Lessons on Mastery

in my book Mastery I discuss how you can get your life in order and find out your life's task and become a master in your career and the following is a compilation of greatest hits if you will of all those moments in which I've discussed how you can follow the path towards Mastery as laid out in this book thank you I was getting a little worried that people who were reading my books particularly young men reading power and seduction they C they were thinking that's all I need in life man I just need to be a manipulator I just need to play political games that's what success is all about and I was worried that if you don't understand how to make something what's going to be the future of mankind our bridges just going to fall down our hotels going to collapse people don't know how to make things anymore we don't know how to use our hands anymore being able to be good with people is extremely important as a social animal but perhaps higher up in the hierarchy is being able to do things to be able to have great skill and to be able to create something and know how to master a subject and to you know build something that can last that's really important and I'm feeling like because young people have this idea that everything comes quick and easy because you can click click click and things come to you that everything in life should be that way that we're we're becoming alienated from the human brain and how the human brain operates because the human brain requires time one of the most important life skills that anybody can develop is focus and concentration I know when I try and figure out an idea for a book that I'm writing and I give it an hour and then I distract and I go away I lose something but if I dig for four five hours for 10 days into this one problem like a mad man obsessed with it I get somewhere I get some truth to it I you know and Steve Jobs person that we venerate he was the master of that unfortunately the the person who ironically created the iPhone that's driving us all crazy but he would close his door leave me alone for 24 hours I'm going to think this through you don't realize the power that you have with your brain when you focus on something simple for enough time it's like a drill boring into a piece of wood you got to keep on boring and boring and boring until you get all the way through all of us are born unique and scientifically your DNA will never be replicated never happened before never will happen again this uniqueness that you had when you were born manifested Itself by certain things you were drawn to you were drawn to games strategy chess you know that you'd be like a Napoleon or you're drawn to music or you were drawn to to visual patterns or you were drawn to sports and things like that it's very Primal and it's showing something about you that's unique and I compare it to a kind of a voice that's inside of you it's a voice that you're five or six years old it's sort of saying this is what you're interested in Robert or this is what you you really like Allison and as we get older that voice tends to become drowned out by your parents who were saying go to law school be a doctor make I'm doing the Jewish parent here but or you're listening to peers who were saying you know this is the cool job you want to be a rock star and you you have no interest in being in it but you're going to do it cuz it's cool or money money is the prime thing I got to be comfortable this is a tough world to live in and that voice gets drowned out even the worst job that you were in if I had guys gotten depressed and sad and down on myself that is dead time I'm working for this man who's paying me my time is his time he owns me during those eight hours that I'm in his office it's dead I'm a dead person it's like grass that has turned brown inside right it's not been watered but if I turn a switch and I go I'm learning I'm learning about human nature I'm learning about the ugliness in people's Souls I'm learning about the ugliness in my own soul I'm learning about what I need never ever want to do in life I'm learning about how I'm going to have to quit this job very soon it's a lifetime it's green it's like it's watering it's turning Greener and Greener and Greener and Greener because I'm using it for some purpose I'm learning everything is an example for learning even flipping burgers at McDonalds you're learning about human nature you're learning about yourself so it becomes your time you own it you're not working for somebody else you're enriching yourself you own it it is your time and it's alive you're never going to have anything successful in life if you're just copying what other people are doing so you have to be willing to be original to be weird and to go out on a limb and to express your true feelings and what's really going on inside of you so if you listen too much to what other people are telling you your work will just be a pale imitation of what the latest meme is on social media they'll have no originality to it it'll die very quickly on the other hand if you just care about your own thoughts and ideas is and you have no objective voice nobody who can say this is good or bad you're just going to write like a schizophrenic like a madman so you need a balance you need people you trust in your life who can give you honest feedback and say this is good or this is crap but you also have to have confidence in your own voice and say I don't care what they're saying on social media I know this is great other people have said as well and I'm just going to be a rebel I'm just going to stand by what I say and and put it out there you can fake your way when you're in your 20s and 30s because you're young life's exciting you can make money can be sort of a motivating factor but what happens is you're less and less engaged in your work you're not connected deeply you're kind of bored you're not paying deep attention you're sort of skating by and by your late 30s it starts to catch up with you and people are coming up who are younger than you who are who are handsomer who are less expensive they replace you you're downsized you're out of a job and suddenly you don't have the skills to adapt because you didn't really follow something you were meant to follow if you spend your 20s trying to learn skill in something that connects to you deeply then things are going to happen to you by the time you reach 30 you've discovered your life's task it may not be something so specific for me it was writing and words but I didn't know what to write I tried novels I tried journalism