Notes on Mastery by Robert Greene

1 the ultimate power

Pressed by circumstances we get to some special type of intelligence
Period of exceptional creativity
More connected to reality
More focus
Minds turn outward
Call it mastery
Can be learned
3 phases
Apprenticeship
Creative active: experimentation
Mastery: see whole picture
Can capture essence of reality
Intuition just immediate seeing of what is real
Immediately seeing something that was hidden to us
Human relies on thinking which can slow
Intuitive powers at mastery level incorporate natural, childlike spontaneity and rational
Fruit of working through long process of training
The evolution of mastery
Brain adapted
Visual and social powers are what ancestors leveraged into being best hunters
Brain most powerful tool
Hunter survival depended on intensity of attention to detail
Animals trapped in constant present
Humans learned to think ahead and generalize
Conscious reasoning developed
Group cohesion critical for survival so developed social dynamics
Social intelligence and attention
Mirror neurons experience sensation when just watching another doing something
Mimicking experts and gaining intuition to do what expert would
Ability to think inside a new skill
Third level intelligence
Deep intuitive mastery
Time spent with task increases skill tremendously
Time essential ingredient for mastery
Can't skip steps or try to advance through political power/connections
Become slaves to time instead of using it in our favor
Keys to mastery
Natural talents not sufficient
Intensity of study and key apprenticeship opportunity
Deep and powerful inclination towards a subject
Recently culture has been going against discipline and craftsmanship and more into feeling
and glamorizing passivity and self destruction and lack of control
Proliferation of devices that do things for u; why bother with effort
Listening more to others than ur own inner calling
Ppl get the mind and life they want from the quality of their actions not genes
Power of willpower
Researched classic and contemporary masters of all ethnicities
In moving to mastery you are bringing your mind closer to reality
Not final destination; need to constantly reopen mind and train
Take pleasure in the craftsmanship of the secondary things
1 discover your calling and life's task
Da Vinci self taught
Studied and sketched nature
Wanted to make things in his own unique way and invent instead of just copy
Obsessive attention to detail
Cared more about search and process of creation than finished product
Not about finishing work as fast as possible like others did
Keys to mastery
What calls ur authentic being
Vocation
Inner voice
All have unique DNA
Early attractions as kids
Early inclinations like forces in us
Primal uniqueness
Social pressures to conform kill the seed within you
1 learn to reconnect with your inclinations. Think about childhood. See pattern in ur
inclinations.
2 look closely at the career path you are on or about to begin. Blur the separation between
work and home.
Want to see work as something more inspiring like part of your vocation
Start with initial position to gain skills and not too lofty to gain confidence
Will be able to later go out on own and become own master, ultimate power of control
Develop selves to not rely on corporation
We must build our own lives as humans, not just react like animals
Strategies for finding your life's task
Obstacles
Voices of others infecting you
Fighting over limited resources
Choosing false paths
Getting stuck in the past
Losing ones way
Return to your origins; the primal inclination strategy
Object or place that inspired u when u were little
Must love the subject almost like religious
Sensations of fascination
Not embedded in u by parents
Comes from ur core
Desire to repeat activity u never tire of
Visceral reactions to something
Subject that sparked curiosity
Occupy the perfect niche, the Darwinian strategy
Career world like ecological field
Find your particular unique blend of interests and subjects and hyper specialize
Start with one field then look for side paths
Or start with and master one field and then add on others
Create a field uniquely your own
Avoid the false path, the rebellion strategy
Desire to please parents and others puts on wrong path
Actively rebel against those forces
Let go of the past, the adaptation strategy
Change is inevitable and u r on your own to fulfill life's task
Not about loyalty to any company
Adapt old skills when see change or opportunity
Find your way back, the life or death strategy
Listen to the frustration you feel in current work and let it lead u where ur interested
Reversal
When faced with deficiencies, ignore your weaknesses and desire to be more like others
Direct yourself towards the small things you are good at
2 submit to reality, the ideal apprenticeship
Keys to mastery
Goal of apprenticeship is not position or money but transformation of mind
Maximize learning of practical knowledge
3 steps of apprenticeship phase
Deep observation, passive mode
Skills acquisition, practice mode
Experimentation, active mode
Deep observation, passive
Observe and absorb reality of conventions at work
Style and values
Power relationships
Just understanding not changing anything
Teaches you to observe and analyze
Skills acquisition, practice mode
Gain tacit knowledge
Follow apprenticeship system
Learn best through practice and repetition
Begin just with one skill
Embrace the tedium and don't skip it
Don't repress the boredom and learn to deal with it
Can't multitask
Better to devote 3-4 straight hours to a task than to spread it out
Once have basic skill automatic then can spend mental effort observing self and noticing
flaws
10k hours
Experimentation, active mode
Initiate project
Gauge yourself
