Mastery

by Robert Greene

The frustration is a sign of progress—a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice.

exercises for these skills.

To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice. The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic; you see your work as if through the eyes of others.

apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.

Improvement of the Mind—a

The best mentors are often those who have wide knowledge and experience, and are not overly specialized in their field—they can train you to think on a higher level, and to make connections between different forms of knowledge.

Your submitting to their authority is by no means unconditional, and in fact your goal all along is eventually to find your way to independence, having internalized and adapted their wisdom.

In his mind he could already envision a totally new style of architecture that would revolutionize the field, but he lacked the experience to set up his own practice.

Growing up in Japan in the late 1970s, Yoky Matsuoka felt like an outsider.

she liked to do things her own way in a country that esteemed social cohesion and conformity above everything else.

The choice of the right mentor is more important than you might imagine.

If your path is in a more revolutionary direction, you will want a mentor who is open, progressive, and not domineering. If your ideal aligns more with a style that is somewhat idiosyncratic, you will want a mentor who will make you feel comfortable with this and help you transform your peculiarities into mastery, instead of trying to squelch them.

At the age of forty-one, he finally had his ultimate and deepest moment of enlightenment, bringing with it a mind-set that would not leave him for the rest of his life. At this point, all of the ideas and teachings of Shoju came back to him as if he had heard them yesterday, and he realized that Shoju was the only true Master he had ever known.

To reach mastery requires some toughness and a constant connection to reality.

As an apprentice, it can be hard for us to challenge ourselves on our own in the proper way, and to get a clear sense of our own weaknesses.

Developing discipline through challenging situations and perhaps suffering along the way are no longer values t...

It makes them unsuited for the rigors of the journey to mastery. It weakens people’s will.

Masters are those who by nature have suffered to get to where they are.

They have experienced endless criticisms of their work, doubts about their progress, setbacks along the way. They know deep in their bones what is requir...

Get them to give you the proper challenges that will reveal your strengths and weaknesses and allow you to gain as much feedback as possible, no matter how hard it might be to take.

Confidence is important, but if it is not based on a realistic appraisal of who you are, it is mere grandiosity and smugness.

In theory, there should be no limit to what we can learn from mentors who have wide experience. But in practice, this is rarely the case. The reasons are several: at some point the relationship can become flat; it is difficult for us to maintain the same level of attention that we had in the beginning.

he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw.

What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline.

He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was a consummate outsider and his mind had not been indoctrinated in any school of thought, he brought a fresh perspective to every problem he tackled. He turned his lack of formal direction into an advantage.

If you are forced onto this path, you must follow Edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. Under these circumstances, you become your own teacher and mentor. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those...

As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences—giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery.

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.

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.

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.

As he got older he came to believe, as many young people do, that getting along with others is a function of behaving charmingly and winning them over with a friendly manner.

To be truly charming and socially effective you have to understand people,

and to understand them you have to get outside yourself and immerse your mind in their world.

Emotions seen inside other people create empathy and bring a deep understanding of what makes them tick.

Most of us have had the sensation at some point in our lives of experiencing an uncanny connection with another person.

Such communication generally occurs with close friends and partners, people whom we trust and feel attuned to on many levels. Because we trust them, we open up to their influence and vice versa.

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.

For instance, the man you judged to be so powerful and assertive may be merely masking his fears and may have far less power than you first imagined. Often it is the quiet ones, those

who give out less at first glance, who hide greater depths, and who secretly wield greater power.

elicited

prudent

inadvertently

Rigidity:

Unable to tolerate this, he came up with his own solution: as much as possible, he would avoid any environment that involved politicking. This meant sticking to doing startups on the smallest scale—a constraint that made him disciplined and creative.

Feeling anxious and insecure, you will tend to turn conservative with your knowledge, preferring to fit into the group and sticking to the procedures you have learned. Instead, you must force yourself in the opposite direction. As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles.

indulging

acquiesced,

disobedience.

resentment

utmost contempt,