my notes

Thinking can be slow, and in its slowness can become ineffective. So much of our obsessive, internal thought process tends to disconnect us from the world. Intuitive powers at the mastery level are a mix of the instinctive and the rational. Mirror neurons: the ability to think inside everything around, make decisions rapidly and effectively, having gained a complete understanding of their environment. hen we take our time and focus in depth, when we trust that going through a process of months or years will bring us mastery, we work with the grain of this marvelous instrument that developed over so many millions of years. e dismiss our thoughts without notice, because they are ours. In every work of genius we recogni!e our own re"ected thoughts. # $uality that is genetic and inborn % not talent or brilliance, but rather a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular sub"ect. This inclination is a reflection of a person&s uni$ueness. 'esire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. (eeling motivated and energi!ed, we can overcome almost anything. (eeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. )ou lose your hard%earned creativity and others begin to sense it.

This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. *+eniuses, all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole- they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well. .eonardo da /inci: 0is mind worked best when he had several different pro"ects at hand, allowing him to build all kinds of connections between them. 0e didn&t care so much about the finished product- it was the search and process in creating something that had always excited him. )our .ife&s Task is to express your uni$ueness through your work. )ou have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it % as a force, a voice, or in whatever form % the greater your chance for fulfilling this .ife&s Task and achieving mastery. hat weakens this force, what makes you not feel it or even doubt its existence, is the degree to which you have succumbed to another force in life % social pressures to conform. )our desire and interest slowly wane and your work suffers for it. )ou come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes from outside your work. 1ecause you are increasingly less engaged in your career, you fail to pay attention to changes going on in the field % you fall behind the times and pay a price for this. #t moments when you must make important decisions, you flounder or follow what others are doing because you have no sense of inner direction or radar to guide you. )ou have broken contact with your destiny.

)ou are your own Master. 2$uality, which we mistake for the need for everyone to be the same, is really the e$ual chance for people to express their differences. )ou must see your vocation as eminently poetic and inspiring. 3onnecting to your inclinations and .ife&s Task re$uires a good deal of planning and strategi!ing. 'eal with the main obstacles in your path: the voices of others infecting you, fighting over limited resources, choosing false paths, getting stuck in the past, and losing your way. In order to master a field, you must love the sub"ect and feel a profound connection to it. )our interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious. 4eturn to your origins: (or 2instein, it was not physics but a fascination with invisible forces that governed the universe. (or 1ergman, it was not film but the sensation of creating and animating life. (or 3oltrane, it was not music but giving voice to powerful emotions. These childhood attractions are hard to put into words and are more like sensations. #n attraction that is not infected by the desires of other people % a desire to repeat an activity that you never tired of. The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it

becomes to thrive there. orking in such a field will tend to wear you out as you struggle to get attention, to play the political games, to win scarce resources for yourself. )ou spend so much time at these games that you have little time left over for true mastery. )ou are seduced into such fields because you see others there. Instead, find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate. #ctively rebel against those forces that have pushed you away from your true path. If you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by. 5suicide:6 )ou do not have the right to eliminate yourself. )ou do not belong to you. )ou belong to 7niverse. )ou are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others. 8eople suffered more from sameness than from nonconformity. .earn the lessons and follow the path established by the greatest Masters % a kind of Ideal #pprenticeship that transcends all fields. In the process you will master the necessary skills, discipline your mind, and transform yourself into an independent thinker, prepared for the creative challenges on the way to mastery. The goal of an apprenticeship is the transformation of your mind and character. Transform yourself from someone who is impatient and

scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. 3onstantly look for challenges, pushing yourself past your comfort !one. 7se danger and difficulties as a way to measure progress. Three essential steps in your apprenticeship, each one overlapping the other: 'eep 9bservation 5The 8assive Mode6 Skills #c$uisition 5The 8ractice Mode6 2xperimentation 5The #ctive Mode6 The greatest mistake you can make in the initial months of your apprenticeship is to imagine that you have to get attention, impress people, and prove yourself. :eep in the background as much as possible, remaining passive and giving yourself the space to observe. 2nter a cycle of accelerated returns in which the practice becomes easier and more interesting, leading to the ability to practice for longer hours, which increases your skill level, which in turn makes practice even more interesting. 4eaching this cycle is the goal you must set for yourself. 1egin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for ac$uiring others. #void at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. )ou need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.

The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise. This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. +ain as much feedback as possible from others, to have standards against which you can measure your progress so that you are aware of how far you have to go. hen you practice and develop any skill, you transform yourself. )our sense of pleasure becomes redefined. hat offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time. 4eal pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. (ind a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. hat prevents people from learning is a sense of smugness and superiority whenever we encounter something alien to our ways, as well as rigid ideas about what is real or true. 3hildren are dependent upon adults for their survival and naturally feel inferior. This sense of inferiority gives them a hunger to learn. Through learning, they can bridge the gap and not feel so helpless. Their minds are completely open- they pay greater attention. This is why children can learn so $uickly and so deeply.

