Table of Contents

The Book in Three Sentences

In this book summary of Robert Greene’s Mastery, you’ll learn that everyone has the potential to become a Master. Getting to that point requires you to learn everything about a field, absorb hidden knowledge, and submit to the process of apprenticeship. In the book, Robert Greene studied the lives of some of the most important Masters in history and compiled a series of lessons that can help you on your journey.

Buy the Book

Mastery Summary

Introduction

There is a form of intelligence that is superior to everything else. It’s not taught at school and you can sometimes see it when you’re constantly working on a difficult project. Once the project is over though, the feeling of creativity goes away and we return to a distracted state where we have no sense of control. We want to recreate this feeling of power, but it seems elusive. Most people think there’s something mysterious about brilliance or that it comes from our natural talent, but the author wants to demystify it. Greene calls this feeling mastery.

Although most people experience mastery momentarily, this process is accessible to everyone and it can become more permanent. First comes apprenticeship. We enter this process as outsiders and we feel confused and intimidated by it. The most common mistake newcomers make is to give in to boredom, impatience, or fear. If we continue the process though, we gain clarity and everything falls into place. As we overcome weaknesses through practice, we move from student to practitioner. This is known as creative-active. Our knowledge expands and we come up with our unique style. By remaining faithful to the process for years, we acquire mastery. This involves internalizing the skill that was once new to us. This final step is called mastery. In this stage, we’ve learned the rules so well we can bend them to our advantage.

We’re born with the same brain and potential for mastery, but few people ever achieve such a state. The most common explanation to describe mastery is natural talent, but this isn’t the case. Mastery requires a deep love for a subject that reflects the person’s uniqueness. In other words, the person experiences an inner calling. You feel such an intense desire toward a field of study that you’re willing to bear the pain of the process. The pain comes in the form of self-doubt, countless hours of practice, and setbacks. To succeed, we need desire, patience, persistence, and confidence.

Nowadays, anyone can achieve mastery in whatever field they want because we have access to limitless information. The problem we face though is that the world seems beyond our control. This overwhelms most people to the point that they retreat into forms of passivity. Not trying, gives us the illusion of control because we think that the less we try, the fewer chances of failure we have. Trying to achieve mastery is necessary and helps us determine our fate. Mastery is a never-ending process which means you should never rest or your mind will decay.

Chapter 1: Discover Your Calling: The Life’s Task

We all have an inner force that guides us toward our Life’s Task. When we’re children, this force is clear because it points you toward activities that light a primal curiosity. As you listen to parents or peers, this force fades which leads to unhappiness. Suddenly, you don’t have a connection to what makes you unique. Before you can achieve mastery, you must look inward. This gives you clarity on your career path and it’s never too late to do it.

The greatest masters in history are guided by an inner voice. This is because we’re all unique and this uniqueness manifests through our inclinations. Inclinations are forces that influence what we pay attention to and inspire us to achieve mastery. Social pressure weakens the force because it makes you embarrassed about the things you like. This counterforce, as the author calls it, sends you on a directionless path.

Realizing your Life’s Task is a three-step process. First, you must connect with your sense of uniqueness. Second, you choose a path in life where you develop your vocation. Finally, see your vocational path as an expedition with optimal routes that help you expand your skills. Eventually, you’ll come across the niche you belong to.

Strategies for Finding Your Life’s Task

Connecting to your Life’s Task isn’t as simple as you think. For this purpose, the author provides five strategies to deal with the main obstacles that will appear in your path.

