Mastery Basics

  • Mastery: The secret to greatness in a field
  • Mastery is not a function of Genius. Not a miracle
    • Mastery is a function of
      • Time
      • Intense Focus
      • Mentors/Relationships
    • Mastery is not
      • Possessed by other Great ones
    • Our vanity/self-love/ego protection promotes the cult of genius
      • If someone is a miracle or gifted or genius and we are not – it does not aggrieve us
      • If we stop believing that there are any geniuses, all the responsibility of becoming great now falls on us. 

Mastery by Robert Greene: 5 Steps

  1. Discover your calling
  2. Apprenticeship
  3. Must have Mentor(s)
  4. Social Intelligence
  5. Strategies for creativity

1. Discover your Calling:

  • Characteristics of a calling
    • LOVE – You must love it.
      • You must feel passion for it
    • Visceral Reactions to stuff related to it
    • Never Tired of it
      • As if you can work on it all the time.
      • This is the feeling I personally get when I am reading business and personal development books and talking about them and teaching the ideas from them.
      • Ask yourself: What is it that you are never tired of?
    • Curiosity – an unusual degree of curiosity
      • You keep digging more and finding more
    • Power – Feelings of power attached to particular actions.
  • Avoid the false path
    • Doing it for money/fame/power
      • When you do it for money/fame/power, you never attain mastery, and you never get the money/fame/power either.
  • Weaknesses
    • Ignore your weaknesses
    • Resist the temptation to be like others
      • The world is constantly trying to make you average.
      • You must resist the temptation to give in and be like others.
      • You must chart your own course.
  • It doesn’t appear out of the blue … it’s a process
    • It can appear in the guise of your deficiencies
      • Makes you focus on the one or two things that you are inevitably good at

2. Apprenticeship

  • Steps of Apprenticeship:
    • Step 1 – Deep observation
      • Don’t try to impress
    • Step 2 – Skills acquisition
      • Natural learning – we learn by watching and imitating
      • Practice – Long hours. Challenging comfort zone
    • Step 3 – Experimentation
      • Experiment with the new
  • Strategies:
    • Value learning over money
      • Don’t choose an apprenticeship that promises to pay more money
      • Instead, choose an apprenticeship where you will learn a lot more, even if you will be paid less.
    • Revert to a child-like feeling of not knowing
      • That is when you are most open to learning.
    • Trust the process
      • Trust that failure is part of the process
      • Trust that challenges will be a part of the process
      • Trust that negative emotions will be a part of the process.
    • Move towards resistance and pain
      • In order to learn at the fastest pace possible, attack areas where you are hitting resistance.
      • Invent exercises in areas of your biggest challenge
    • Apprentice yourself in failure.
      • There are 2 Kinds of Failure:
        • Never trying – waiting for the perfect time to take action. 
          • Failure of Inaction will DESTROY you
        • Bold and venturesome – You try and you fail
          • You learn and grow a lot from this kind of failure.

3. Find a Mentor

  • Why do you need a Mentor?
    • Life is too short. Your creative time is very limited.
      • You can not figure it all out by yourself.
    • Trying to learn through books, practice, occasional advice is time-consuming and hit/miss
    • Shortcut the process
      • 10 years on your own
      • 5 years or less with a mentor
  • Emotional Relationship w/ Mentor is crucial
    • They feel emotionally invested in your progress
    • Be useful to them
    • You feel emotionally drawn to them
      • You admire them
      • Mentors find this immensely flattering
  • How to get a mentor interested and hooked
    • See the world through their eyes
    • Ask yourself – what do they need the most?
    • If you are interested in their self-interest – they will, in turn, be interested in you

4. Social Intelligence

  • Most of us are operating in the dark
    • We are blind to Others’ motivations and intentions
  • Your goal is to identify and pierce through to what makes people unique. TO understand their:
    • character
    • Values
    • Pasts
    • Way of thinking
  • Be able to see yourself as others see you
  • Put yourself in their shoes
    • Don’t project your feelings on them
  • How to do this?
    • Silence your inner voice. Be present

5. Strategies for Creativity

  • Creative Task
      • Think of yourself as an explorer.
      • THE higher the goal, the more energy you will call up from deep within.
  • Creative Strategies
    • Cultivate negative capability
      • The ability to hold paradoxes.
      • Be OK with feeling doubt and uncertainty
    • Allow serendipity
      • most interesting and profound discoveries in science occur when the thinker is not concentrating directly on the problem
    • Alter your perspective
      • Look for what’s not there.
    • Have a Sense of Urgency
      • The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds.
      • Manufacture urgency if needed
        • Your mind is now like an army that is backed up and can not retreat.
        • Fight or DIE
      • Edison – Light Bulb
        • Deliberately talked to press about an idea before he was ready
          • Put his reputation on the line
      • Galois – The greatest work on Algebra
        • The night before his duel (which could lead to death) he summarized all his ideas on algebra
    • Lack of Intensity is BAD
      • Without intensity, the brain doesn’t jolt into high gear
      • Mental connections do not trigger



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