+o in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. 4esist the temptation to be nice to yourself. +ive precedence to the elements you are not good at. 4esist the lure of easing up on your focus. Train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two. Invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses. +ive yourself arbitrary deadlines. 'evelop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others. To an entrepreneurial venture, mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inade$uacies. It is hard to find out such things from people, as they are often political with their praise and criticisms. )our failures also permit you to see the flaws of your ideas, which are only revealed in the execution of them. )ou learn what your audience really wants, the discrepancy between your ideas and how they affect the public. 8ay close attention to the structure of your group % how your team is organi!ed, the degree of independence you have from the source of capital. These are design elements as well, and such management issues are often hidden sources of problems. To apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping that you&ll fail.

Study as deeply as possible the technology we use, the functioning of the group we work in, the economics of our field, its lifeblood. hen we learn something in a concentrated manner, we experience fewer distractions. hat we learn is internali!ed more deeply because of the intensity of our focus and practice. 9ur own ideas and development flourish more naturally in this shortened time frame. ;ostalgia for the intensity with which we used to experience the world: #s the years pass, this intensity inevitably diminishes. e come to see the world through a screen of words and opinionsour prior experiences, layered over the present, color what we see. e no longer look at things as they are, noticing their details, or wonder why they exist. 9ur minds gradually tighten up. #sk the kinds of simple $uestions that most people pass over, but have the rigor and discipline to follow your investigations all the way to the end. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. hat kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. To think more flexibly entails a risk % we could fail and be ridiculed.

)ou must have faith that what you are doing will yield something important. The choice of where to direct creative energy makes the Master. 3hoose something that appeals to your sense of unconventionality and calls up latent feelings of rebelliousness. In opting for something that has deep personal appeal to you, you will naturally move in an unorthodox direction. Try to ally this with a desire to subvert conventional paradigms and go against the grain. Strategies to loosen up the mind: feel doubt and uncertainty for as long as possible. )our thoughts will be more real than if you had "umped to conclusions and formed "udgments early. 3onfirmation bias: what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces. Suspend the need to "udge everything. #dopt a kind of humility toward knowledge. ;egative 3apability should not be a permanent state of mind. In order to produce work of any sort we must create limits on what we&ll consider- we must organi!e our thoughts into relatively cohesive patterns, and eventually, come up with conclusions. In the end, we must make certain "udgments. ;egative 3apability is a tool we use in the process to open the mind up temporarily to more possibilities. 9nce this way of thinking leads to a

creative avenue of thought, we can give our ideas a clearer shape and gently let it go, returning to this attitude whenever we feel stale or blocked. The essence of the creative mind: every stimulus that enters the brain is processed, turned over, and reevaluated. ;othing is taken at face value. 8erception itself becomes a stimulating exercise in thinking. If we had failed to speculate on the meaning of what we had observed, we simply would have had an observation that led us nowhere. If we had speculated without continuing to observe and verify, then we simply would have had some random idea floating in our heads. 1ut by continually cycling between speculation and observation<experiment, we are able to pierce deeper and deeper into reality. 1ecome aware of the typical patterns your mind falls into and how you can break out of these patterns and alter your perspective. #nomalies themselves contain the richest information. They often reveal to us the flaws in our paradigms and open up new ways of looking at the world. (ocus your attention on some need that is not currently being met, on what is absent. This re$uires more thinking and is harder to conceptuali!e. 2motions influence how you perceive the world. If you feel afraid, you tend to see more of the potential dangers in some action. If you feel particularly bold, you tend to ignore the

potential risks. #lter your mental perspective, but reverse your emotional one as well. (or instance, if you are experiencing a lot of resistance and setbacks in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is $uite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you tougher and more aware of the flaws you need to correct. If you see setbacks as opportunities, you are more likely to make that a reality. .anguage locks you into certain forms of logic and ways of thinking. If there are no words for certain concepts, you tend to not think of them. hen you attempt to sketch something you must observe it closely, gaining a feel through our fingers of how to bring it to life. Such practice can help you think in visual terms and free your mind from its constant verbali!ations. 'etect flaws and difficulties in your original idea that you had not foreseen. .esser types would simply give up or settle for what they have % a mediocre and half%reali!ed pro"ect. 1ut Masters understand that they must plow forward, and that the frustration, or the feeling of being blocked, has a purpose. The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. 9ur attention and thoughts become diffused. 9ur lack of intensity makes it

hard for the brain to "olt into a higher gear. The connections do not occur. (or this purpose you must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured. 2very day represents an intense challenge, and every morning you wake up with original ideas and associations to push you along. 9ur work is now more public and highly scrutini!ed. e might have the most brilliant ideas and a mind capable of handling the greatest intellectual challenges, but if we are not careful, we will tumble into emotional pitfalls. e will grow insecure, overly anxious about people&s opinions, or excessively self%confident. 9r we will become bored and lose a taste for the hard work that is always necessary. 9nce we fall into these traps it is hard to extricate ourselves. The six most common pitfalls: 3omplacency: (ight this by upholding the value of active wonder. 3onstantly remind yourself of how little you truly know, and of how mysterious the world remains. 3onservatism: )ou begin to fall in love with the ideas and strategies that worked for you in the past. )ou also will have a reputation to protect. 3reativity is by its nature an act of boldness and rebellion. The world is dying for bolder ideas. #s the creative spark leaves you, you will find yourself clutching even more forcefully to dead ideas, past successes, and the need to maintain your status. Make creativity rather than comfort your goal.