Return to your origins – The primal inclination strategy: your inclination appears clearly in childhood. To master a field, you must love it deeply. Your attraction will be hard to put into words, but your connection to it will be powerful nonetheless. As you grow up, you might lose touch with your inclinations, but you must reconnect with them.
Occupy the perfect niche – The Darwinian strategy: in the career world, you compete for resources with other people. The more people, the harder it is to survive. Instead of wasting time on political games, try and achieve mastery in your field. The game you want to play is one where you find a niche you can dominate. Your objective is to choose a large field and you have two paths. You can either move to a narrow field until you can thrive or you can master one field and then move on to another subject where you can apply everything you learned from the first field. Either way, your goal is to find a niche where no one can compete with you.
Avoid the false path – The rebellion strategy: when we follow a path for the wrong reasons (such as money, fame, or attention), we feel empty inside. As a consequence, our work suffers and we feel unfulfilled. To solve this, accept you’ve chosen a career for the wrong reasons as soon as possible. Then, rebel against the forces that steer you away from your true path.
Let go of the past – The adaptation strategy: things like the position you fulfill or the company you work for don’t define you. Your goal is to express your Life’s Task and nothing else. Things will change eventually and you must be prepared. Don’t hold on to the past and be able to adapt. The worst thing you can do when things change is to overreact or feel sorry for yourself. Channel your frustrations and move in new directions where you can use your skills.
Find your way back – The life-or-death strategy: never deviate from your path because you’ll move further and further away from it. The frustration and pain you feel when you deviate from your path are trying to warn you, so listen to them. Take the way back, even if it means sacrificing something in the process.

Some people ignore their inclinations and focus too much on their limitations instead. They internalize the criticism of others and think there’s something wrong with them. This often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all have our weaknesses, but we must ignore them and focus on the activities we’re good at. Doing this will bring you confidence and you’ll expand your skillset as a result. This is a gift that will teach you the value of discipline.

Chapter 2: Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

As soon as you’re done with formal education, a more practical phase starts. This is The Apprenticeship and you reenter it whenever you change careers or learn new skills. The most dangerous part of this phase is giving in to your insecurities. As part of this process, you’ll become an independent thinker who’s ready for creative challenges.

Before someone can achieve mastery, they must go through a self-directed apprenticeship. This period lasts between five to ten years and doesn’t receive external attention. Internally though, the person is undergoing a deep transformation that precedes success. The Ideal Apprenticeship follows a pattern. During childhood, we learn a lot from our parents or teachers. As we grow older, we’re supposed to learn on our own through passive absorption. When that part of the process is over (often between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five), we’re supposed to do everything ourselves.

To say we’re unprepared to face the world is an understatement, but this teaches us a valuable lesson: we must conduct our apprenticeship. This second education is critical to our success. The objective of the apprenticeship is the transformation of mind and character. To make the most out of this period of your life, you must look for challenges and find ways to leave your comfort zone. The apprenticeship has three steps.

Deep Observation – The Passive Mode

Starting a new career involves moving into a place with its own set of rules. Your job is to observe and then absorb everything you see in this new reality. The worst mistake you can make is to try to impress people. There are two realities in this world. The first one involves all the rules and procedures. Some of these rules are overt, but others you must figure out for yourself. The second reality is the power struggle between the people involved.

Skills Acquisition – The Practice Mode

All activities involve mastering a series of skills. You want to reduce these skills to the bare essentials to practice them over and over. As you learn, you acquire tacit knowledge which is hard to put into words, but easy to show. The best way to learn is to commit to seven years and then produce some sort of master test where you can display your skills. At first, you learn by observing Masters and imitating them. Eventually, you’d start using your hands to manipulate different materials. To graduate from the apprenticeship stage, you must dedicate more than 10,000 hours.

The moment the skill we’re trying to learn gets easier, we enter a cycle of accelerated returns. At the beginning of this cycle, we first start with a single skill that works as a foundation. Learning several skills at the same time is a mistake and as soon as you try to multitask, you kill the process. Furthermore, you must accept the tedium that comes with the initial stages of learning something new. As difficult as it is, accept and embrace boredom. Like physical exercise toughens the body, the first stages of learning a new skill invigorates our minds. Chasing immediate pleasure or distractions is a mistake because we want to cultivate a sense of discipline.

When we focus intensely on the same task, the neural pathways in your brain develop and you’ll be able to perform the skills for years. Eventually, the skill becomes automatic and you’re able to notice mistakes, as well as your potential. Pushing this process hard enough will help you enter a state of flow more easily.

Experimentation – The Active mode

As your skills improve and you get more confidence, you must experiment more. You should do this before you think you are ready. Once you have nothing new to learn in your discipline, the apprenticeship stage is over.

Strategies for Completing the Ideal Apprenticeship

Here are eight strategies to complete the Ideal Apprenticeship.

Value learning over money: choosing the apprenticeship with the biggest paycheck leads to more pressure. Instead of trying to acquire new skills, you’ll be focusing on the wrong things, such as your insecurities or trying to please others. The paycheck will become an addiction and it will determine what you do and where you go. Value learning because it leads you toward the right choices. Pursue opportunities to learn and the mentors who can teach you the most. Getting by with less is a critical life skill. The apprenticeship that doesn’t pay is often the one where you’ll learn the most.
Keep expanding your horizons: entering the apprenticeship phase means starting at the lowest position and without help. Your job is to expand your horizons by learning as much as you can. Constantly look for new challenges and you’ll redefine the limits of your world. Eventually, new opportunities will present themselves.
Revert to a feeling of inferiority: having a sense of superiority prevents you from learning new things. Don’t make assumptions out of fear of things that are different. Embracing a sense of inferiority, on the other hand, helps you learn. This makes you open-minded and receptive to new ideas. Accept that others might know more than you and drop any preconceptions about certain fields. Follow your curiosity and in a couple of years, you’ll have learned everything in that field.
Trust the process: when we learn a skill, we eventually feel frustrated because we feel the thing we’re learning is too difficult. Accepting this is the same as giving up. To overcome this sensation, we must trust the process. With enough time, the skills you’re trying to learn become internalized. The only obstacle is yourself and your emotions. As difficult as it is to deal with boredom, frustration, or insecurity, they’re part of the process. If you have faith in the process, those emotions will vanish.
Move toward resistance and pain: we tend to run away from activities that are painful or too difficult. When we practice a skill, we often focus on the parts that are easier for us and we overlook our weaknesses. Also, we adopt conventional practice routines from other people. Greene encourages you to follow the Resistance Practice which involves going in the opposite direction of our tendencies. Don’t be nice to yourself, pay attention to your weaknesses, focus intensely during practice, and be creative when developing your routine.
Apprenticeship yourself in failure: as you practice more skills, you’ll achieve a form of practical intelligence, patience, and problem-solving you can use on anything. Running into problems helps you improve. Failing because you never tried destroys you. Failing because you’re bold helps you learn a lesson and gives you a sense of clarity. Fail often and fail fast. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Combine the “how” and the “what”: there are hidden things in the outer world. Although they aren’t as captivating as the things we can see (the “what”), these hidden things (the “how”) possess the secret of life. Combining the “how” and the “what” gives you a deep knowledge of the field you’re studying and you’ll be able to go beyond what’s conventional.
Advance through trial and error: learn as many skills as you can and follow the paths that interest you the most. Exploring the paths that lie before you helps you identify what works for you, as well as the things you want to avoid. As you move forward, you expand your skill base and opportunities will present themselves.

Chapter 3: Absorb the Master’s Power: The Mentor Dynamic

Learning and practicing a skill without someone’s guidance can take years. The best way to accelerate the process is by finding a mentor. This is the case because you get immediate feedback and eventually, you’re able to internalize their knowledge. The goal is to surpass your mentors.

No one should be admired for their position, even if they reached it on their own. Learning requires humility, admitting that certain people know more due to time and experience. Being self-taught isn’t more authentic and often stems from insecurity. When you have teachers in your life, pay full attention to them.

Learning puts you in a vulnerable position, but only momentarily. Relying on a mentor is important because it saves you time and energy. Mentors will tailor recommendations to your specific circumstances and you can learn from their experiences. In other words, they streamline the process which leads to a richer learning experience. Mentors will guide you and they’ll provide feedback. The mentor-protege dynamic is intense and they will get something out of the experience too. Mentors suffer from too many demands on their time and too much information to consume., so help them in these departments.

While books are great mentors at first, you should find a living mentor soon. Finding figures from the past or present makes for great mentors because you can come up with imaginary situations and determine how that person will behave. Whatever you do, don’t stay too long with a mentor. They’ll rely on you too much or envy your youth. Once you’ve got what you needed out of the relationship, establish your path.

Strategies for Deepening the Mentor Dynamic

Greene suggests four strategies to exploit the mentor/protege dynamic to the fullest.

Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations: choosing the right mentor for you is extremely important. Above all, ignore superficial reasons, such as status, what they know, or their personality. Also, ignore choosing the first mentor you find. Select a mentor with care. A good mentor should give you support, confidence, direction, and space to pursue your interests.
Gaze deep into the mentor’s mirror: mastery demands that we challenge ourselves properly and that we understand our weaknesses. The modern world is moving in the opposite direction where discipline and talking about people’s weaknesses aren’t considered polite. Your mentor should give you tough love. Accept their criticism. In the long run, this will turn into confidence which is an important quality.
Transfigure their ideas: try every idea you’re exposed to and change them to make it your own. This often involves transforming someone else’s knowledge into something that feels unique.
Create a Back-and-forth dynamic: developing an interactive relationship with your mentor is the best way to learn as much as you can from them. They can adopt some of your ideas, as you adopt some of them.

Chapter 4: See People as They Are: Social Intelligence

One of the most difficult parts of achieving mastery is dealing with people. For this purpose, try to have social intelligence which involves seeing people as they are and noticing manipulative tendencies. Successfully navigating the social world gives us the time and energy to pursue our Life’s Task.

We humans are social animals and as such, we’re wired to imitate and imagine what others think or feel. This empathy improved our levels of cooperation. Language and rational thinking enabled more complex cooperation. When we come into the world, we’re weak and helpless and we have to rely on adults to help us. As a consequence, we see those around us as stronger, more capable, and more selfless than they are. The distorted view of the world is transferred from our parents and caretakers to teachers and friends. It isn’t until adolescence that we start seeing people’s flaws, but again, we exaggerate them. The author calls this the Naive Perspective. To understand people, you mustn’t view them through a distorted lens. Likewise, we don’t want drama in our lives because it distracts us.

Social intelligence is the cure to the Naive Perspective because it lets us see people as they are. You must become an apprentice in social intelligence. This has two parts. First, specific knowledge of human nature which is the ability to read people. Second, general knowledge of human nature which is understanding the patterns of human behavior we all share.

Specific knowledge gives us the sense that we’re connecting deeply with people. This is hard to describe, but it feels as if we can anticipate what the other person is thinking. For this to happen, we should trust the other person completely, so this is easier to do this with friends and family. We care so much about the person that we feel attuned to them and we can shut off our internal monologue. Don’t jump to conclusions quickly though, since this can be misleading. People wear masks and you won’t be able to see the depth in them by making quick judgments. The truth will be revealed before you over time, even if this process takes months. Eventually, you’ll see what makes people tick, as well as their most important values.

General knowledge refers to the universal features we all share. Although we share positive qualities (such as our tendency to cooperate), we also possess negative ones. Greene identified the following negative qualities: Envy, Conformism, Rigidity, Self-obsessiveness, Laziness, Flightiness, and Passive aggression. He refers to them as the Seven Deadly Realities. Since these traits are undesirable, people disguise them. Reacting emotionally to people who display any of these traits increases the damage, so our job is to study the Seven Deadly Realities so that we can prepare for them.

Envy: we tend to compare ourselves to others and envy is the result of such comparison. To identify envy, find people who are too friendly as soon as they meet you. They want to get closer to you and hurt you. Envy is hard to discern, so your best defense against it is to do your best not to trigger it. Show weaknesses and don’t appear to be too talented. Also, reveal your insecurities to humanize yourself.
Conformism: in any given group, there’s a common mindset. Your job is to observe these sets of values so that you can show your individual spirit in subtle ways. Don’t express your opinions openly because everyone in the workplace is wearing masks.
Rigidity: creating habits and routines gives us an illusion of control in a complex world. Following procedures while on autopilot makes you hold on to ideas that you may have never questioned or thought through. Introducing new ideas to a group will be met with more defensiveness. Accept the rigidity of others, but maintain an open spirit.
Self-obsessiveness: people think of themselves first. This is a trait of human nature and while there’s nothing wrong with it, people hide it nonetheless. The most self-interested people appear to have a sense of gratitude, charity, or friendliness. When you ask for help, they won’t do anything unless there’s something in it for themselves. Accept this and try to get a sense of what they want.
Laziness: we all want shortcuts, but while most people can control this impulse, others can’t. Lazy people will steal ideas or take credit for work they contributed nothing to. Be careful around lazy people and don’t overshare anything with them.
Flightiness: we’re irrational by nature. This means we change opinions too often. Cultivate detachment from people who are manipulated by their emotions. Don’t focus on their words but on their actions. Never take them seriously.
Passive aggression: passive aggression stems from our fear of direct confrontation. As a consequence, a lot of people attack you in subtle ways: they show up late, procrastinate, and create unnecessary drama. To deal with these kinds of people make them aware of their behavior or ignore it. Ideally, you’d want to avoid them before they come close to you. Often, they’re easy to stop since their reputation precedes them. When you find yourself under attack, leave immediately or respond in similar ways.

