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Key insights from
Mastery
By
Robert Greene
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What you'll learn
What does it take to become a master? There’s no one way to
the top of Mount Mastery, but there are general trail markers that can let
you know you are ascending, regardless of the field you’re pursuing. Robert
Greene’s writing is backed by a slew of life experiences spanning numerous
careers and odd jobs on multiple continents—as well as the lives of
luminaries who give us glimpses into greatness. Taken together, these
experiences have made him a keen observer of human nature, and he unpacks
the keys to mastery in his book titled Mastery.
Read on for key insights from Mastery.
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1. Leonardo da
Vinci was looking for the life force that animated all of life, and he
obsessively hunted for it behind everything he did.
Deep within each of us is our truest calling, our Life’s
Task. It’s deep and primal and has been with us since we were very young.
It fades as we get older, and then flashes in and out throughout our lives.
For those who pursue it, it becomes increasingly clearer. For those who
ignore it or suppress it, it grows fainter. Your Life’s Task is a call to
some kind of action. There’s something that each of us has to do and only
we can do it. Discovering that “something” is not an optional
extracurricular. It’s the central preoccupation in life.
This is the true self: the deepest part of us begging for
expression in the world around us. It’s not something that is arrived at
through rational speculation. It’s a gut level urge beyond words.
One of history’s many greats who spent his life cooperating
with his inner voice, was Leonardo da Vinci. Because he was born out of
wedlock, Leonardo was not able to attend schools or university as other
“legitimate children” could. But this turned out to be the making of
Leonardo. He was a lonely child who loved to wander through the dense
forests in the countryside surrounding Vinci, the tiny town where he grew
up outside of Florence. He would wander through the woods and marvel at the
trees, the wild animals, the rivers, and waterfalls.
His father was a notary, so even though paper was extremely
rare and expensive at that time, Leonardo took reams and reams of it out to
the woods to practice sketching the scenes of nature around him. Not only
did he appreciate the gorgeous landscapes, he also loved nature’s more
minute details: the textures of the bark, the veins in a leaf, a bird’s
feather, and so on.
Leonardo studied under artists and learned everything from
painting to chemistry, from metallurgy to physics. But he also saw the
value of doing things his own way and pursuing his own inclinations. He
continued to be drawn to the details of his subjects, whether it was white
irises in the woods of Vinci or the wrinkles in a face that he wanted to
sketch. Following his love of detail led him to be the man we know today.
He could have followed a conventional path through university, but he
listened to an inner voice that helped him towards certain subjects and
ways of approaching problems that were unknown in his day.
On one project he did with his master and mentor, Andrea del
Verrocchio, Leonardo leaned into his love for detail. Breaking with the conventional
style of his day, he was the first to paint realistic wings on angels. He
added an otherworldly expression to the angels' faces, inspired by
parishioners he’d observed praying at church. He also painted plants around
the angels, but not just generic plants as his contemporaries did: He
painted plants in scientific detail that had never been seen before,
drawing from his years of experience observing the flora in the woods. This
painting Leonardo created with his mentor is just one small example from an
illustrious and variegated career, but it was this inclination that made
him a standout, and endeared him to his masters and the masses alike.
We have these reflections thanks to conversations Leonardo
had while on his deathbed in France. His friends and even the king of
France himself would gather to hear his rare intimations of childhood.
Leonardo talked about a life force that he had been pursuing all his life.
This force that opened the white irises he sketched as a boy was the same
force that allowed all life to be transformed. According to Leonardo, this
inner force guides us intuitively toward our true calling, which we must
learn to harness.
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2. The process of
finding your inner voice and learning to cooperate with it is your most
important task in life.
The life force that Leonardo da Vinci spoke of and
obsessively pursued throughout his life shows up throughout human history
in the lives of the greats we can’t stop talking about. Socrates, Napoleon
Bonaparte, Goethe, and many others all make reference to an inner voice or
guiding light that seems to speak to them and directs them towards certain
activities and pursuits.
Discovering your Life’s Task happens over the course of
three stages. The first stage involves you listening to your own inner
voice, your own inclinations. What are the things that make you come alive?
Along your life story are instances where you saw that spark, that intimated
some kind of primal desire deep within you. Your task is to clear away the
noise of other voices, even the voices of well-intended friends and
mentors. Sometimes we’re so afraid of the inner voice and what it might say
to us that we clam up and create noise for ourselves. But finding your
calling, your vocation, that thing you just have to do comes from listening
to that voice deep within you and understanding it well.
The second phase of this journey involves taking stock of
your position in life. What is your career? Is the path you are on aligned
with the deep inner voice or is it time to alter your course? This phase is
crucial. It’s also important to clarify what we mean by career and work.
