Mastery

Robert Greene · 2012

Thesis

Mastery is not the product of innate genius but of a process anyone can follow: discovering one's inborn inclinations, submitting to a long apprenticeship, absorbing a mentor's knowledge, learning to read people, and accumulating experience until expert knowledge becomes intuition that sees further than others can.

The main ideas

Each person has a primal inclination, visible in childhood, that points toward a Life's Task. Finding it is the first step.
After formal education comes an apprenticeship whose goal is the transformation of the mind, not money or status.
Apprenticeship has three stages: deep observation, skills acquisition and experimentation.
A mentor compresses years of learning, but the apprentice must eventually transform the mentor's ideas and move beyond them.
Many talented people fail through naivety about others. Social intelligence is a separate skill to be learned.
Creativity needs the open, childlike mind kept alive inside expert knowledge, and tolerance of uncertainty.
Mastery is intuition built from long experience, fusing the rational with the intuitive.

The Life's Task

Robert Greene opens with Leonardo da Vinci, born outside marriage and barred from university, who spent his childhood drawing and was apprenticed to the painter Andrea del Verrocchio. The pattern, Greene argues, recurs in every master: an early, intense attraction to a particular field, which he calls a primal inclination, that points toward a person's Life's Task.

His examples include Albert Einstein, who at five was fascinated by a compass whose needle moved under an invisible force, and the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, whose childhood interest in anomalies among seashells led him to anomalous neurological disorders. Ramachandran illustrates a second strategy, occupying the perfect niche: a field narrow enough that one can dominate it.

The mechanism is motivation. The years of practice mastery requires are bearable only if the work engages a deep personal interest; people who choose careers for money or status run out of energy. Greene also describes paths back after a false start: the boxing trainer Freddie Roach letting go of a fighting career to find his strength in training, and Buckminster Fuller finding his way after business failure.

Implication: look for the subjects that held your attention as a child without anyone requiring it, and choose work that connects to them.

The ideal apprenticeship

After formal education, Greene argues, comes the most important phase of life: a second, practical education he calls the apprenticeship. Its goal is not money, position or credentials, but the transformation of the mind and character.

It has three steps. First, deep observation, the passive mode: watching how the field actually works, its rules and power relations, without trying to impress. Second, skills acquisition, the practice mode: tedious, repetitive training of basic skills until they become automatic. Third, experimentation, the active mode: taking on more responsibility and testing one's own ideas.

His model is Charles Darwin, unsure of his direction and under pressure from his father, who joined the voyage of HMS Beagle as an unpaid naturalist on the recommendation of his Cambridge professor John Stevens Henslow. Five years of collecting and observation, often seasick, transformed him into a scientist.

The strategies Greene draws from other apprentices include valuing learning over money, from Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship at his brother's print shop; reverting to a feeling of inferiority, from the linguist Daniel Everett; trusting the process; moving toward resistance and pain; and apprenticing yourself in failure, from Henry Ford, whose first two car companies failed.

Implication: in the first years of any career, choose positions by what they will teach you, and accept slow, boring practice as the price of skill.

The mentor dynamic

A mentor, Greene argues, can compress years of learning into a few, passing on knowledge and judgment that cannot be found in books. The relationship is intense and emotional, and it should be chosen deliberately, according to the apprentice's needs and inclinations, as Frank Lloyd Wright chose the architect Louis Sullivan.

His central case is the chemist Humphry Davy and his assistant Michael Faraday. Davy took Faraday on and taught him, but when Faraday's discoveries began to rival his own, Davy grew envious and tried to obstruct his work.

The mechanism is that the relationship has a natural life span. The apprentice must absorb the mentor's knowledge, then transfigure it, adapting the mentor's ideas into something of their own, and eventually separate. Mentors often resist that separation. Greene recommends creating a back-and-forth dynamic in which the apprentice gives as well as receives, as Roach did with his trainer Eddie Futch.

Implication: choose a mentor whose knowledge you need, learn everything you can and plan to outgrow them. Expect the separation to be difficult.

Social intelligence

Greene argues that many brilliant people fail because they are naive about others. His example is the young Franklin, promised money by Pennsylvania's governor, William Keith, to open his own print shop, and sent to London to buy equipment; the money never came. Another is Ignaz Semmelweis, who found that hand-washing cut deaths among new mothers but failed to win over the colleagues who had to accept it.

Greene's remedy is to see people as they are, not as one wishes them to be. He lists seven deadly realities of human nature that the intelligent must expect: envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsessiveness, laziness, flightiness and passive aggression.

His strategies include speaking through your work, letting results rather than argument persuade; crafting an appropriate persona; seeing yourself as others see you; and suffering fools gladly, accepting the foolish as part of life rather than wasting energy fighting them.

The mechanism is that skill in a field is necessary but not sufficient. Work must be accepted by others to have any effect, and those others act from motives that have little to do with merit.

Implication: expect envy and resistance in proportion to your success, and let your work make the argument for you.

The creative-active

Greene distinguishes three kinds of mind. The Original Mind is the child's, open, curious and receptive. The Conventional Mind is the adult's, governed by habit and familiar categories. The Dimensional Mind joins the expert's deep knowledge of a field with the openness of the Original Mind.

His case is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who stayed in Vienna against the wishes of his father, Leopold, and went on to write his most original music. Greene's example of tolerating uncertainty is Einstein, who spent about ten years thinking about what a person riding alongside a beam of light would see before arriving at special relativity. Greene borrows the poet John Keats's term negative capability, the ability to remain in uncertainty and doubt without reaching irritably after answers.

He also recommends allowing for serendipity: widening the field of search so that chance connections can occur, instead of narrowing too early to a single solution.

The mechanism is that expertise brings habits of thought that eventually close off new possibilities. The creative master keeps the knowledge while loosening the habits.

Implication: when you know a field well, deliberately question its accepted categories, and tolerate long periods without an answer instead of settling on the first solution.

Fusing the intuitive with the rational

Greene's final stage is mastery itself: a form of intelligence in which long experience has been internalized so deeply that the master grasps situations as wholes, intuitively, and sees more than others can.

His case is Marcel Proust, whose years of apparently aimless social life and false starts turned out to be the preparation for In Search of Lost Time. He also points to Jane Goodall, who came to understand chimpanzees through long immersion in their world, and to the general Erwin Rommel's feel for a battlefield.

Greene's strategies include connecting to your environment, playing to your strengths, transforming yourself through practice to develop a fingertip feel for the work, internalizing the details, widening your vision and synthesizing all forms of knowledge.

The mechanism is accumulation. Years of practice store thousands of patterns, and the master's intuition is the rapid recognition of those patterns, joined with rational analysis rather than opposed to it.

Implication: treat intuition in your field as something earned through long experience, and trust it in proportion to how much experience stands behind it.

Limits

Its histories are simplified to fit the thesis. Kirkus Reviews warned readers to beware of Greene's "quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations," and the masters are chosen from among those who succeeded, not from all who followed similar paths.
Practice explains less than the book implies. A 2014 meta-analysis by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald found that deliberate practice accounted for about 12 percent of the differences in performance across domains.
The idea of an inborn calling is contested. Research by Paul O'Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton in 2018 found that people who believe interests are fixed and waiting to be found explore less and lose interest more readily when the work becomes difficult.

The Art of Learning — a single master's account of the apprenticeship and intuition Greene describes.
The Laws of Human Nature — Greene's full treatment of the social intelligence covered here in one chapter.
The 50th Law — the same respect for slow, dull practice, compressed into one principle.