Strategies for Acquiring Social Intelligence

The author suggests four strategies to face the challenges you’ll run into on your way to mastery. Bear them in mind and maintain a rational mindset which is necessary for social intelligence.

Speak through your work: if you want to persuade others, you must express your ideas clearly and reasonably. Involving others in your work makes them attached to your ideas. Eventually, you’ll create some kind of work that speaks for itself. Your work is how you express social intelligence. Put your audience first and they’ll soon follow you. Also, people will have trouble arguing with your results.
Craft the appropriate persona: our personality plays an important role in our success. Don’t keep to yourself and focus solely on your work or people will define you and you won’t progress as much. Create the image that best suits you and you’ll control people’s judgments. Don’t settle on a single image or people will figure you out.
See yourself as others see you: we all have social flaws. When repeated enough times, these mistakes can offend people. This happens because we’re blind to our own mistakes and because people never tell us what we do wrong. Look at past experiences that led to problems with others and try to identify what soured the dynamic. Hopefully, you’ll identify patterns that show flaws in our character.
Suffer fools gladly: you’ll encounter many fools and you won’t be able to avoid all of them. Our most important value is to get long-term results while doing our work efficiently and creatively. Fools operate under different values, often pursuing short-term matters because they’re manipulated by their egos and insecurities. As a consequence, they often get nothing done. Don’t let fools annoy you or they’ll waste your time and energy. When dealing with fools, smile, tolerate them, and avoid trying to change them.

Chapter 5: Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active

As you internalize rules, your mind will become more active. When this happens, you want to look for the knowledge that suits your inclinations. Your attitude can slow you down, so try not to feel anxious or insecure, fit into the group, or get into mundane procedures you’ve learned. Instead, be bold and expand your knowledge as much as possible. Soon, you’ll be changing the rules you’ve internalized and you’ll become original.

During our childhood, we were open to new ideas. Experiences we now see as mundane gave us a sense of wonder back then. Before we mastered language, our senses took over and certain events and experiences felt intense. At the time, the world was more alive and we saw it as our playground. The author calls this quality the Original Mind. We feel nostalgia for how we used to experience the world.

Now that we’re older, we take everything for granted and we rarely challenge our beliefs. This is the Conventional Mind. What we want to do is put ourselves in situations that release us from the Conventional Mind and put us in the Original Mind. This can be achieved through games or by visiting other countries. When everything around us is odd and new, we go back to our childhood again. Masters can harness this spirit and channel it into their work and their worldview.

While the Conventional Mind passively consumes information and leads to something familiar, the Dimensional Mind is about creating something original. The Dimensional Mind has two requirements: knowledge about a specific field and the ability to use that knowledge originally. There are three steps to get there: choosing the right Creative Task, accepting Creative Strategies, and creating an environment where a breakthrough or insight can happen. We must also be aware of the Emotional Pitfalls (complacency, boredom, grandiosity) that stop our progress.

Step One: The Creative Task – Creativity isn’t something you process intellectually, but an activity that overwhelms our emotions, energy, character, and mind. Creating something meaningful takes time and effort. When you know what to focus on, you must do it wholeheartedly and ignore all setbacks and haters along the way. Your excitement and obsessiveness will show in your work and this will attract an audience. The deeper you go within yourself, the more authentic your work will be. Your job is to choose a realistic task (but an ambitious one nonetheless) and embrace uncertainty.

Step Two: Creative Strategies – Our mind tightens unless we use it. This is the case because we prefer familiarity rather than something new. Also, the more we focus on something, the fewer possibilities we entertain. With this in mind, the author suggests five strategies to loosen up the mind.

