15 Key Takeaways From Mastery by Robert Greene
1) Mastery is described as “the feeling we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves.” Mastery becomes a way of life. It explains everything.
2) The Stages of Mastery
- Apprenticeship – Involves standing on the outside of a specific field and looking in. This is the stage where you learn how everything works. The basics and the rules.
- Creative-Active – The stage where you practice and enter the field. This stage involves creatively experimenting and developing a greater understanding of the field.
- Mastery – When your knowledge of the field is so deep, you are basically immersed within it. You see everything in the field with complete clarity.
3) Where Most People Go Wrong In the Pursuit of Mastery:
- Lowering your sights on what you can accomplish.
- Conforming to social norms.
- Listening to others more than your own voice.
4) Living for Pleasure: If you don’t pursue Mastery or pursue your true calling, you can still find success. But that success won’t sustain you throughout life. You feel something missing, and you desire that missing piece. Desire is what leads to immediate pleasures, which affect our long-term happiness negatively.
5) Strategies to Find Your Life Task
- Return to Your Origins – Bring something powerful to life and give a voice to your deepest emotions.
- Occupy the Perfect Niche – The more people who are in a field, the harder it is to stand out. There are two directions you can go to counter this. Firstly choose a field and narrow your focus until you find something nobody else is doing. Secondly, if you master a field, look for other fields to combine it with until you create a brand-new field.
- Avoid the False Oath – Don’t be attracted to a career for the wrong reasons, such as money or fame.
- Let Go of the Past – Commit to your life’s task, not a career. If any changes occur in your field, be ready to adapt.
- Find Your Way Back – Don’t be lured away from your life’s tasks by material things. Your life’s task brings you true happiness. These material things bring instant gratification that you will continually seek out.
6) Steps of an Apprenticeship
- Deep Observation
- Skills Acquisition
- Experimentation
7) Strategies for an Ideal Apprenticeship
- Value Learning over Money
- Expand Your Horizons – Read books and other quality sources of information. Even more, than is required. Branch outside your field. It could be how you discover a completely new field.
- Revert to the State of Inferiority – In childhood, we all possess a curiosity for everything. Maintain this childlike curiosity and be ready to learn without prior judgements.
- Trust the Process – Enter the process and don’t let yourself or your emotions get in your own way.
- Move Towards Pain and Resistance – Become your own worst critic. Approach pain and mistakes and attack them head-on. Learn from them and adapt to your discomfort. Get used to your discomfort and you won't fear it any longer.
- Apprentice Yourself in Failure – Learn from failures. This is how we constantly improve.
- Combine the “How” and the “What” – The world of appearance is the “what”. The functional world below this is the “how”. The “how” is less considered. We just see, for example, a blog grows to a massive size, and the mastery underneath that helped them achieve success isn’t considered. Ask how things work and how decisions are made.
- Advance Through Trial and Error – Enjoy the journey, not the destination. You don’t know where your pursuit of mastery will take you. But you have access to knowledge and information to help you develop skills that will then always be at your disposal.
8) Strategies for Deepening Mentor Dynamics
- Choose a Mentor According to Your Needs – This can depend on your approach to finding your field. If you want to create a new field, consider a mentor with an open mind for example. They will affect you in ways you don’t even recognise, so choose carefully.
- Gaze Deep Into the Mentor’s Mirror – Mentors will give you tough love. Be prepared for it.
- Transfigure Their Ideas – Over time, distance yourself from your mentors’ ideas so you can form your own.
- Create a Back and Forth Dynamic – Challenge your mentors. Propose your ideas to them and locate problems with theirs. A back-and-forth dynamic gives the mentor-mentee relationship much greater potential for both involved.
9) What is Naïve Perspective? – When we are a child we are dependent and so idolize those who help us grow up stronger and more capable than they are. Once we become teenagers, we are highlighted more by these negative aspects of people that exist but have been clouded in the past. Having adapted to a life in childhood where everyone was better than we expected, this revealing itself in adolescence leads us to focus more on the negative qualities of others. This is naïve perspective.
10) What is Social Intelligence? – The ability to see other people as they truly are. For example, reading people so clearly that you see what motivates them. Involves looking past yourself.
11) The 7 Deadly Realities
- Envy
- Conformism
- Rigidity
- Self-Obsession
- Laziness
- Flightiness
- Passive Aggression
12) Strategies for Acquiring Social Intelligence
- Speak Through Your Work – Be clear, efficient, and detail-oriented. Show you care for the field by explaining in simple terms for all to understand.
- Craft the Appropriate Persona – Don’t give your audience everything about you. Maintain some mystery. For example, Doomberg.
- See Yourself As Others See You
- Suffer Fools Gladly – Don’t show the same traits as foolish people you encounter. Use their foolishness for your own gain. Write about what not to do, using the foolishness of others as fuel for your writing.
13) How to Awaken the Dimensional Mind
- Choosing the Proper Creative Task
- Open Up The Mind Through Creative Strategy
- Create The Optimal Mental Conditions For A Breakout or Insight
14) Strategies for Reaching Creative -Active Phase
- The Authentic Voice – Be prepared for a long apprenticeship and take everything you gained from it after.
- The Fact of Great Yield – Be an opportunist. Have no specific speciality. Once you dig deep enough into a specific area of knowledge, you locate challenges that offer further opportunities.
- Natural Powers – Have a wide knowledge of your field and related fields. Never settle into being complacent.
- The Open Field – Be aware of the life cycle of a field. When a new field is created, it can be a new style. Then imitators enter the field, and it becomes more “mainstream”. To avoid getting stuck in this crowd, always think of new ways of doing things and engaging the emotions of your audience.
- The High-End Technical Lock – Continue to look for connections on a higher and higher level of life.
- The Evolutionary Hijack – Be completely open to where the creative process takes you.
- Alchemy Creativity and Unconsciousness – Don’t categorize everything. Sometimes, mixing opposite ideas can create something new. This can be a good strategy to break existing rules and principles.
15) Strategies for Attaining Mastery:
- Connect to Your Environment – Merge knowledge and feelings. Always observe.
- Play To Your Strengths
- Submit To The Other
- Transform Yourself Through Practice
- Synthesize All Forms of Knowledge