'ependency: Internali!e the voice of your Master so that you become both teacher and pupil. Impatience: )ou will convince yourself that your work is essentially over and well done, when really it is your impatience speaking. )ou will veer toward repetition % reusing the same ideas and processes as a kind of shortcut. 3ultivate a kind of pleasure in pain % like an athlete, you come to en"oy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits, and resisting the easy way out. +randiosity: 8raise generally does harm. Slowly, the emphasis shifts from the "oy of the creative process to the love of attention. e alter and shape our work to attract the praise that we crave. hat must ultimately motivate you is the work itself and the process. 8ublic attention is actually a nuisance and a distraction. Inflexibility: )ou must regularly doubt that you have achieved your goal and sub"ect your work to intensive self%criticism. #void emotional extremes and find a way to feel optimism and doubt at the same time. The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash. 4ead "ournals and books from all different fields. Sometimes you will find an interesting anomaly in an unrelated discipline that may have implications for your own. )ou must keep your

mind completely open % no item is too small or unimportant to escape your attention. If an apparent anomaly calls into $uestion your own beliefs or assumptions, so much the better. )ou must speculate on what it could mean. If what you have discovered seems to have profound ramifications, you must pursue it with the utmost intensity. 1etter 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. right 1rothers: Two men from a completely different background. (or them, the pleasure and excitement of design was in doing everything themselves. Their model depended not on superior technology, but on the highest number of test runs, creating an optimal learning curve. This revealed flaws to be worked on and gave them a feel for the product that could never be had in the abstract. hatever you are creating or designing, you must test and use it yourself. Separating out the work will make you lose touch with its functionality. 0ave wide knowledge of your field and other fields, giving your brain more possible associations and connections. 3ultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work and the need to constantly improve. The longer you can allow the pro"ect to absorb your mental energies, the richer it will become. (or creative types: 1egin by looking inward. Something you

want to express that is uni$ue. ;ot something that is sparked by some trend. # sound you are not hearing in music, a type of story not being told. # new way of doing business. 8lay against the very conventions that you find dead and want to get rid of. (ollowing this strategy will give your work a kind of reverse reference point. Think of the overall purpose of your work, of the larger $uestion at hand. Thinking on such a high level frees the mind up to investigate from all different angles. The microprocessors that made the microcomputer possible had originally been developed to run traffic lights and vending machines. They had never been intended to power computers. The first entrepreneurs to attempt this were laughed at- the computers they had created looked hardly worthy of the name % they were so small and could do so little. The peculiar process that led to these inventions: generally, the inventors had a chance encounter with the available technologythen the idea would come to them that this technology could be used for other purposes- and finally they would try out different prototypes until the right one fell into place. hat allows for this process is the willingness of the inventor to look at everyday things in a different light and to imagine new uses for them. e come upon something by accident. This accidental encounter will spark some interesting associations and ideas in us. #ctively explore the unconscious and contradictory parts of your personality, and to examine similar contradictions and tensions in the world at large.

These contradictions contain a rich mine of information about a reality that is deeper and more complex than the one immediately perceived. #fter some =>,>>> hours, Masters thus have a sense of how everything interacts organically, and they can intuit patterns or solutions in an instant. Make our years of study $ualitatively rich. e don&t simply absorb information % we internali!e it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use. Intuition, primitive or high level, is essentially driven by memory. hen we take in information of any kind, we store it in mnemonic networks in the brain. The stability and durability of these networks depends on repetition, intensity of experience, and how deeply we pay attention. This desire for what is simple and easy infects all of us, often in ways we are mostly unaware of. The only solution is the following: e must learn how to $uiet the anxiety we feel whenever we are confronted with anything that seems complex or chaotic. In our "ourney from apprenticeship to mastery we must patiently learn the various parts and skills that are re$uired, never looking too far ahead. e must do whatever we can to cultivate a greater memory capacity % one of the most important skills in our technologically oriented environment. Take up hobbies % a game, a musical instrument, a foreign language % that bring pleasure but also offer you the chance to strengthen your memory capacities.

To become such sensitive observers, you must not succumb to all of the distractions afforded by technology. It is easy to become enamored with the powers that technology affords us, and to see them as the end and not the means. The Ideal of the 7niversal Man % a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people. 199:S T9 (9..9 78 9; http:<<sivers.org<book<8assionate8rogrammer http:<<sivers.org<book<0ackers8ainters http:<<sivers.org<book<Talent3ode http:<<sivers.org<book<Mastery http:<<sivers.org<book<#rt9f.earning http:<<sivers.org<book