Cultivate negative capability: suppress your ego and experience events without judgment. The ability to embrace uncertainty is called Negative Capability and it’s what gives creative power to Master. When you’re constantly looking for evidence that supports your beliefs, you’re experiencing confirmation bias and you must avoid this at all cost.
Allow for serendipity: our brain is wired to make connections. With this in mind, give your brain opportunities to do this often. The best way to do this is to let luck enter the process. When something unexpected enters our lives and we make a discovery, this is known as serendipity. You can’t force this, but you can invite it by widening your research and being open. Also, Greene suggests you keep a notebook with you to record ideas.
Alternate the mind through “the Current”: the author refers to the process that makes invisible forces visible as the Current. To do this, we see a phenomenon we can’t explain, but we start entertaining different possibilities. The more we study the phenomenon, the more we understand it. This is a long process that takes a lot of back and forth, but you’ll eventually come up with something compelling.
Alter your perspective: creativity demands looking at the same thing from different angles and noticing new things. To alter your perspective, identify the patterns your mind falls into and break out of them.

Step 3: The Creative Breakthrough – Tension and Insight – All masters start a project full of excitement because it connects to something personal. As they progress, their concept grows and the masters’ focus narrows which leads to a sense of frustration because they’re not happy with the results. But there’s a purpose to this. The solution the Masters seek comes to them. This is often the case because distancing yourself from your project helps you look at it objectively. The points of maximum tension lead to enlightenment. To help you achieve this, create your own deadlines and you’ll come up with ideas more often.

The six most common emotional pitfalls we succumb to are:

Complacency: skepticism and cynicism don’t lead to interesting questions. Don’t take the ideas you’ve learned and developed for granted because they represent how much you’ve progressed. Follow your sense of wonder and see the world around you as intriguing and mysterious.
Conservatism: don’t fall in love with your way of doing things. Be bold and rebellious. Getting too comfortable with your ideas is the opposite of creativity.
Dependency: don’t rely on other people’s approval or judgments. Work hard and then become independent. Past a certain point, the role of your mentor isn’t that important, so internalize their voice and become both teacher and student.
Impatience: this is the quality everyone deals with. As a consequence, it will make you less energetic and more repetitive. Impatience leads to mediocre results.
Grandiosity: don’t believe in success or praise because they can harm you. Joy must come from the creative process, not from the attention you get from it. When you see that your ego is taking over, think about the people who are better than you and how luck played a role in your success. Ultimately, people’s attention is a distraction.
Inflexibility: be willing to understand your field deeply, but also question its assumptions. This is the paradox of creativity and it involves changing attitudes to have ideas.

Strategies for the Creative-Active Phase

The author introduces nine strategies to learn about the creative process.

The Authentic Voice: finding your voice is difficult because you can’t put it into words. You’re expressing something about yourself in your unique style. It isn’t about letting loose, it’s about using a specific form to convey your individuality. Before you can do this, you must spend years learning as much as possible. Eventually, you’ll be able to combine ideas in unconventional ways. This is your authentic voice. You’re expressing primal emotions deep within yourself and connecting with your audience.
The Fact of Great Yield: there are two kinds of animals, specialists and opportunists. Specialists have a dominant skill that lets them survive and when they’re not hunting, they can relax. Opportunists have no such specialty, so they have to rely on their environment to find opportunities. Humans are opportunists, so we’re constantly looking for possibilities around us. We shouldn’t start with a broad goal but look for the fact of great yield. This is an anomaly that grabs your attention and you’re open to see where it takes you. As you do research, you should look for deep ramifications or dead ends.
Mechanical Intelligence: thinking in abstract terms can only get you so far. Mechanical intelligence, on the other hand, is the source of our reasoning and creativity and that makes it extremely valuable. Mechanical intelligence encourages you to try everything yourself. The result will be elegant, simple, and better than the sum of its parts.
Natural Powers: No one teaches us to be creative, so our first creative pursuits are often unsuccessful. That said, we can learn from other people and find principles we can apply to any field. First, the initial period should be open-ended which means you can wonder and dream as long as you want. Second, know your field well, as well as other fields to make connections. Third, embrace the inevitable obstacles. Finally, accept the fact that the project might take months or years.
The Open Field: over time, a sense of decay affects all professions. People often follow this paradigm without question until someone comes along and revolutionizes everything. Then, the cycle starts again. Creative people have a big opportunity when something becomes a cliche because they can express something unique about themselves and start a new trend.
The High End: there’s a term called technical lock that refers to a mindset that sees every problem as something where you can use the same strategies. Your job isn’t to focus on small details, but on the larger picture where you’ll be able to look at things from a different perspective. Whenever you run into problems, think about the goal that motivated you in the first place.
The Evolutionary Hijack: creativity isn’t a linear process that goes from conception to refinement. Creativity is messy and in a way, it resembles evolutionary hijacking. These are accidents in evolution that changed everything. With this in mind, find opportunities around you, as well as serendipity.
Dimensional Thinking: when trying to solve a problem for external reasons (such as money, power, fame, or attention), you might approach it coldly. When fueled by genuine interest and love for the area you’re studying, you pursue it for internal reasons (such as trying to find the truth). For this purpose, avoid reducing complex concepts to simple formulas. Study the object in question from different angles and make as many connections as possible. Soon, the truth will reveal itself before you.
Alchemical Creativity and the Unconscious: cultural conventions often come in the form of opposites. Seeing the world this way gives us comfort, but life is more complex than that. Thinking in binary terms prevents us from accepting a third option, so we suffocate our creativity.

