📚 Sunday Summary (03/22/20)
Mastery by Robert Greene
Have you ever had the feeling where nothing can stop you?
That feeling when you are at the top of your game.
That feeling of a greater command of reality, other people, and yourself.
For some people, this is a way of life. They rise to the top 1% in their field and they stay there.
Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Charles Darwin, Lebron James, and Warren Buffett are examples of this. How did they do it? Is it natural ability? Is it hard work?
Robert Greene makes a strong case that these people deliberately went through three stages to achieve Mastery.
The Apprenticeship
The Creative Active Phase
Mastery
In the book, he discusses how to navigate these three stages in your life and career if you want to be in the top 1% of your field. First, it’s important to identify your Life’s Task which is the foundation for your success. After you identify your Life’s Task then you progress through the three phases above.
Author
Robert Greene is best known as an author for writing The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, Mastery, and a handful of other books. The 48 Laws of Power has been banned in a handful of U.S. prisons, so you know it’s a good book. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list. Before becoming a successful author he had 80 jobs, which included construction worker, translator, magazine editor, and Hollywood movie writer. He’s a very interesting guy and Mastery shows his thoughtful approach to deconstructing what it takes to be at the top of your field. I’ve linked to the best of Robert Greene at the end of this post.
On to the Summary ...
Summary
Introduction and Context
Your Life’s Task
As a child, Darwin had one overriding passion - collecting biological specimens. His father, a doctor, wanted him to follow In his footsteps. Darwin tried, but failed. Then his dad found a career for him in the Church. As Darwin was preparing for this career, a former professor of his told him that the HMS Beagle was a ship that was sailing around the world and they needed a biologist to collect specimens that could be sent back to England. Although his father was angry, Darwin took the job. After five years at sea passionately collecting and analyzing specimens across the world, he returned to England and devoted the rest of his life to studying the theory of evolution. You know how the rest of the story plays out.
Masters seem to share this common theme: a youthful interest, a chance encounter that allows them to discover how to apply it, an apprenticeship in which they come alive with energy and focus. They have an inclination towards a particular subject and they go after it. For Darwin, studying biology was his life’s task. It’s important for you to find your life task as the first building block in your foundation to achieve mastery. Finding your life task is your own personal journey, but there are certain tools and questions in place to help guide you. Ask a few of these questions to help you in your process:
What is something that feels like play to you but work to others?
What is something that you seem to excel at very easily?
Is there an area where you seem to have an unfair advantage?
What were you interested in before social pressures made you conform to something “normal”?
All of us have some unique ability and force. What weakens that force or doubt it is the constant social pressure to conform. These social pressures affect us subconsciously everyday and they are driven by our parents, the media, our education system, our peer group. Unconsciously, you may feel that what makes you different is embarrassing. Do not conform. Lean into your uniqueness. The greatest contributors to our society are contrarian.
If you are able to ignore other’s opinions and dig deep within yourself to identify your Life’s task you will have built one brick in your strong foundation to help you achieve Mastery. The next thing you will need to do, is go through an Apprenticeship phase.
The First Phase: The Ideal Apprenticeship
In 1718, Benjamin Franklin was 12 years old. His father wanted him to begin working in their successfully family-run candle-making business. His father wanted Ben to go through a seven-year apprenticeship and then take over the business. Ben had other plans. He wanted to work in his older brother’s new printing business. This would be harder work and this apprenticeship would be nine years, instead of seven. It was quite a big risk. The real reason for Ben pursuing this apprenticeship was not to run a printing business, but to pursue his real dream of becoming a writer.
Most of his work dealt with manual labor and operating machines, but he would also have the chance to proofread and edit a pamphlet or some text. And there was always new books around. After a few years, he asked to be the one to oversee the printing of English newspapers the shop would reprint. This gave him the chance to study these texts in detail and he taught himself how to imitate their style in his won work. By doing this, he created his own efficient apprenticeship for writing, with the added benefit of having learned the printing business as well.
Apprenticeships are not as common today as they were in previous decades. However, by shifting your mindset in the early stages of a career similar to Ben Franklin, you can approach your career experiences as an apprenticeship.
The goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good title, or a diploma. But rather, the extreme transformation of your mind and character. Your first step on your way to mastery. You enter a career as an outsider. You are naive and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is filled with dreams and fantasies about the future. Slowly, you ground yourself in reality. You will learn what the work really entails. You’ll learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process, you’ll transform yourself from someone who is impatient to someone who is disciplined and focused with a mind that can handle complexity.
