Mastery

by Robert Greene

“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.”

Our evolution as a species has depended on the creation of a tremendous diversity of skills and ways of thinking.

the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery.

First, knowing your environment inside and out will help you in navigating it and avoiding costly mistakes.

Second, the ability to observe any unfamiliar environment will become a critical lifelong skill.

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.

Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills,

The future in science does not lie in increased specialization, but rather in the combining and cross-fertilization of knowledge in various fields.

The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas.

In truth, anomalies 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.

Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming,

We humans are the ultimate opportunists in the animal world, the least specialized of all living creatures.

In the end, you win through superior craftsmanship, not marketing.

the willingness of the inventor to look at everyday things in a different light and to imagine new uses for them.

Creativity and adaptability are inseparable.

If time is not absolute, then neither is space or distance. Everything is relative to everything else—speed, time, distance, and so on—except for the speed of light, which never changes.

The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance.

The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric.