Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

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But genius, no matter how bright, will come to naught or swiftly burn out if you don't choose the master's journey. Few will find the book inaccessible—Greene covers virtually every possible field and often includes the connections between them, such as Yoky Mastuoka’s work on robotics and tennis.

Look for mentors who can do that, and beware of falling into the opposite trap— opting for a mentor who resembles one of your parents, including all of his negative traits. As a side note; I thoroughly enjoyed the course, and would recommend it to anyone reading this review.

In the long run, the war against mastery, the path of patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results, is a war that can't be won. The instruction starts with the reasons why mastery is so rarely practiced these days and the various things people default to instead.

For while the earlier book was about how to gain and hold control of other people, this one is about how to find, develop, and fully realize one's own Life's Task. Regardless of whether the pursuit is of professional, personal, social, or athletic nature, mastery should be on our minds rather than frustration. In this sense, the word is akin to the Chinese word tao and the Japanese word do, both of which mean, literally, road or path. Their superiority is not a function of natural talent or privilege, but rather of time and experience. Leonard gives us the tools to take what interests and excites us and to apply the keys to mastery to allow us unreal success.

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. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field.

Learning to embrace and anticipate the plateau in the journey, and feeling excited and looking at the plateau as a chance to learn while we wait for our next spurt of improvement, and waiting on the plateau again, and again.You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process. The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character— the first transformation on the way to mastery… This has a simple consequence: you must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning… This means that you move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. But that might just mean that while you can always start, you might not be able to finish the path to mastery before the clock runs out.

The bigger obstacles are fear and conformism, and we all have fear, and we all have some desire to conform. Instead you want to see your work as something more inspiring, as part of your vocation… Your work then is something connected deeply to who you are, not a separate compartment in your life. Internalize the Details — The Life Force: Seeing your work as something alive, your path to mastery is to study and absorb these details in a universal fashion, to the point at which you feel the life force and can express it effortlessly in your work. Play to your strengths — Supreme Focus: Mastery is like swimming— it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. It completely shatters the myth of iconic people being destined for success by birth or some wild genius feat.Although it might be something we experience for only a short while, for others— Masters of their field— it becomes their way of life, their way of seeing the world. Even serious blows in life can give you extra energy by knocking you off dead center, shaking you out of your lethargy—but not if you deny the blows are real. The masters he looks at range from the historical, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Michael Faraday, to the contemporary, such as the architect Santiago Calatrava, the boxer and coach Freddie Roach, and the autistic animal psychologist Temple Grandin.