Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

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The key to transforming yourself -- Robert Greene at TEDxBrixton". YouTube. Archived from the original on December 21, 2021 . Retrieved October 24, 2013. The High End: Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger— a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place. Speak through your work: If you are experiencing the pressures of political maneuvering within the group, do not lose your head and become consumed with all of the pettiness. By remaining focused and speaking socially through your work, you will both continue to raise your skill level and stand out among all the others who make a lot of noise but produce nothing. Masters excel because of their ability to practice harder and move faster through the process, all stemming from the intensity of their desire to learn and from the deep connection they feel to their field of study. First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.”

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. In the sciences, you will tend to entertain ideas that fit your own preconceptions and that you want to believe in. This unconsciously colors your choices of how to verify these ideas, and is known as confirmation bias. Thapa, Ben. Freddie Roach and Manny Pacquiao, Excerpt From Robert Greene’s Mastery. Bloody Elbow. November 13, 2012.Robert Greene. The Aha! Moments That Made Paul Graham's Y Combinator Possible. Fast Company. November 12, 2012. Combine the “how” and the “what”: Get a full understanding of the skill, not just the recipes or tools, don’t leave parts of it unlearned. Transfigure their ideas: As you incorporate the lessons of your master, begin to adapt them to yourself. Don’t purely copy them, think for yourself. You have to surpass them eventually. Inflexibility: You must know your field inside and out, and yet be able to question its most entrenched assumptions. Strategies for the Creative-Active Phase First, realize as early as possible that you have chosen your career for the wrong reasons, before your confidence takes a hit. And second, to actively rebel against those forces that have pushed you away from your true path. Scoff at the need for attention and approval—they will lead you astray.

Trust the process: It takes time. As long as you’re learning and working, you will keep moving towards mastery. You have to learn to see people as they are. “To begin this process, you need to train yourself to pay less attention to the words that people say and greater attention to their tone of voice, the look in their eye, their body language— all signals that might reveal a nervousness or excitement that is not expressed verbally. If you can get people to become emotional, they will reveal a lot more.”

The Daily Laws

What constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit. When we see or experience something we must be able to look at it from several angles, to see other possibilities beyond the obvious ones. We imagine that the objects around us can be used and co-opted for different purposes. We do not hold on to our original idea out of sheer stubbornness, or because our ego is tied up with its rightness. Instead, we move with what presents itself to us at the moment, exploring and exploiting different branches and contingencies. If we remained as excited as we were at the beginning of our project, maintaining that intuitive feel that sparked it all, we would never be able to take the necessary distance to look at our work objectively and improve upon it. Losing that initial verve causes us to work and rework the idea. It forces us to not settle too early on an easy solution. The mounting frustration and tightness that comes from single-minded devotion to one problem or idea will naturally lead to a breaking point. We realize we are getting nowhere. Such moments are signals from the brain to let go, for however long a period necessary, and most creative people consciously or unconsciously accept this. When we let go, we are not aware that below the surface of consciousness the ideas and the associations we had built up continue to bubble and incubate. With the feeling of tightness gone, the brain can momentarily return to that initial feeling of excitement and aliveness, which by now has been greatly enhanced by all of our hard work. The brain can now find the proper synthesis to the work, the one that was eluding us because we had become too tight in our approach.

Then as we continue for years we make the leap to mastery. We develop an intuitive sense of the skill and have mastered it to the point of being able to innovate and break the rules. People see our behavior from the outside, and their view of us is never what we imagine it to be. To have the power to see ourselves through the eyes of others would be of immense benefit to our social intelligence. We could begin to correct the flaws that offend, to see the role that we play in creating any kind of negative dynamic, and to have a more realistic assessment of who we are. As you gain more skill and understanding, you must move into the active mode where you take the skill and apply it yourself. You have to break out of just following the rules, and start creating new works on your own. Strategies for Completing the Ideal Apprenticeship Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles. The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. We misread their intentions and react in ways that cause confusion or conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly 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.”Avoid the false path - actively rebel against forces pushing you down a path for the wrong reasons (money, fame, attention, parental expectations, etc.). The book originated from a realization that Greene reached while writing and researching his previous books; Greene concluded that the people he studied had similar paths to success. [5] After finishing The 50th Law, Greene focused on this concept in writing Mastery. [5] [6] Synopsis [ edit ]