Chapter 6: Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational: Mastery

When you achieve mastery, you’ll have access to a higher form of intelligence that changes your worldview and lets you predict trends. To get there, we must dedicate ourselves completely to the field and this process might take years.

After years of immersion, Masters feel as if their intellectual powers are possessed. This high-level intuition is different than rational thinking. Rational thinking involves evaluating a situation to arrive at a conclusion. Masters don’t follow such a formula. As part of this relationship between two things, there’s something hidden from the naked eye. The author calls it the dynamic and it’s only visible to experts in a given field. To achieve the dynamic, you need around 20,000 hours of practice and that time has to be qualitatively rich. Spending time doing something isn’t enough. You must interact with the knowledge and make connections.

All animals have some form of instinct. We humans have grown less dependent on it because we have reasoning power. Instead, we have to replace it with intuition which lets us anticipate certain events. Achieving high-level intuition takes time and practice, but a lot of people never get there because it’s difficult and uncomfortable. Furthermore, using technology means we don’t have to rely on our brains often and our memory decays as a consequence.

All life forms started as cells that evolved into different animals. The author refers to this relationship as the ultimate reality. The human mind has two unique capabilities. It can specialize in narrow fields of knowledge where the interrelatedness of life is lost and our tendency to make connections between things.

Strategies for Attaining Mastery

You don’t have to be a genius to achieve mastery. To get there, you need time and focus. There’s an additional X factor that involves forging your unique path. With this in mind, Greene provides some examples.

Connect to your environment – Primal Powers: this involves crafting a deep connection to your environment, a primal form of mastery. Before we can achieve this, we must observe closely to identify potential signs.
Play to your strengths – Supreme Focus: you should determine what you’re good at and focus on that as soon as possible. Then, accept what you’re going to be mediocre at. When there are obstacles in your path, you can surmount them by focusing on your strengths.
Transform yourself through practice – The Fingertip Feel: our mind and body are often separated. This separation is even more apparent when we start learning something new. If we practice long enough, the skill in question becomes automatic which lets the mind focus on something else. Mastery is about fusing mind and body.
Internalize the details – The Life Force: Immerse yourself in the details and do this for its own sake. This will let you understand things inside out and this will show in your work. People will notice and feel connected to your work.
Widen your vision – The Global Perspective: having a wider and global perspective will give you an advantage. Most people can’t do this because they’re in the present moment, reacting to what’s happening now. As you practice, enlarge your perspective by thinking about the purpose of your work.
Submit to the other – The Inside-out Perspective: coming to a new culture with an outsider approach makes it difficult to become part of it. The inside approach takes courage, but it’s the only path toward the truth. When dealing with other people imagine how they must feel.
Synthesize all forms of knowledge – The Universal Man/Woman: choose your unique path in life, regardless of what others expect of you. Extend your knowledge in the field of study you choose. The universal man/woman is the person who knows so much that their mind starts seeing things others can’t. This is because you know so much your brain can make connections everywhere you go. When you get to this stage, pursuing new ideas becomes its own reward.

Book Summary: Mastery by Robert Greene