You must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning. Practical knowledge is the currency and investment and this will pay far greater dividends in the future, which will make up for any negligible increase in pay you might receive at a position with a better sounding title, but worse learning opportunities.
There are three steps to successfully complete your apprenticeship: 1) Passive Mode, 2) Practice Mode, and 3) Active Mode.
Passive mode: This is a time of deep observation. Your goal is to observe and absorb reality as deeply as possible. The greatest mistake you can make at this time is to try and get attention, impress people, and prove yourself. If you do impress people during this time, it should be based on the seriousness of your desire to learn, not because you’re trying to rise to the top before you’re ready. You will observe two crucial realities. One, you will observe the rules and procedures that drive success in this world. In simple terms, “how do things get done here?” You’ll learn these directly and indirectly. Observe the people at the top of the hierarchy and understand the written and unwritten rules that take place in this world. The second reality to observe is the power relationships within the group. Who has real control, how does communication flow, who is rising and who is declining. This may seem like politics, but your job here is to not judge or be jaded, it is simply to observe and deeply understand how these power dynamics work.
Practice mode: This is the time where you will start acquiring skills that are crucial for you to perform your job. First, you need to begin with one skill that you can master that will serve as the foundation for all other skills. At this time, you develop your powers of concentration and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process. Second, you must learn that through repetition this will seem to become tedious and potentially boring. You cannot shy away from this, you must lean into it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill will toughen our minds, much like physical exercise. In the end, an entire network of neurons in your brain have developed to remember this single task. Think about it like riding a bike, you can still remember how to ride a bike years after you learned as a child. I have not ridden a bike in years, but I know that if I went out today and went for a ride, I could easily do it.
Active mode: This is a time of experimentation. As you gain skill and confidence, this means taking on more responsibilities, initiating projects, or dong work that exposes you to the criticism of peers and the public. Most people wait too long to take this step, generally out of fear. It’s always easier to learn the rules and stay within you comfort zone. Often you must force yourself to do this before you think you’re ready. For example, writing in public is something I’m doing before I feel like I’m ready. But, I know that the only way I will get better is by seeing how “the market” responds. If my number of subscribers grow, my open rate grows, and I get positive feedback then I know I am putting out work that people like. If these metrics stall or go the opposite way, then I know I need to improve something.
It’s crucial to understand there are no shortcuts or ways to bypass the Apprenticeship phase. If you try shortcuts, you will end up failing.
During this Apprenticeship phase, you’ve ideally found the right mentor. It’s important to take full advantage of your time with your mentor to gain all the knowledge that you can.
The Mentor Dynamic
Freddie Roach is one of the best trainers in boxing. In 2001, a 122-pound featherweight boxer named Manny Pacquiao from Philippines stepped into his name. At the time, Pacquiao was relatively unknown outside Philippines. Most trainers passed on working with Pacquiao because there was little money to be made in the lightweight division. However, Freddie could see that Pacquiao had an explosive, intense, and quick fighting style unlike any other fighters.
At the time, Pacquiao was a one-dimensional fighter. He had a great left hand and not much else. He was always looking for the knockout, ignoring everything else. Freddie’s goal was to turn Pacquiao into a multi-dimensional fighter. Freddie worked with Pacquiao to develop a powerful right hand and fluid footwork which made him a well-rounded fighter.
There were two major things that helped this mentor relationship develop so deeply. First, Pacquiao was a true apprentice. He was extremely teachable. Because of that, his progress for learning was rapid. Pacquiao never seemed to get tired of training or worry about over-training. Roach kept waiting for the inevitable snag in a relationship where the fighter begins to tune their trainer out, but this never came. Pacquiao continued to work harder and harder. As a result, he began to win fight after fight. Second, as the years went by Pacquiao would give input on Roach’s strategies and tactics. He developed a sixth sense for Roach’s guidance and because of that Pacquiao was now able to teach Freddie, just as much as Freddie could teach Pacquiao. For most fighters, they reach a plateau because their opponents pick up on their weaknesses due to a stale training approach. For Freddie and Pacquiao, this back-and-forth of input and learning meant that they could push each other to new heights and success. And they did. Pacquiao is known as one of the greatest boxers of his generation.
Mentors don’t give you a shortcut, but they streamline the process. They most likely had their own great mentors. They observe you at work and provide real-time feedback, making your practice more time efficient. Their advice is tailored to your needs. What may take you ten years by yourself can be done within five if you have proper direction.
One way to find the right mentors, is to offer them practical and useful value. Figure out what experience and skills you have that can be helpful for your mentor. If for some reason your circumstances limit your ability to have a mentor, books can be great replacements for the time being. For myself, I have learned so much by reading about Charlie Munger, Ben Franklin, John Rockefeller, and others. However, do not take the easy route of just going for books, put in the work to try and connect with your ideal mentors.
