Learning the Secret to Mastery: An Interview with Robert Greene

We were all born to do one important thing: to pursue our “life’s task” and master it. That’s what Robert Greene believes. In fact, he’s written a whole book about the subject, and it’s called Mastery.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Awhile back, I had a chance to sit down (virtually speaking) with Robert and interview him. We talked about the concept of calling, apprenticeship, and how to master your craft. Greene believes we all have something we intuitively know we were meant to do, and the path to that work — what he calls your “life’s task” — is less glamorous than we’ve been told.

Note: This a long blog post (nearly 3000 words). I’ve done my best to make it scannable and easy to read, but there’s no easy way to cut it down, and I believe all the material is quite good. If you need to, save or print it and come back to it when you get a chance. Or skip to the memorable quotes section if you just want the Cliff’s Notes version.

Included below is the following:

27-minute long audio (which you’re welcome to download and share with anyone)
Abridged Q&A (text only)
Full transcript (download)
Memorable quotes

Here’s my interview with Robert…

Interview with Robert Greene

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J: So, Mastery is a book about how you find your calling. Is that right?

R: Well, it’s a book about not just being good at what you do, but being great. I call it the ultimate form of power, the highest level of intelligence we can reach. And it’s generally the fruit of a lot of practice, and diligence, and persistence. It’s not the fact that you’re born a genius, or that you have a larger brain. It’s the level of dedication and persistence and patience.

But at the root of all that is what you correctly note is knowing what your life’s, what I call your life’s task. It’s choosing a career path that meshes with your deepest interests in life, what sparks your deepest levels of curiosity.

And if you do manage to follow a path like that, then you’re naturally going to be more patient. You’re naturally going to be more persistent. You’ll know how to deal with all of the crap that people throw at you. So, that’s really the key to the whole game.

The path to mastery

J: Can you just talk about the process of becoming a writer and where you’re at in your own craft?

R: Ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to write. I maintain in the book that usually people have a sense of these things when they’re very young. But I never really knew exactly what I should be writing.

So at first I thought I’d write a great novel. Then I got into journalism. And I didn’t really like journalism because what you wrote didn’t really last very long. It could be forgotten three days later.

Then I got into Hollywood, and film, and television. And that lasted longer, but you would write something, and then 20 other people would come on top it and change everything that you did. So you had no control.

I was in my mid-30s, and I knew I wanted to be a writer. But I hadn’t found where I fit in this world. And, then, just by sort of by coincidence, I suppose, I met this man who is a book packager. And he asked me if I had any ideas for books. I ended up kind of improvising that day what would turn out to be The 48 Laws of Power.

But the important thing was I could sense that this was like the perfect fit for me. I could write something that would last. I would have complete control of it. I could put in all of the research, my love of history that I had developed over many years. I could put into a nonfiction book but also really work to helping people.

The lesson for this — and I have other people in Mastery who follow a similar paradigm — is that it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to find exactly what you want early on in life. It can be a voyage, a journey that takes a few years, as long as you have a general sense of the direction you need to be headed. Which for me was writing.

If I had wasted my 20s and this man asked me for book ideas, it would have been useless. But I had spent my time learning how to write, writing under a deadline, gaining skill in the craft. And when the opportunity came I could exploit it. So, that to me was the lesson.

Now, some 17 years later, I feel like I’m in the best position I can be in. And I think I’ve honed my craft over these years. But the main thing was I was ready when that opportunity came.

The ideal apprenticeship

J: In Mastery, you talk about the ideal apprenticeship. Can you talk a little bit more about that? How did you apprentice?

R: Well, the first thing is to get my concept of the apprenticeship. You can pretty much throw out what you learedn from school, or your parents, once you enter the real world, because it’s a totally new environment with new rules, new ways of learning. And the problem is, we’re not prepared for that.

For me, personally, I made some mistakes, and I learned the hard way. Mostly, I was a bit naïve and didn’t understand that people out there can be sometimes manipulative and political. I have a chapter in the book that your apprenticeship really includes knowing how to work with people and not being so naïve.

