Mastery by Robert Greene

This is an excellent book with a treasure trove of useful guidance, but the last half of the book dragged a bit causing me to dock one star from the review. Nevertheless, the beginning of the book alone is worth the price of admission.

Greene starts out by tackling a simple, yet often overlooked concept: we each have a “life task” yet many of us deviate from this task because of pressure from family members, concerns about money, etc. We thus jump into a rat race in which we fail to make progress, ultimately finding ourselves in a job we merely tolerate and having given up on our dreams. If you are not excited to get up each morning and go to your job, then this book is for you.

Greene aptly points out that we will spend the lion’s share of our waking lives at our job. That being the case, we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the notion that our jobs are merely a hassle we endure to get to the weekends. Rather, we should engage in some soul-searching to find our life’s task: something we are naturally inclined to do, even if we weren’t being paid to do it. We are all unique, so no one can tell you your life’s task. In fact, you might not even know what your life’s task is, and Greene suggests re-examining activities from your childhood to find something that you never grew tired of doing.

Once you’ve identified what your life’s task is, it’s time to go after it. If you say, “Hey, I’m already in a career and have invested all this time” Greene’s is that you will never be truly successful and happy by doing something that isn’t your life’s task. To get ahead in any field requires massive commitments of time and energy, and you seem won’t have the motivation for this in the long haul if the path you’ve chosen isn’t your life task. But once you’ve mustered the courage to go after this life task, Greene suggests you pick an area that roughly corresponds to this interest. This job should be viewed more as a learning experience, and as you come to know the field better you’ll identify side-paths that appeal more closely to your particular interests.

After identifying your life task and jumping into a related field, the next step is to find a mentor. A good chunk of the book is dedicated toward finding the right mentor, and the information Greene provides is invaluable. Greene avoids spewing vague platitudes and gives the reader concrete direction about how to obtain a mentor, why a mentor is important, and how to interact with the mentor.

The second half of the book is where I found myself losing interest. Greene is famous for his mini-biographies of historical figures, and in his previous books he does an excellent job weaving these stories seamlessly into his life lessons. This time, however, I felt like I was reading a laundry-list of stories one after the other as I delved into the latter half of the book. I would read several pages about this person and then several pages about that person, and I wasn’t quite sure what the key takeaway was. In the previous books each chapter had a clear, succinct point, but as I wound my way toward the end of Mastery I found myself struggling to remain engaged with the material. Perhaps the best way to summarize it is this: if someone were to ask me what I took away from the first half of the book, I could launch into a long, informed discussion of the salient points; but if someone were to ask me what I took away from the second half of the book, I would have to fire up my Kindle and go back to dig up something that wasn’t useful enough for me to bother committing it to memory.

Other reviewers have mentioned that Greene forgoes his usual style of quotes in the margins, etc. and this is correct, but I found that to be less of an issue. Who cares what format he chooses for delivering information if the material is useful and engaging?

If you are not excited to get up and go to work tomorrow, if your job is just “so-so,” if you’re lacking a clear sense of purpose in your life, buy this book and take its advice seriously– it might help you make better use of the time you have to live. If you get bored with the second half of the book, just put it down and rest easy knowing that you’ve identified your life task and are going after it.

There are countless self-help books–some good, some trite. Then there are self-help books that revolutionize the genre.

Robert Greene’s Mastery is such a book. It’s Greene’s fifth book broadly tackling the art of strategy, and like all his books, it’s entertaining, educational, densely packed with biographies of powerful and interesting people, and almost completely devoid of fluff.

Greene’s overarching thesis challenges the conventional notion of “genius” as a genetic gift bestowed upon a handful of individuals–Mozart and Einstein immediately come to mind. To Greene, such a conception of genius is illusory. All “genius,” Greene contends, is acquirable, and all masters, regardless of intrinsic ability, go through roughly the same process on their path towards mastery:

1) Finding your Life’s Task. Greene argues that there’s an inner force that guides you towards what you’re “destined” to accomplish. Once you discover your Life’s Task, throw everything at it.