Culturally, we default to an artificial divide between work and “real
life,” as if real life only begins after five o’clock or at the start of
the weekend. This is a dismal outlook considering how much of our lives we
spend working.
We would do better to think of work as a vocation, a pursuit
that consumes us, something we simply have to do. The word
“vocation” originally had to do with the call of God that people felt to be
part of his church. With the passage of time, the word is no longer limited
to clergy, but we would do well to recover this deeply-felt religious sense
of the word when we think about our work. We won’t find true mastery apart
from a sense of connection to what we’re doing.
What you do has to interest you, to electrify you, or at least leave you a
trail of tantalizing crumbs. “Will this make me lots of money?” is the
wrong question to ask. “Does this work or aspect of work naturally erupt
from who I am?” is closer to it.
Thirdly and lastly is the phase of adventure, where you
start a career or a job that roughly aligns with what you could see yourself
doing. Through the unavoidable process of trial and error, you gradually
become acquainted with the aspects of work that ignite something in you,
and the others that don’t generate any sparks. Lean into the aspects of
work that are exciting. Take this data for your consideration. As time goes
on, you’ll gradually develop a clearer picture of a niche you could carve
out where things just “click.” This is where everything starts to find its
place and you excel beyond what you expected you were even capable of. This
is not a niche you shoehorn yourself into, but something that suits your
unique Life Task.
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3. There are
several paths to finding your inner voice, and they all require some soul
searching.
Where do you begin finding your Life’s Task?
Start by reflecting on your life and thinking back to
moments of excitement, where you felt a very primal sense of “aliveness.”
These moments are typically related to your story in a way that’s very
specific to you. Albert Einstein remembers the moment when he was five
years old when his father gave him a compass. He couldn’t believe there was
some kind of invisible force that moved the needle around, and it left him
to wonder what other forces might be operating in the universe. For the
rest of his life, he’d come back to that moment as the starting point of
his curiosity and obsession with understanding invisible forces.
Another approach to discovering your Life’s Task could be
rebellion. By the time Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was four, his parents could
not keep him away from the piano—even when it was time for bed. His father
Leopold—an accomplished musician and composer in his own rite—could see his
son had tremendous talent. By the time Mozart was five, he was composing
his own music, and his father began shuttling him around Europe.
Young Mozart captivated royalty across Europe, and
throughout his childhood he was essentially the breadwinner for his family,
as his father set up more and more opportunities to showcase this prodigy.
But Mozart became increasingly restless and in conflict with his father
during his adolescence and young adulthood. Torn between supporting his
family and avoiding his father’s anger on one hand, and pursuing that voice
from his depths telling him he was meant for more, on the other, Mozart
eventually heeded the voice and parted ways with his father. He played a
show in Vienna, and refused to return home to his native Salzburg.
Mozart would remain estranged from his father for the rest
of his life, but this was necessary for him to discover his passion for
composing operas. His father’s jealousy toward Mozart had been festering
and led to the father stifling his son’s talents to save his flagging ego.
Mozart was never going to discover what was within himself under his
father’s roof. It was a painful but crucial choice that he made to tap into
the genius that lay in his depths. Mozart could have stayed trapped in the
false self that his father had consigned him to, as a local organist in
Salzburg, but the call of Mozart’s true self was too strong for him to
ignore.
Yet another strategy for finding your voice is the
adaptation approach. This is the understanding that your number one task is
your Life’s Task. At the end of the day, you are not tied down to a career
or to any company or to any particular way of doing things. Freddie Roach
was a skilled boxer, but he struggled to clinch titles at a professional
level, despite being trained as a fighter since he was a kid and getting
coached by a towering personality within the boxing community. After
drowning his sorrows in booze for not winning in the big leagues like he
always wanted, Roach began coaching younger boxers and integrated new
coaching techniques that revitalized a sport that seemed to be dying in the
United States. Eventually he left his coach’s gym and started his own,
where he became one of the most sought-after coaches. He never became a
boxing legend himself, but he let go of the past failures, pivoted,
adapted, and went on to train the boxing legends of tomorrow, like Miguel
Cotto and Manny Pacquiao.
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4. No one becomes
a master without a strong apprenticeship.
To master anything, you must start as an apprentice. Once
you have a sense of what your Life’s Task might be or a general direction
in which to head, it’s important to find an apprenticeship after you’ve had
a formal education. We can think of the apprenticeship in three phases:
deep observation, skills acquisition, and experimentation.
It starts off with simply observing and absorbing as much as
you can of the world you are trying to enter and the masters who most
profoundly influenced that world. Link yourself to one of them. Become
familiar with that environment. This is the phase where you follow the
rules, you don’t try to stand out, you remain sensitive and respectful of
the hierarchies that are in place, and you absorb, absorb, absorb.