But the main thing is, you want to be developing skill. That’s the key thing in the apprenticeship phase. Learning, learning, learning. Not making money. Not getting fame and attention. The more you learn in this apprenticeship phase, the more you’re prepared for those moments that will eventually come to you.

For me, it was just simply writing. I kept writing. And I had some success — I was published in Esquire and other magazines. And I developed the skills that I would later really need, which is to be able to write under a deadline, to be able to be professional and write in a professional manner, and skills in organizing.

From my parents’ perspective, I looked like I was lost. And they were ready to give up on me. But really, I was developing all the things that would later be very important for writing a big book.

Debunking the myth of genius

J: We have this idea that history’s greatest artists were crazy or intoxicated or incredibly inspired when they were creating their life’s best work. But in the book you say that it’s actually the opposite, that people don’t create their best work when they’re hooked on heroine. They don’t create their best work when they’re going crazy.

R: Well, it’s a terrible, ridiculous myth. And it’s also a great secret. If we looked behind the scenes and we saw Einstein spending hour after hour thinking about this one problem, or if we saw the hours of practice that Mozart put into his music, or John Coltrane into playing the saxophone, it would almost not seem so glorious, so mystical. We love the myth of the artist just creating out of nothing.

Also, it gets us off the hook. We can say, “Well, I wasn’t born a Mozart. How could I possibly do it?” Or with Coltrane: “It was just the heroine.” When, in fact, Coltrane said he did his worst music when he was on heroine.

What people don’t realize is that the greatest jazz artist ever, John Coltrane, in a medium known for its spontaneity was a practice freak. This man practiced harder than anyone ever had practiced before on the saxophone. This man practiced hours, and hours, and hours every conceivable genre of type of jazz music. And that’s what led him to be so wildly creative, and even spontaneous, in the end.

So, I set out in this book to debunk that ridiculous myth that it’s something someone’s born with, they’re just insane, or they take drugs. And I show it applies to Albert Einstein. It applies to dance and Martha Graham. It applies to sports and Michael Jordan or Bill Bradley. On and on down the line.

The effort and years of practice you put in will let you become much more creative and intuitive.

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life!”

J: A lot of people in their 20s and even 30s say, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” How do they find the one thing, that one craft they can discipline themselves in so they can start moving towards mastery? Do they just pick something?

R: Well, I’m maintaining that you do know it, that there is something in there.

Everybody is born unique, genetically. Your brain is wired differently than anybody else. And when you were a kid, it meant that you were drawn to certain subjects.

For me, it would have been history, and writing, and literature. For others, it’s going to be sports, or games of strategy and competitiveness. I maintain, like great athletes, it’s not just maybe basketball that interests them, but it’s winning. It’s the competitive angle that a Napoleon or a Michael Jordan has. For others, it could be music, or math.

When you’re a kid, it was there. And you felt it. It was before your parents infected you with, “No, you got to go to law school, or go to medical school.” And it’s before your peers started infecting you with, “This is a cool job. This is where you want to go.” And before you started thinking about money. It was there.

Also, in life as you get into your 20s, you discover things that you don’t like, which is a very important lesson. Seeing the negative side of what you don’t want can be very helpful.

You don’t want to give up what you’ve been doing for the past 10 years and suddenly say, “No, I’m going to be a rock star. That’s what I was meant to be.” You’ve got to build on what you been doing already.

You’ve got to take the skills that you’ve been acquiring and maybe something that wasn’t suited to you, and find a way to adapt them. And find your way towards a path that’s more in alignment with this life’s task.

What it takes to be great

J: What sort of distractions will we encounter as we’re heading towards our life’s task? What challenges do we face?

R: Well, oddly enough, it’s really your ego that becomes the biggest obstacle of all. And you’d think that’s counterintuitive. But even if you read Steve Jobs’s biography, you’d realize the guy isn’t motivated by attention, or fame, or money. He’s motivated by the love of his work— and to an obsessional level. That’s what made him sometimes kind of unpleasant to be around.

So the biggest obstacle you face when you enter the work world is you think the game is about getting attention, being liked, having other people pay attention to you, making money. And that’s going to really mess you up later in life. Because it’s going to prevent you from learning the skills that you need to learn.