Thomas Edison found his mentors through books. His family was poor. He had no chance at formal education. Edison turned to books so he could further develop his understanding of his passion for Science. One book that played a decisive role in his life was Experimental Researches in Electricity. Through books, experiments, and practical experiences at various jobs, he gave himself a strong education that lasted about en years, up until the time he became an inventor.
It’s important to really soak up all of your Mentor’s knowledge. Some things may seem incorrect or irrational, but it’s important to deeply understand their principles and actions and understand the “why” behind what they’re doing. You can note the things that you don’t like or don’t agree with and in the future you can determine if you want to incorporate their principles into your work. At a certain point during your relationship, you can have more of a back-and-forth with your mentor about these principles. If they can adapt to some of your ideas, the relationship becomes much deeper. If you are doing good and your mentor sees your potential and is willing to take your feedback - this is where magic happens. Similar to Freddie Roach and Manny Pacquiao, the amount of learning and growth that can happen for you and your Mentor gets unleashed.
While you’re going through your Apprenticeship phase, you will have the opportunity to interact and work with other people. There are some people who are unable to achieve all they want in life because they have not understood how to effectively work with other people. It’s extremely important to understand human psychology. By knowing how to influence people, persuade them, anticipate, and understand their actions and reactions you will set yourself up for greater success. This brings us to our next point to understand within your Apprenticeship phase: Social Intelligence.
Social Intelligence
During Ben Franklin’s apprenticeship at his brother’s Printing shop, Franklin was becoming a skilled writer. Four years into his apprenticeship, his brother, James, launched his own newspaper called The New England Courant. Ben approached James with several interesting ideas, but James wasn’t interested because he thought Ben’s writing was too immature.
Ben knew it was pointless to argue with his James because he was stubborn. Ben decided to take matters into his own hands. He created a character called Silence Dogood who lived in Boston and had lots of strong opinions on living in Boston. He sent in the first letter to The Courant and his brother publishedd the story along with a note asking for more letters from her. Ben kept in sending letters under the character of Silence Dogood and James kept publishing them, not realizing Silence Dogood was actually his own brother.
Ben’s responsibilities at the shop kept growing and he proved that he was extremely valuable to the business. One day, he couldn’t help himself and he confessed to James that he was actually Silence Dogood. Ben expected to be praised, but he was surprised by his brother’s response. James was very angry that Ben had been lying to him. Deep down, James was obviously embarrassed. Over the next few months, James was very cold to Ben, and, even abusive towards him. It became impossible for Ben to work for James and he decided to flee to Boston turning his back on his brother and family.
After this event, Ben found himself in a few other situations that he misread badly as he bounced around a couple jobs and had some opportunities fall through that he thought were going to be great for him.
Because of these incidents, Ben Franklin was struck by an apparent paradox. In his work, he was extremely rational and realistic. He was always improving his skills and abilities. But with people, it was the complete opposite: he would be swept up in his emotions and lose contact with reality. To fix this, he decided in all of his interactions with people he would not get emotional. He would force himself to take a step back and view his interactions from the standpoint of his counterpart, eliminating his own insecurities and desires. He would adopt this new philosophy: complete and radical acceptance of human nature.
This story of Franklin was a great inflection point in his life. It’s important to understand other’s desires and needs and accept each person’s characters and then adjust your own behavior. We cannot change human nature, we must learn how to accept it and adapt. Even if you are extremely intelligent, diligent, and create great work you still need to understand how to work with other people.
Often the greatest obstacle to your pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain you experience in dealing with the resistance, manipulations, and emotions of those around us. We misread their intentions and reaction ways that cause confusion of conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. Navigating smoothly through the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery and will not last.
As you approach your apprenticeship it’s important to think about the Mentorship dynamic and Social Intelligence. The story of Freddie Roach and Manny Pacquiao is a great example of how to create a mutually beneficial relationship that can transcend new heights. Ben Franklin’s stories on Social intelligence will help you learn how to ensure you’re able to achieve what you need without roadblocks from others.
Ultimately, the question becomes, how do you know when your apprenticeship is complete? You will know your apprenticeship is over when you have the feeling that there is nothing left to learn in this environment. It’s time to declare your independence or move to another place to continue your apprenticeship and expand your skills. At some point, it’s important for the Mentor to surpass the Mentor. As Leonardo Da Vinci said, “Poor is the apprentice who does not surpass his Master."