See how you take criticism
Testing your skills and character
Find a way to work with your hands
Become craftsman
Builder using actual materials
Ideal apprenticeship strategies
Value learning over money
Choose jobs where can learn and have time to develop own ideas
Keep expanding your horizons
Revert to a feeling of inferiority
Smugness, superiority, feeling of having knowledge creates learning disabilities and
difficulties in understanding something new
Return to childlike spirit
Trust the process
Frustration and time part of the process
Has to happen
Move toward resistance and pain
Rigorous training regimen
Learn that it is in the actual hard boring work that u get the real learning
Apprentice yourself in failure
Failure gives u the important data u need to know because ppl often hide real feedback
Combine the how and the what
Some focus lives on the what and design
Others focus on the how and engineering
When can combine these become more powerful
How do things work
How does group function
Will give deeper understanding
Advance through trial and error
Hacker method
Trial and error
Learn more from what fails
Reversal
No shortcuts
3 hours of practice per day gives 10k hours after 10 years
3 absorb the masters power, the mentor dynamic
Goal to surpass the mentor
Use as guide
Alchemy of knowledge
Keys to mastery
Learning from master and submitting to authority important
Not weakness
Just about acquiring practical knowledge
Strategies for deepening mentor dynamic
4 strategies
Choose the mentor according to needs and inclinations
Be strategic
Consider their personality
Gaze deep into your mentor's vision
Get sharpest dose of reality from mentor
Proper challenges
Accustom self to criticism
Transfigure their ideas
Create a back and forth dynamic
Show hunger to learn
Reversal
If you don't have a mentor then you need to develop extreme self-reliance and educate
yourself through the library and your experiments
Chapter 4. See people as they are. Social intelligence
Thinking inside
Keys to rationality
Live and let live
Really understand someone else and figure out how to work with them instead of altering
them
Dangerous to view ppl through our own emotional needs (naive perspective)
Focus attention outward instead of inward
More realistic perspective
Not just demonizing or idealizing ppl
To understand ppl need to immerse ur mind in their world
Adopt attitude of supreme acceptance
Observer of human comedy
Specific knowledge of human nature
General knowledge of human nature
Specific knowledge, reading ppl
When not inward directed and actually attending to another then can sense more
Pay more attention to tone of voice and body language than words
Pay attention to extremities of what they do
See patterns over months
General knowledge, 7 deadly realities
Envy
Don't want ur own behavior to trigger it
Display great interest in others' work
Ascribe own success to luck
Self deprecating humor
Don't stand out too much
Conformism
Adhere to accepted standards
Save expressing different opinions for later
Rigidity
Just accept it in others
But cultivate new ideas yourself
Self obsessiveness
Many disguise it by appearing selfless
When asking for favor, must appeal to their self interest first
Offer return favors
Laziness
Don't do work for others
Asking u to collaborate is just asking u to do work for them
Flightiness
Rely just on ur self to get things done
Passive aggression
Can call ppl on it or ignore it in others
Watch for unusually friendly exterior
Avoid them
Thinking inside others
Strategies for acquiring social intelligence
Speak through your work
Can't alienate others in ur zeal even if ur right
Spend time making ur case clearly in writing and showing external evidence
Involve others in ur work so they feel included
Craft the appropriate persona
Control your clothes and appearance to create the aura u need at different time
Never let ppl totally figure u out
Always be one step ahead
See yourself as others see u
Never criticize directly and involve others in decisions
Need to listen to feedback from others carefully
Look at negative events in the long past of our lives
See pattern in what we did
Suffer fools gladly
Supreme value is getting work done
But fools have different values like looking popular
Often criticize wrongly
Learn how they think to outsmart them
Ignore them
Reversal
If can't deal with social politics then stick to small groups and start ups and have others do
social work
Chapter 5 awaken in the dimensional mind the creative active
If stay anxious and self conscious will only stick to what know
Need to become more fluid and think in different dimensions
The second transformation
Apply lessons learned in one field to another
Allow something unique in you to come out, even if unconventional
Keys to mastery
Retaining childhood original spirit
But also adding our experiences and skills
Need openness and flexibility
Choosing proper creative task
Alter own concept of creativity
Involves entire self
Struggle to find the subject matter that speaks to u
Ur emotional commitment to what doing will translate to work doing
Choose something that calls up feelings of rebelliousness
Go against the grain
Task must be realistic
Choose a task slightly above u
Let go of need for comfort or security
Loosening mind, creative strategies
Let in new ways of thinking
Cultivate negative capability
Ability to endure mysteries and uncertainties
Actually embrace the things that go against what u know
Suspend need to judge everything in path
Observe person or event for length of time
Read books of unrelated fields
Allow for serendipity
Brain constantly searching for similarity
Chance associations
Widen your search
Maintain openness of spirit
Engage in activities outside work
Pay attention to little signs