I tried theater I tried screenwriting but you know it it gives you a direction and you try and you try and try and you know that's what you were meant for that's what you were destined for you feel connected to it you feel a love for it and so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff you're able to do it because you know in the end it'll pay rewards you'll get better and better at it and the connection is so deep that to not do it would be miserable I'm trying to to to radically shift your perspective on who you are and your whole concept of what makes you happy and fulfilled in life trying to build in this this idea that there that there is a vocation for you that you have a calling in life that it stems from something deep inside and in childhood in your early years you you're kind of in tune with this you're drawn to sports to chess to mathematics to music something draws you for me it was history and writing you can't explain it it's preverbal it's so powerful and as you get older that voice gets weaker and weaker and weaker you listen to your parents you listen to peers and you're in your 20s your 30s you don't know who you are you followed the wrong career path you're a lawyer but you don't want to be a lawyer you're lost and it gets too late to to regain it you're working really really hard on something you're creating all this all this information and in your brain all these neurop pathways are connecting and that's unconsciously but consciously nothing is happening and you're getting frustrated you've almost learned too much much you've almost thought too deeply into it and you're kind of blocked and then you step away from it for a day or something and you let go and all of those connections that are happening unconsciously now reach the conscious mind and you become aware of the perfect idea that had been there the whole time but you were blocking it by being too intense and too focused on one way of doing it right frustration is a good sign frustration is a sign that you're going to be turning the corner at some point if you give up then that that's the worst thing can happen to you the problem that most people have and believe me I know it when you're writing something or working on a project is you have no distance you have no ability to analyze your own work you think that everything you do is just golden and beautiful or you think everything you do is awful or terrible right yeah so you need you can have other people look at it and who can kind of bring you back to reality and say this is what's working this is what isn't working but often times you can't trust other people first of all maybe they don't really know maybe they're not as knowledgeable on the subject and also they might have a political axe to grind or whatever so you have to become your own critic you have to be able to see the flaws and what isn't working in your own in your own creation and sometimes you know it's very hard to do that you tend to kind of gloss over the things that aren't working I want you to think of your career path not as this sort of random thing that just sort of happens to you that you live in the moment and whatever appears you have to take or this direction or that direction the usual passive approach that a lot of people have I want you to think of your career path as actually a work of art something that you are creating that you are forging that you are making that it's not something that just happens to you Steve Jobs he's 5 years old 6 years old and he's walking down the street and he looks in a window of an electronic shop and his eyes just light up wow what are those things and it's and what's interesting is he's not just interested in electronics he's interested in how they look and their design now you can draw a line from 5-year-old Steve Jobs to 55-year-old Steve Jobs the same obsession with electronics and how they're designed and how they look and the interface between those two that voice he stayed true to there are people who lose that voice voice and then refind it later in their life and get back to their vocation and the reason is if you don't love your work you're going to burn out you're going to stop paying attention you're not going to be creative you're going to be rigid and conventional we see the book or the project that brings the money and the attention in other words we see the visible signs of opportunity and success but we are grasping being at an illusion what really allows for such dramatic changes are the things that occur on the inside of a person and are completely invisible the slow accumulation of Knowledge and Skills the incremental improvements in work habits and the ability to withstand criticism any change in people's Fortune is merely the visible manifestation of all of that deep preparation by essentially ignoring this internal invisible aspect we fail to change anything fundamental within ourselves and so in a few years time we reach our limits yet again we grow frustrated We crave change we grab at something quick and superficial and we remain prisoners forever of these recurring patterns in our lives if you look at Crafts People somebody who's building a house or an architect they can't sit there and just suddenly have it happen they have to go Brick by Brick by Brick they have to lay a foundation they have to focus on the foundation but at the same time they have an overall vision of what the house will look like so if you're only focused on the dayto day it loses a little bit of spirit so you need to allow yourself a little bit of dreaming those who are successful seem to know from age of seven or eight maybe older you know they're very in tune with what they love I compare it to a voice inside their head not literally a voice but something saying I you you really are drawn to this subject and they hear it throughout their lives for me it was it was writing and books since I was a kid anytime I deviated from that love and went into something else I just was so unhappy I knew that I wasn't doing the right thing and so it's just like this voice that keeps drawing you back to what you really really love you want to look for the job that offers you the most possibilities of learning so if you're going to go to a florish shop where there's only one other person there it's like an entrepreneur who started it and you're going to be like their right-hand man or woman and you're going to learn and the pay is half of what you could get working at the shop at some department store where they'd pay you triple take the job that pays onethird