It’s almost a Zen-type thing where you’re almost egoless. You’re really motivated by the love of this particular question, or subject, or problem that’s facing you. And it might sound cliché. It might sound touchy-feely or something. But I swear to you, all of the masters I interviewed, all the people I researched, they all share that quality.

What can happen to you is if you get success early on in your 20s you start thinking, “Well, it’s all about being in the limelight, getting people’s attention, repeating what I did before,” and you lose connection to the fact that it’s the work itself that matters.

And if you put that energy into the work, into learning, the money will come. The fame will come. You may not even want it, because you work so much. But I guarantee you that that kind of drive and persistence will bring much more money and fame than if that became your original motivation.

J: There’s a story about Bobby Fisher in the book where you talk about this “heightened awareness,” where all of these masters had this moment where they just saw the world differently. Is this what you’re talking about where they just beginning to focus more on the work than the fame, or the accolades, or money?

R: Well, they’ve always been focusing on the work. So if you take a Bobby Fisher, the great chess master, for example — this kid put in an insane number of hours as a young man, because he loved chess.

And at some point, he had this feel for the chess board that just surpassed anything anybody had. He could sense not just the moves that he needed to make, or what his opponent could make, but a whole feel for the game as it evolved. He could see in advance the whole dynamic and then make the killer move.

It’s the same thing that happened in warfare with a Rommel or Napoleon, the same thing that happened in business, or an invention with Thomas Edison, or Steve Jobs.

So all along, these people are absorbed in their work for its own sake. They don’t go at it saying, “I’ve got to be a master. I’ve got to become this great person.” Eventually, it happens to them.

When it feels like you’ve missed your shot…

J: Let’s talk about regret. For those who feel like they’ve missed the boat: how do they reclaim this pursuit of their life’s work?

R: You really have to have had some kind of skills that you acquired. If you are in your 40s, and you haven’t really gained any patience, or persistence, you haven’t learned skills, it’s not going to be very easy. This is not a book to sugar coat it, where I’m telling you things that you want to hear.

You need to have at least some level of skills in certain things, number one, just to develop the habits that you need in order to get your life back on track. But let’s say that you have developed skills to some extent, but they’re just not what you really wanted to do in life. You’ve got to go through this process. You’ve got to go back and look at yourself.

The problem that we have now is, a lot of people aren’t in touch with who they are. They’ve been on Facebook too much, too much social media. They listen to what other people are doing. Their attention is all outward focused on what others are doing. And they have no sense of who they are, or what they need to be doing.

So you need to take time, and step back, and look at yourself deeply and say, “This is actually what I loved when I was a kid. I know it. I knew it. I knew it when I came out of college, but I took a wrong step.” You’ve got to be honest with yourself. And, then, you’ve got to find a way to get back on that path, however late it is in life.

Let’s say, for instance, you’re in your 50s and you didn’t do what you wanted to do. You wanted to be a writer, and you didn’t actually do the writing. In your spare time, you’re going to go take classes.

At night — instead of wasting time playing video games — you’re going to practice writing. Getting back some skill level, and the ability to learn skill, just the sense that you’re going to do that, is going to make you feel so much better.

And you’ll slowly develop momentum, and it will feel right, and maybe if you do it for three or four years, maybe by the time you’re 55, you’ll be able to start writing things and make some money off of it and change the course of it.

It’s not a big, dramatic change. It’s small realistic steps in the right direction. And a realistic reassessment of who you are, and where you want to go.

* * *

You can find out more about Robert Greene and his writings on his website. His book, Mastery, is available on Amazon (affiliate link). You can download the full transcript of this interview here.

Memorable quotes

“It’s not the fact that you’re born a genius, or that you have a larger brain. It’s the level of dedication and persistence and patience.”
“The more you learn in this apprenticeship phase, the more you’re prepared for those moments that will eventually come to you.”
“You don’t have to find exactly what you want early on in life. It can be a voyage, a journey that takes a few years, as long as you have a general sense of the direction you need to be headed.”
“What people don’t realize is that the greatest jazz artist ever, John Coltrane, in a medium known for its spontaneity, was a practice freak.”
“The effort and years of practice you put in will let you become much more creative and intuitive.”

What would mastery look like for you? Share in the comments.

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