strategies for Acquiring Social Intelligence
  • Speak through your work.
    • Master the craft, that will say more about you than what you say about you.
  • Craft the Appropriate Persona
    • Do this more deliberately, and with consideration.
    • By creating a persona that is mysterious, intriguing, and masterful, you are playing to the public, giving them something compelling and pleasurable to witness.
  • See yourself as others see you
    • We are quick to discern the mistakes and defects of others, but when it comes to ourselves we are generally too emotional and insecure to look squarely at our own. Second, people rarely tell us the truth about what it is we do wrong - find people who will call you about.
    • We can develop increasing self-detachment, which will yield us the other half of social intelligence— the ability to see ourselves as we really are.
  • Suffer fools gladly

    • In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them.

4. Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active

• As you accumulate more skills and internalize the rules that govern your field, your mind will want to become more active, seeking to use this knowledge in ways that are more suited to your inclinations. What will impede this natural creative dynamic from flourishing is not a lack of talent, but your attitude.
• As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles. As your thinking grows more fluid your mind will become increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality. In the end, you will turn against the very rules you have internalized, shaping and reforming them to suit your spirit. Such originality will bring you to the heights of power.
• The goal here is to awaken your “dimensional mind,” to think beyond the typical constraints of your skill and keep growing and learning. Not get stuck in your ways, or conform to the norms of your time.
• Step One: The Creative Task
  • Pick something related to your interest that you choose to work on - something that you have an obsessive relationship with.
  • Your emotional commitment to what you’re doing will determine your success. Choose something that appeals to your sense of unconventional-ness and has a hint of rebellion, it will keep you emotionally engaged.
  • It should be realistic, hard but not impossible. Let go of your need for comfort and security.
• Step Two: Creative Strategies
  • Cultivate Negative Capability: Learn to embrace mystery and uncertainty.
  • Allow for Serendipity: Move outside your normal realm of comfort and interest, explore far and wide, while staying open and avoiding jumping to conclusions. Let yourself be surprised and discover new opportunities. Keep a notebook with you at all time and record ideas as they appear to you.
    • The first step is to widen your search as far as possible. In the research stage of your project, you look at more than what is generally required. You expand your search into other fields, reading and absorbing any related information. If you have a particular theory or hypothesis about a phenomenon, you examine as many examples and potential counterexamples as humanly possible.
    • The second step is to maintain an openness and looseness of spirit. In moments of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial.
    • The wideness of his searches and the openness of his spirit allowed him to make this connection and “random” discovery.
    • “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • Alternate the Mind Through “the Current”:
    • The Current is a constant dialogue between our thoughts and reality. If we go into this process deeply enough, we come into contact with a theory that explains something far beyond the capability of our limited senses. The Current is merely an intensification of the most elementary powers of human consciousness. Our most primitive ancestors would take note of something unusual or out of place—broken twigs, chewed leaves, the outline of a hoof or paw. Through an act of pure imagination, they would deduce that this meant that an animal had passed by. This fact would be verified by tracking the footprints. Through this process, what was not immediately visible to the eyes (a passing animal) became visible.
    • All that has occurred since then is an elaboration of this power to increasingly higher levels of abstraction, to the point of understanding hidden laws of nature—like evolution and relativity.
  • Alter Your Perspective: Try to see the subject or problem from different angles, look at the how instead of the what, shift from the macro to the micro (or vice versa), look for what’s weird about it, look for what’s absent instead of just what’s present (dog that didn’t bark)
  • Revert to Primal Intelligence: Try to think beyond language, get visual or physical, use diagrams and models, exercise.
• Step Three: The Creative Breakthrough - Tension and Insight
  • At a particular high point of tension, they let go for a moment. This could be as simple as stopping work and going to sleep; or it could mean deciding to take a break, or to temporarily work on something else. What almost inevitably happens in such moments is that the solution, the perfect idea for completing the work comes to them.
  • Think about your biggest problem before you sleep. Whenever you leave, fixate on a problem, when you arrive, jump right into it.
• Emotional Pitfalls
  • Complacency - remind yourself that you know very little.
  • Conservatism - make creativity rather than comfort your goal and you will ensure far more success for the future.
  • Dependency - don't rely on anyone else's approval.
  • Impatience - The best way to neutralize 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.
  • Grandiosity - We fail to understand the element of luck that always goes into success— we often depend on being in the right place at the right time.
  • Inflexibility - Don't be afraid to question what you've learnt or what the field says.
• Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behavior, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.
• Understand: to create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability.