Choose random points in dictionary to start search or work
Random idea used to constrain search
Keep notebook by you to record random scraps of thoughts
Think in terms of analogies
Alternate the mind through the current
Observe then analyze and experiment and repeat
Requires imagination and then checking with reality
Build prototypes of ideas instead of just discussing and critiquing
Cycle between getting ideas and testing them against reality by seeking market feedback
Layer your perspective
Natural Mistakes to correct
Looking at the what instead of the how
focus instead on the structure and process instead of content
Focus more on relationships between things
Rushing to generalities and ignoring details
Wait before generalizing
Confirming paradigms and ignoring anomalies
Deliberately focus more on the anomalies to learn lessons
Fixating on what is present and ignoring what is absent
Average person not paying attention to negative cues
Ponder the missing info in events
Allows u to find unmet needs
Imagine more
Emotions we experience alter our perspective
Need to change our emotions to change how we think
Revert to primal forms of intelligence
Over time we lost our connection to natural ways of communication
Grammar of language blocks us into limited ways of thinking
Images and visualization much more powerful and wider than words
With idea brought to exterior can interact with it physically and learn more
Drawing and thinking synonymous
Having various physical cues to prompt new sensory thoughts
Synesthesia
Give yourself sense cues from something strong
The creative breakthrough, tension and excitement
Sometimes solution comes to U when u give up and drop level of excitement
Letting go important part of the process
Always work with deadlines even if artificial
Emotional pitfalls
Complacency
Mind slowly narrows
Uphold value of active wonder
Conservatism
Make creativity rather than comfort your goal
Dependency
Can't carry over need for approval
Develop internal standards and independence
Internalize voice of master to stand alone
Impatience
Work never done
Don't gear toward repetition
Cultivate pleasure from rigorous practice
Grandiosity
Handle criticism well
But also ignore praise
Remember element of luck
Always greater geniuses out there
What must motivate u is the actual work
Inflexibility
Must regularly doubt but also believe
Cultivate flexibility to go between both
Strategies for creative active phase
The authentic voice
Takes immense practice to find own voice
First must completely submerge character in intense apprenticeship
Be patient and follow the process
Lengthy
Greatest impediment to creativity is impatience
Must first master the basics
Becomes imitative
The fact of great yield
Humans are opportunists with general skills instead of specific ones
Read journals and books from all fields to remain open
3 mechanical intelligence
Process of becoming a craftsman
Must do the work by hand yourself and test yourself
4 natural powers
Hand and mind work together while sketching in way that is disturbed by inclusion of
computer screen
Initial open ended period
Wide knowledge of related fields
Never settle on initial vision
Constant dissatisfaction with results and uncertainty
Embrace slowness
5 the open field
Create totally new field
6 go high end
We become locked into seeing problems from same technical angle
Connect project to something larger to not overtly focus on certain details or techniques
7 evolutionary high jack
See new methods in old area
Accidents play enormous role
Openness and adaptability of our spirit
8 dimensional thinking
Assume problem is more complex and layered and devote the time to fully explore all angles
Don't be driven by desire for fame
9 alchemical creativity and the unconscious
Real and unreal constructions and can be bent
Dualistic approach to life
Explore contradictions
Reversal
Ch 6 fuse the intuitive with the rational: mastery
The third transformation
Keys to mastery
Seeing more
Grasping situation in an image
Intuition
Think that thinking is always rational
But other types of thinking also useful
Broader sense of rationality
Not miraculous or mystical
The way, the Tao
The dynamic and living force operating in relationships
Psychology
Understand through intense absorption
Rigorously taking apart books instead of merely reading
Analyzing everything around and visiting locations in person to see firsthand
The roots of mastering intuition
Continual experience
Different from instinct
Driven by memory
Depends on repetition and intensity of experience
Must block desire for simple and easy
Quiet our discomfort with complexity
Manage your anxiety
Build up memory capacity despite technology
Take up hobbies in spare time instead of entertainment
Return to reality
Life interrelated because all evolved from same initial roots
Events interrelate
Focus on relationships between phenomena
Similarity between interconnected brain and society
Strategies for creating mastery
Not fitting into conventional mold
Connect to your environment, primal powers
Become consummate observer
Ignore distractions of tech
Play to your strengths, supreme focus
Determining your mental strengths
Transform yourself trough practice, fingertip feel
Only through tenacious effort and practice
Internalize the details, the life force
Notice all details around you
Sketch what u see
Create exercises for self
Widen vision, global perspective
Look wider and think further ahead
Submit to the other, inside out perspective
Go deeper into experience of others and learn to feel what they feel
Synthesize all forms of knowledge, universal man
Exploring core of life itself
Reversal
False self
Voices of others internalized in self
Voice of own ego
Not cult of ego
Book: eye and brain