The second phase of the apprenticeship is practice mode.
This is where you put in your 10,000 hours, where you start to connect your
observational knowledge to action. Over time, it becomes tacit knowledge, a
part of you as you begin to act out your skill. This is where discouragement
and boredom can set in, even if you’re confident your training aligns with
your Life’s Task. The process of hardwiring those skills into your mind and
body takes time.
The final phase of a good apprenticeship is the
experimentation period. This is the most active mode, where you’re not just
practicing, but really doing, where you gradually step out of your master’s
shadow and face down all the fears that process brings. Now that you have
the skill, you make it your own and outshine your master.
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5. Don’t let your
emotional needs block you from seeing people as they truly are or
understanding what motivates them.
One of the many admirable themes that runs through the life
of Benjamin Franklin is his social intelligence. But this wasn’t some innate
gift that he possessed. Only through a number of disappointments early in
his life and discovering the depths of his naïveté was he able to alter his
course.
One early incident came when young Franklin was apprenticed
to his older brother James in a printing shop in Boston. When James refused
Franklin an opportunity to write for The New-England Courant,
Franklin wrote letters to the paper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood, a
feisty elderly widow with opinions on just about everything. The Dogood
letters became the most popular section of the Courant and
James loved the write-ins—until Franklin revealed that he was Silence
Dogood. The playful Franklin had expected his brother to laugh and applaud,
but James was livid and considered it a deception and betrayal. An
undercurrent of hostility began fomenting from that point and became severe
enough that Benjamin Franklin had to leave the Courant. He’d
horribly misread the situation, and lost a job over it.
Franklin left Boston for Philadelphia, and quickly established
a reputation as a man of letters. The governor at the time was thrilled to
have such an excellent writer, and promised him funds if he’d set-up a
printing house. He agreed to fund Franklin’s voyage to London where
Franklin could acquire the printing materials himself. Franklin was
informed that he could go to London and the credit he would need would be
waiting for him on the other side of the pond. But when Franklin got to
London, the funds were not waiting for him, and he had to scramble to make
a living for himself. He came across a businessman from Philadelphia who
informed him that Philadelpiha’s governor was given to grandiose visions
without actionable follow-through. He would be excited about a plan one
week and forget about it the next. In Franklin’s naïve excitement, he had
misjudged his unreliable commissioner.
Franklin managed to find work in a printing house in London,
where he established himself as a fine, dependable editor. But when
Franklin refused to chip in money for the local tradition of pausing from
work five times a day for a pint with the guys, little mistakes he could
have sworn he had exercised in the proofreading process were showing up in
final printings. When he inquired, his colleagues shrugged and said there
must be some ghost in the place mucking things up.
First he’d wrongly anticipated his brother’s response to
Silence Dogood. Then he misjudged the Philadelphia governor’s character and
got himself stranded in London. Now, his reputation was suffering sabotage
because he had misread his colleague’s “acceptance” of his refusal to join
their revelry.
Franklin had to level with himself and admit that he was
struggling to read people well, and it was landing him in trouble. He made
a decision in that moment to operate differently, to approach each and
every human interaction with enough distance to make sense of what was
motivating others. This meant a radical acceptance of human nature, and of
people as they are. Instead of trying to judge them or change them,
Franklin wanted to understand them. This ongoing study of human nature
allowed him to not only to develop a lifetime supply of witty homespun
quips, it also made him a fantastic politician and diplomat. Franklin was
noted for his uncanny ability to turn people intent on becoming his enemies
into staunch allies and friends.
When we operate from our own deprivations and our own
neediness, true mastery is not possible. Without social intelligence, we
may learn things, but the lessons won’t stick. Social intelligence allows
us to learn and grow in a way that the needed skills and qualities become
part of us. It allows us to master our craft.
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6. Conforming to
the expectations of others might feel safe, but if it comes at the cost of
betraying your Life’s Task, that safety is actually a danger.
A word of warning as you pursue this adventure: There are
counter forces that will thwart your effort to explore your inner voice,
because that quest will inevitably bring you into conflict with the
expectations of people who are closest to you. Your parents and your peers
will have ideas of what you should be doing, but if you listen to them at
the expense of your own voice, you will lose touch with your Life’s Task
that’s been entrusted to you. You will slowly but surely waste away in the
career you chose simply because “it makes sense” or “will make you lots of
money.” You’ll wonder why you feel so sapped of any vitality or curiosity.
About 26 centuries ago, the Greek poet Pindar once mused,
“Become who you are by learning who you are.” It’s tragic to face that some
people never discover who they are. They never go on the journey. They
spend their lives hiding behind masks, but they’re never known for who they
truly are—to themselves or by others. This doesn’t have to be you if you
find your inner voice.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Mastery here. And since we get a commission on
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