Robert Greene is one of the premier thinkers and strategists of our time. Every time I hear him speak on a podcast or on YouTube, I am absolutely entranced and get the feeling that I’m listening to a true expert on the human experience. His books can be pretty dense, but he does offer a “concise” version of each for those who’d like to get straight to the point.
Mastery is the ultimate how-to guide for anyone aiming to achieve excellence in their field. It is possible for all of us to achieve mastery if we simply follow Greene’s advice. To provide lessons and inspiration, he includes tales of contemporary masters such as Freddie Roach, Yoky Matsuoka, Daniel Everett, and Teresita Fernandez.
Uncovering the “Life’s Task”
“Success demands singleness of purpose.” – Vince Lombardi
Before we can even begin the pursuit of mastery, we have to identify what Greene calls our “Life’s Task.” We can think of this as our calling, or “what [we] are meant to accomplish in the time that [we] have to live.” This endeavor must be singular in focus; if we try to multitask and perfect too many skills at once, it will kill our creativity.
The Life’s Task must also provoke an emotional response within us:
“In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything.”
So, how do we figure out exactly what it is that we ought to pursue? Greene recommends reconnecting with your inner child. As kids, we experience primal tendencies towards certain subjects.
For me, that was anything related to reading or writing. For Leonardo da Vinci, it was painting what he saw in nature. Physicist and chemist Marie Curie was mesmerized by the laboratory instruments she discovered in her father’s study. Charles Darwin loved being outside collecting bugs, flowers, and rocks. “Reconnect with your childhood obsession. You were obsessed with it as a child for a reason.”
In other words, we can’t shake a magic 8 ball and expect it to show us what our calling is. There is an innate proclivity within each of us which may have been hidden away for years. Those who don’t chase this passion within them will eventually become depressed.
We have to think about what we did as children when we were left to our own devices. Before the world got its hands on us. This is what makes each one of us unique. Plus, when we set our sights on something that is so deeply embedded within us, we are able to maintain a sense of childlike wonder and curiosity. This will keep us engaged and motivated until we are experts.
The apprenticeship phase
Once the Life’s Task is uncovered, the apprenticeship phase begins. While some amount of theoretical knowledge from books, formal classes, etc., may be necessary, the shortest path to mastery is to learn from an already-established master of the craft. We cannot expect to be self-taught in this process; even natural prodigies benefit from the diverse teachings and perspectives of other experts in the field.
Most of the remaining details, though, are for us to determine.
“This part of their lives – a largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years – receives little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discovery.”
The process is not “self-directed” in that we have to figure everything out on our own. Rather, we are the ones who decide whether we learn from one mentor in the same place, or whether we move around, take multiple positions, and learn from several different masters. Greene provides the framework of five to ten years and also alludes to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule.
In other words, the apprenticeship phase is undoubtedly the most intensive step in the mastery process. It is a grind. It is ok to move around, to learn as many things as we can from many different sources of knowledge. This only expands our realm of possibility. But, it will also take time. As Greene notes, “You must have patience and faith that what you are doing will yield something important.”
This can prove to be the most difficult part of the process, because it entails so much uncertainty. Greene explains that we should value experience over money. That’s easier said than done. Most of us, myself included, would prefer not to tread the unbeaten path unless we know that security, financial and otherwise, is at the end of the road.
However, as I mentioned in my post on Courage is Calling, Greene echoes that there are two kinds of failure. One stems from an intense, internal fear that we cannot blaze our own trail in life. Instead, we take the safe route and do our best to fit in.
The other is a more noble type of failure. It is the result of a “bold and venturesome spirit.” If we fail at something we hate, it can be debilitating. On the other hand, if we fail at something that brings us joy, it’s not so bad. We can learn from it and view it as part of a lifelong process towards success.
Becoming a Master
“And so he chose his own unique and strange path in life, guided by an inner force that he called his daemon – a spirit of restlessness that impelled him to explore beyond literature, to the core of life itself. All that was necessary was to master and channel this spirit, implanted in him at birth.”
We now know that expertise is partially dependent upon passion and deep, focused work. Getting over the final hump in achieving mastery, though, requires us to immerse ourselves totally in our Life’s Task. “The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.”
It must become part of our ethos, part of our being. Once this happens, we can begin to contribute our own creative influence within our professions.
Some examples from the book:
Freddie Roach was born into a boxing family and began training at the age of six. He had a successful amateur career before hitting a plateau and retiring from the sport at age 26. Roach possessed excellent technical skills but couldn’t quite put all the pieces of the puzzle together in the ring. By the time of his retirement, he hated boxing and began to drink heavily. Eventually, he found himself back in the gym of his old coach, Eddie Futch, and became an unofficial trainer there, catching up on new fighting styles that his friend, Virgil Hall, had learned from Cuban boxers. This revitalized his love for the sport as he went on to become the legendary coach of such fighters as Manny Pacquiao, Mike Tyson, and Oscar De La Hoya. With all his internalized knowledge and experience, Roach was able to find his niche within the boxing world.
Yoky Matsuoka was a young tennis prodigy in her native Japan. Much like Freddie Roach, she hit a wall at some point in her playing career and realized that being a professional athlete was not her course in life. Matsuoka’s other passion growing up was science, so when she enrolled at UC Berkeley, she was first interested in designing a robot that could play tennis with her. This led her to pursue a Ph.D. in robotics at MIT, where she studied under Rodney Brooks. Matsuoka went on to professorial roles at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington, where she pioneered a new field called “neurobotics,” which stemmed from her early obsession of both tennis and science. She is currently attempting to build a prosthetic hand that can connect with the human brain.
Teresita Fernandez felt like an outsider growing up in Miami, but she found her place studying art in her high school years. Although she continued by pursuing the fine arts at Florida International University, Fernandez grew bored with the conventionality of most art mediums. This all changed when she took notice of a couple other artists working with sheet metal in the sculpture lab. Fernandez quickly became obsessed with crafting out of metal and has since gone on to a decades-long career as a widely recognized conceptual artists, whose public sculptures and other works using unconventional materials have been featured in art exhibits all over the world. She has received countless awards for her art, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”
Daniel Everett grew up near the southern border of California and was drawn to the language and culture of the Mexican population around him. After studying Noah Chomsky, the influential linguist, and receiving a Ph.D. in linguistics, Everett was eventually able to decipher the language of the Piraha people (a remote culture within the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil), after living with them for nearly eight years. The Piraha language was considered the hardest language in the world to translate. It is unlikely that any other classically trained linguist would have been able to accomplish this without Everett’s obsession for language and his willingness to uproot his life for nearly a decade to pursue an unofficial apprenticeship in the Amazon.