2) Finding an ideal apprenticeship–the time when you hone the necessary skills and acquire the discipline vital to mastery.

3) Finding the right mentor. This is the key to a fruitful apprenticeship, enabling you to absorb the master’s knowledge and power. Greene cautions that you must know when it’s time to sever ties with your mentor and craft your own path in order to prevent remaining in your mentor’s shadow indefinitely. The goal, Greene advises, it to eventually surpass your mentor.

4) Acquiring social intelligence. Social intelligence is an important theme in all of Greene’s books. Quite simply, our personal and professional advancement will invariably stall if we don’t learn to read people and deftly maneuver through the labyrinth of others’ whims, passions, and ambitions.

5) “Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active.” This stage involves expanding your knowledge to fields related to your craft, thereby challenging you to “make new associations between different ideas.” Greene believes this is a critical step to optimizing your creative output and achieving mastery.

6) Fusing the intuitive with the rational. Greene argues that Einstein’s discoveries can be as much attributed to his intuition as to his mathematical analysis grounded in pure reason. Practice and intimate knowledge of our field foster the integration of intuition with reason.

For each stage, Greene outlines concrete steps to take to achieve these goals, including approaching difficult problems from unconventional angles or altering your perspective, embracing the holistic approach–i.e. utilizing and synchronizing the full range of resources and options your environment has to offer.

One of the features that distinguishes Mastery from Greene’s two other masterpieces, 33 Strategies of War and 48 Laws of Power, is its greater focus on the biographies of contemporary masters, most of whom are not well known to the general public. Greene delves into the lives of legendary masters like Mozart, Einstein, Goethe, Darwin, and da Vinci, but also of lesser known contemporary masters like software engineer and entrepreneur Paul Graham, animal scientist and inventor Temple Grandin, and linguistic archaeologist Daniel Everett, who cracked the previously thought to be indecipherable language of the reclusive Amazonian tribe, Piraha.

Linking the human capacity for mastery to our biology and indeed, metaphysics, Greene writes in a veritably spiritual manner, making Mastery highly compelling and exceedingly motivational.

The title Mastery is fitting, since Greene is undoubtedly a master in the art of strategy. It is amusing to hear some of his detractors bemoan the “amoral” nature of his books. Amoral virtues–be it courage, prudence, or temperament–are indispensable to achieving moral ends. A strategically inept well-meaning person will likely fail to achieve any significant good, because he is ill-prepared to deal with endless obstacles that stand in his way. Whereas a person well versed in the art of strategy and equipped with the amoral virtues necessary to overcome such obstacles, has the potential to achieve noble ends.

The one area where I could quibble with Greene has to do with the age old debate over the role of nature vs. nurture. Since genetic makeup is a fixed variable outside of our control, it is perhaps pointless to dwell on its role in our development when writing a book about the concrete things we can actually do to better ourselves. Still, I wonder if Greene’s unequivocal dismissal of the traditional interpretation of genius as inherent isn’t to some extent mistaken. Regardless of how many thousands of hours Mozart spent studying his craft, is it really conceivable that any person of sound mind and body could replicate his success?

I tend to think that there is something to be said about intrinsic genius; that there are masters who are born with an uncanny and natural ability to perceive things others do not and cannot, no matter how hard they try. Nevertheless, even if Greene errors in downplaying the role DNA plays in cultivating “genius,” it in no way diminishes his strategy for acquiring mastery. Whether all of us can become the Einstein in our field makes little difference. What matters is that we can reach our maximum potential–become men and women in full–by following Greene’s blueprint.

O Livro vem muito bem embalado, em perfeito estado. Robert Greene não decepciona e este livro orienta para principios simples para o aprendizado, inspiração e determinação do seu propósito, recomendo demais!

Pedí pasta blanda, la calidad del libro es muy buena, las páginas del interior son resistentes. Venía sin el film protector, suelto en el paquete de Amazon pero llegó “bien”.
Sobre el contenido, apenas voy en el capítulo 1, pero se ve prometedor. Tiene un enfoque a la plasticidad cerebral y la psicología, por lo que está respaldado. Es mi primera vez leyendo a Robert Greene.