The Second Phase: The Creative-Active
Wolfgang Mozart was surrounded by music from the moment he was born. His father, Leopold, was a violinist, composer, and music instructor in Austria. His sister, Maria Anna, who was three years older than him was a piano player. At three years old, Mozart was already playing the piano with a great sense of rhythm and hadn’t even had any instruction.
Leopold realized that he could make a fortune through his children because of their musical talents. He took his family on a tour throughout Europe’s capitals playing in front of royal courts and the public. They played in Vienna, Paris, and London in front of emperors and Kings.
As the years went by and Mozart became older, he felt that he was being held back. He had a desire to express his own music and quit imitating others. As a kid he had a range of different emotions including elation and depression. He wanted to let these feelings out through his own work. In the turning point of his life, he traveled to Vienna alongside the archbishop of Salzburg to showcase the musical talents of various court musicians. During this trip because of conflicts with the archbishop and his father he decided to stay in Vienna to pursue his own music. This conflict with his father was permanent and painful, but he knew that life was short and he had so much to express. He threw himself into music with an intensity even greater than what he had expressed when he was a kid.
Mozart completely began reworking the orchestra. He would write for larger orchestras and produce more powerful sounds than had previously been known. Because of his creative innovations in orchestra, European music would be forever altered. In 1786, he translated the story of Don Juan into an opera called Don Giovanni. It was Mozart’s take on completely innovating the opera through his own creativity. At the time, everyone hated it. People complained that it was ugly and harsh to hear; they found the pace too frenetic and the moral ambiguity too disturbing. Several years after his death in 1791, audiences caught up with the radical sound he had created in works such as Don Giovanni, which soon became among the five most frequently performed operas in history.
As you emerge from your apprenticeship, it’s important for you to become bold. Learn how to break the rules. Be like Mozart.
As you accumulate more skills and internalize the rules that govern your field, it’s very easy to begin to be complacent. You will tend to turn conservative with your knowledge, preferring to fit into the group and sticking to the procedures you have learned. Instead, you must force yourself in the opposite direction. As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. You must experiment and look at problems from all angles. As your thinking grows more fluid your mind will become increasingly dimensional. 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.
There are two lenses to view this through. One, is the Conventional Mind. Second, is the Dimensional Mind. The Conventional Mind sees reality through our prior experiences, learnings, and biases. What has made us successful, can also be what holds us back. We no longer look at reality as it is, missing the details, or wondering about why they exist. We become defensive about the world because we are protecting our own egos by making us feel like that we have gained all the knowledge there is. Anything that disagrees with our worldview makes us admit that we were wrong about something. They lose their child-like spirit of wondering, wandering, and questioning.
Masters, on the other hand, cultivate the Dimensional Mind. The Dimensional Mind incorporates the vast amounts of knowledge they have received from their mentors and experts in their field, but they layer in their child-like spirit to continue to learn, evolve, and grow. This opens up their mind to see reality as it is. Taking the foundation of their prior knowledge, while also maintaining a sense of curiosity.
In order to awaken the Dimensional Mind, there are three steps to go through: First, choose the proper Creative Task; Second, loosen and open up your mind by pursuing Creative Strategies, and 3) create the optimal mental conditions for a Breakthrough.
The Creative Task: this is relatively simple. Choosing where you direct your time and energy is extremely important. What you choose to work on, is much more important than how you work. It’s always best to choose a task that is slightly challenging, however you have the fundamental skills and basic processes to achieve. You also must let go of your need for comfort and security. If you’re still worried about failure or going through a period of instability you’ve already violated the primary law of the Creative Dynamic and your worries will be reflected in your results.
Creative Strategies: these come down to one fundamental truth. Allowing yourself to be fully present in whatever you are doing. A few tools to help: first, eliminate judgment. Begin looking at the world, people, and reality without judgement. Observe everything simply for what it is. You do not need certainty in everything - it is ok to observe without judgment. Second, allow for Serendipity. Many of the most interesting and profound discoveries in science occur when the thinker is not concentrating directly on the problem but is about to drift off to sleep, get on a bus, in the shower, or hears a joke. Invite serendipity into your life by putting your phone in another room, stepping away from your laptop, taking walks throughout the day, and allowing yourself to truly shut down from work at the end of your work day.
