Mastery
Robert Greene
Summary
Robert does a great job using various examples from history how to become a master of your domain.
Rating: 4/5
Notes
The visual and the social - reasons how humans evolved from apes
All great masters in history: a youthful passion, a chance encounter to apply it and apprenticeship where they come alive
We think intellectual power is correlated with success and achievement but it’s really desire, patience, persistence and confidence
People get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions
You want to see work as part of your ‘creation’ and understand it as a journey w/ twists and turns rather than a straight line
‘You are and will be the only person in human history w/ your DNA’
Become who you are by learning who you are - Pindar
Understand your origins
To master a field, you must love the subject and feel a powerful connection to it
Occupy the perfect niche
Find a niche you can dominate and master
Avoid the false path
You are on your own and change is inevitable
Improve your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be like others
Concentrate on becoming sufficient at simple and immediate skills
Masters have a self directed apprenticeship usually lasting 5-10 years
The goal of apprenticeship is not money, fame or title: it’s about transforming your mind and character
Choose positions and places of work that have the greatest opportunity for learning
3 steps: deep observation (passive mode), skills acquisition (practice mode) and experimentation (active mode)
In the first little while, just deeply observe the rules and relationship dynamics
Our brains are highly suited for learning through mirror neurons: watching experts
Begin with one essential skill and understand that the first little bit will be tedious
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways
You should find a way to work w/ your hands
Value learning over money and everything else
Keep expanding your horizons and mingle with as many different kinds of people as possible
Feel a sense of inferiority: it gives you a hunger to learn
Trust the process: time is the magic ingredient. You just have to stay disciplined and consistent
Move toward resistance and pain
- Create a space for focus and deliberate work
Apprentice yourself in failure
Combine the ‘what’ w/ the ‘how’; things work
Move by trial and error
There are no shortcuts in apprenticeship
You need a mentor in your life that pushes you but you surpass them
To learn requires a sense of humility
You want person to person access so don’t shy away from menial tasks and keep their self interest top of mind
Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations
You must continually start over and challenge yourself
When reading people, focus your attention on how they think, not you
Learn specific knowledge - reading people and general knowledge - human behaviour
Pay less attention to people’s words but how they say it - tone, body language, look in the eye
- Look for common emotional experiences to relate to others
- Actions say more about a person’s character than words every do
- Avoid making judgements of people based on initial impressions
Seven deadly realities: envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsessiveness, laziness, flightiness and passive aggression
- Envy: be wary of those who are overly friendly. Be careful not to boast about success and use self-deprecating humour
- Conformism: reserve your most interesting thoughts for your friends. Be careful with what you say
- Rigidity: accept it in others but maintain your spirit on your own
- Self-obsessiveness: always appear to someone’s self interest. Give them something valuable in exchange for helping you
- Laziness: keep your ideas to yourself
- Flightiness: do not take people’s promises to help seriously. Rely on yourself to get things done
- Passive aggression: focus on people’s actions and what others do around them
The foundation of learning is reading
Your work is the single greatest means for expressing social intelligence
People will judge you based on your outward appearance
You will always deal with fools - people focused on short term matters
- Suffer fools globally - never let them affect you
Once you’ve learned, you will feel anxious and insecure about using your knowledge but you must push against that. Become bold
Aim to have a dimensional mind: a high level of knowledge on a subject and an openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new ways
Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. It has to come from deep within
You cannot find anything new if you are unwilling to leave the shore
Cultivate negative capability: suspend the need to judge everything you see
Allow serendipity to enter your life: spend your time doing other things
‘Chance favours only the prepared mind’ - Louis Pasteur
Keep a notebook on you all the time and record everything
Speculation is the heart and soul of human rationality, our way of connecting to reality and seeing the invisible
Alter your perspective
- Look at the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what’
- Pay greater attention to the relationship between things
- Study the details but don’t become lost in them
- Focus on what may be missing instead of what’s present
Resistance is the way to make the body stronger, same with the mind
Try and visualize concepts and ideas more
Always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read
Remind yourself how little you know and how mysterious the world is
The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience
Read info from all different fields - keep you mind completely open
Constantly remind yourself of your purpose, of your higher goal
The essential character trait in an entrepreneur is supreme tenacity
Let go of the need to create dualities for everything and look holistically
Make your years of study qualitatively rich
Every setback, failure or hardship is a seed being planted for cultivation later
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent; it is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge
Know your strengths and move with them
The person w/ the wider global perspective will always win out
‘Look wider and think further ahead’
In order to understand ppl, you must develop mirror neurons and imagine their perspective
Rich ideas come from extending your knowledge further and farther away
***
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Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
Summary
The life of Steve Jobs in his own words
Rating: 5/5
Notes
Make something wonderful and put it out there
‘You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear’
When you’re a stranger in a place, you notice thing you don’t otherwise (Jobs after India trip)
Whenever you start with nothing, always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose.
You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times
Never be afraid to fail. You never achieve what you want without falling flat on your face a few times
We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture them. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true
Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights others don’t see
Believe that some of what you follow with your heart will come back and make your life richer. And it will. And you will gain even firmer trust on your instincts and intuitions
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. The reward isn’t in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s in crossing the rainbow
To find A+ talent, if experienced, look at their track record and results
The world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (read whole ad ‘here’s to the crazy ones)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit - Aristotle
Hire people better than you are
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life
It’s impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but they make sense looking backwards so you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you
***
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