Strategies for the Creative-Active Phase

• The Authentic Voice - Anyone who would spend ten years absorbing the techniques and conventions of their field, trying them out, mastering them, exploring and personalizing them, would inevitably find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive.
  • If you can look back on yourself and realize how little you knew then, you're doing the right thing. It takes that amount of time to be good at something.
• The Fact of Great Yield - Better to look into ten such facts, with only one yielding a great discovery, than to look into twenty ideas that bring success but have trivial implications. You are the supreme hunter, ever alert, eyes scanning the landscape for the fact that will expose a once-hidden reality, with profound consequences.
  • What's the one truth that you believe in that no one else does?
  • Where is your energy going?
• Mechanical Intelligence - You win through superior craftsmanship, not just marketing.
• Natural Powers - Give yourself open-ended time and focus, develop a wide understanding of your field, never settle into complacency, and embrace slowness as a virtue in itself. Imagine yourself years ahead looking back on the work you’ve completed.
  • Keep the beginners mind.
• The Open Field - Create a space to build something new, by creating something new you will create your own audience, and attain the ultimate position of power in culture.
• The High End - Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger— a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place.
• The Evolutionary Hijack - What constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit.
  • Creativity actually resembles a process known in nature as evolutionary hijacking.
  • Perhaps language itself developed as a strictly social tool and became hijacked as a means of reasoning, making human consciousness itself the product of an accident.
• Dimensional thinking - Think beyond the recipes and the rules. Everything interacts with everything else, nothing is isolated.
• Alchemical Creativity and the Unconscious - 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 at large.

5. Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational: Mastery

• All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains were designed to attain, and we will be naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends.
• [[Intention vs. Intuition]]: At first, our intuitions might be so faint that we do not pay attention to them or trust them. All Masters talk of this phenomenon. But over time they learn to notice these rapid ideas that come to them. They learn to act on them and verify their validity. Some lead nowhere, but others lead to tremendous insights. Over time, Masters find that they can call up more and more of these high-level intuitions, which are now sparking all over the brain. Accessing this level of thinking on a more regular basis, they can fuse it even more deeply with their rational forms of thinking.
• Strategies for Attaining Mastery
  • Connecting to your environment - Primal Powers.
  • Play to your strengths - it's too difficult to move forward when you're creating your own resistance.
  • Transform Yourself Through Practice - The Fingertip Feel
    • Each time one skill becomes automatic, the mind is freed to focus on the higher one. You move through layers of abstraction.
    • At the very end of this process, when there are no more simple skills to learn, the brain has assimilated an incredible amount of information, all of which has become internalized, part of our nervous system. The whole complex skill is now inside us and at our fingertips. We are thinking, but in a different way—with the body and mind completely fused. We are transformed. We possess a form of intelligence that allows us to approximate the instinctual power of animals, but only through a conscious, deliberate, and extended practice.
  • Internalize the Details - The Life Force
    • You must see whatever you produce as something that has a life and presence of its own.
  • Widen Your Vision - The Global Perspective
    • In any competitive environment in which there are winners or losers, the person who has the wider, more global perspective will inevitably prevail. The reason is simple: such a person will be able to think beyond the moment and control the overall dynamic through careful strategizing.
    • Create a micro-macro view.
  • Submit to the Other - The Inside Out Perspective
    • We can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts.
  • Synthesize all forms of knowledge - The Universal Man / Woman
    • In any way possible, you should strive to be a part of this universalizing 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.
    • Broadening your horizons and creating a holistic view. Do it for the process, not for the reward.

As [[Marcus Aurelius]] expresses it, “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.” #connections

[[Passive Aggression]]