Breakthrough: Similar to creating serendipity, we can create tools to help us achieve great insights. When we’re working and thinking deeply about our tasks we are in a state of tension of focusing on the problem in front of us. This allows us to be efficient in problem-solving. Peak creativity, however, occurs when the subconscious merges with the conscious. When we let go, our brain is continuing to work “in the background” to build up associations and connections from what we have learned. You must be aware of this process to encourage yourself to relax because it will allow you to effectively come up with creative ideas. The opposite side of this is that it’s important to schedule deadlines in your work. The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has a negative effect on our minds. Our lack of intensity makes it hard for the brain to kick it into high gear. You must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured. Faced with time constraints, your mind will rise to the challenge. Every day represents an intense challenge, and every morning you wake up with original ideas and associations to push you along.
In the Creative-Active phase, our work becomes more demanding. We are on our own and the stakes are higher. Our work is more public and highly scrutinized. It’s easy to grow insecure, anxious about other’s opinions, or excessively self-confident. Or we become bored and lose a taste for the hard work required. There are a handful of emotional pitfalls that will hold you back in the Creative-Active phase. These include complacency, grandiosity, inflexibility, among others. Actively check yourself to make sure you’re not stalling in your progress.
The Creative-Active phase requires discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these peopled endured. Creative energy is the fruit of such efforts and nothing else. Think about Mozart’s early days, his feeling of being repressed, and his twenty years of apprenticeship. He endured many challenges through his life before he created his innovative breakthroughs. Even after creating these breakthroughs, the public was blind to his creativity until after his death.
After this phase, it’s time to enter your final passage to Mastery.
The Third Phase: Mastery - Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational
The great chess master Bobby Fischer spoke of being able to think beyond the various moves of his pieces on the chessboard; after a while he could see “fields of forces” that allowed him to anticipate the entire direction of the match. Wayne Gretzky described his experience during hockey games as being able to see things before they actually happened. Lebron James is able to recall plays that happened in NBA games from years ago.
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 other 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 act 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.
To the ancient Chinese, this concept of “seeing more” is known as Tao, Or Way. Tao inhibits everything in the world and is embedded in the relationship between things. Tao is visible to the expert in cooking, carpentry, warfare, or philosophy. However to the outsider it seems magical.
Through intense study and practice of a particular field, over a long period of time, Masters come to understand all parts involved in what they are studying. They reach a point where all of this has become internalized and they are no longer seeing the parts, but gain an intuitive feel for the whole. This is simply a function of deep study and practice compounded by time. With all of their practice throughout the Apprenticeship and Creative-Active phase, all kinds of connections have been formed in their brain of different types of knowledge. Masters thus have a sense of how everything interacts and they can identify patterns of solutions in an instant. This fluid form of thinking does not occur through a step-by-step process, but rather comes in flashes and insights as the brain makes sudden connections between disparate forms of knowledge, causing us to sense the dynamic in real time. A Master piano player does not think about each note they are playing, but rather can feel the entire song and how it should be played.
They key to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of studying qualitatively rich. An hour of Einstein’s thinking at the age of sixteen does not equal an hour spent by an average high school student working on a physics problem. It’s not about just spending years studying something and then emerging as a Master. It’s about the intensity of our focus during those years. We cannot just passively consume information, but internalize it and put it to practical use. We must make connections between the various elements we learn. If we experience failure, we must deeply reflect so we can learn even more and progress. Over time, Mastery will come to you. Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field. But there is one more thing. At some point, Masters hit a key moment in their lives: they decide to forge their own route. One that others will see as unconventional, but that suits their own spirit and rhythms and leads them closer to discovering the hidden truths of their objects of study. This takes extreme self-confidence and self-awareness. It is the X factor that is necessary for attaining mastery.
Each person must forge their own route independently. Yet again, there are some tools to help you here. First, become primal. Live deeply within your environment, observe everything around you, do not become constantly distracted by technology and feeing yourself constant inputs. Second, play to your strengths. As I mentioned earlier, you are uniquely qualified in some aspects - double down on those. Third, focus on the details. It is very easy to abstract away nuance and complexity by generalizing but you must not let your mind trick you into this. If you want to be a Master, it’s important to have the patience to understand the fine points and minutiae that’s intrinsically part of your work. Lastly, widen your perspective. If there is a person who thinks more broadly about their decisions and also thinks about the second and third order effects, they will make better decisions and have better outcomes. Their decisions are not overly influenced by the most immediate events which drives emotional decision making and greater significants to a problem. However, the person who widens their perspective can think beyond the moment and control the overall dynamic through deliberate and thoughtful thinking and strategizing.
Mastery is a book that I often return to when I’m feeling complacent, bored, or exhausted. It helps remind me that in order to achieve Mastery in your field you must lean into your feelings and sit with them. You cannot accelerate your process - you can only increase the intensity of your focus. It’s a great book for anyone that is truly dedicated to becoming great at what they do.