where you're going to learn the most you're going to learn about the business you're going to learn from the ground up there's going to be a level of excitement a lot of people when they're 23 they grab the job with the biggest paycheck and that's a mistake because if you go to like large firm you're kind of lost you don't have as much responsibility you suddenly have to deal with all the political games the 48 Laws of Power you're not developing skills as much you don't have as much responsibility take the job that has one half the salary but you're responsible you're going to be learning that's most important thing you can do when you're at that point in your life it's not about passion it's not about finding your passion I actually don't like that word passion it kind of makes me cringe because if you think about it passion to succeed at anything requires time and effort and boredom and tedium so let's just say a simple example you're learning to play the piano when you first sit down at the piano you have to play these really insipid Tunes it's so boring you have to learn finger exercises and scales on any instrument you have to learn scales Etc it's tedious man if you think it's got to be passion forget it you're never going to get far the thrill comes after a year of playing the piano and you get better at it better and better and now it starts coming fun then 10 years it's more fun then 20 years it's fantastic your laziness is something that has to do with you you're not connected to something deep enough you don't feel the necessity you don't feel the devil at your heels you don't feel the fact that you could very well die tomorrow that will compel you to get something done there's no necessity behind it and the human animal the way we were created is when we feel pressure we feel the necessity to get things done we can move mountains but when that pressure releases and we don't feel the need to get something done we could become incredibly lazy because there's no necessity so you have to create necessity in your life you have to create the need to get things done you have to give yourself deadlines you have to remind yourself that tomorrow everything could go kapon you could be fired you could die you could have an illness give yourselves sense of urgency that I need to get things done quickly there's a good Mentor figure and a bad Mentor figure the bad Mentor figure is that kind of father figure that wants to keep you under his or her thumb and won't let you assert your own independence and if after five or six years of being with them they won't let you go out on your own and they're oppressive and then there's the other kind of loving type that wants you to succeed and that lets you cut the ties and sort of slowly gives you more and more Independence there's a lot of in the world about do what your passion and all that and I don't believe in people just dropping their careers and becoming a rock musician or writing poetry or you have to make a living you have to be practical but let's go through a process and find out what it where you went wrong what you were meant to do and how instead of like veering suddenly to becoming a rock star while you're in law how we can kind of carve a path this direction towards music towards maybe something that is more your your what you connect to how do we now carve a path there if the idea of discipline of consistently doing an action is only associated with pain with Tedium being by yourself in a room room doing one thing over and over and over again never going to get over the mountain because it's associated with too much pain and the Brain naturally shrinks from anything that's painful so there has to be pleasure involved discipline has to have an element of pleasure consistently doing your work has to have rewards reward is the key word here so if you never feel a direct pleasurable Sensation from what discipline is giving you then it's never going to work to create something big and Lasting it's going to take time it's going to entail some pain some sacrifice and what you need to do is you need to change your whole assessment of what is pleasurable what is pleasurable is actually accomplishing something that you set out to actually reach your goals to actually take the time to make something that's meaningful to you I can tell you personally the Fulfillment that I get from writing a book even though it takes a lot of painstaking and tedious hours of work is a feeling that is so Superior Superior in pleasure to anything else in life it's like I could die tomorrow and it's okay I did what I wanted to do I said what I wanted to do I felt like I helped people and I worked on it and I gave it everything I had that is a much deeper form of pleasure and I want you to reorient your sense of pleasure to these longer term goals and not to these shorter term goals we have these romantic Notions that creativity involves being spontaneous and free and natural and that if to be creative if it requires so much work and effort that kind of spoils the effect but this is not only wrong in a general way it's also wrong scientifically because that's not how the human brain works essentially the human brain is a dual processing system information comes into the brain it is designed to compare and differentiate things that come in we hear this sound we associate it with this or we contrast it with that and that allows us to respond and be intelligent and Ral with this material that's the brain it's a dual processing system the more information that comes into the brain the more you feed it with experiences with study with research with practice the more the brain can naturally make all of these associations and connections between this and that the key factor in life is motivation is desire is the energy that you bring to it if you don't believe in yourself if you only half-heartedly are reading my books or listening to Tom or listening to me and you go yeah I kind of want to change it won't matter it won't change anything you'll just go back to your old habits because habits are very powerful you're a product of the cultural moment it's very hard to resist it it's very hard to swim against the tide of the times that we live in so if you don't have the motivation if you don't have the energy if you don't have the idea that damn it I'm going down fast if I don't turn this around you're only alive once it's you know YOLO and it goes past really fast I can tell you that is now as I get older faster than you think so you've got to be desperate you've got to tell yourself I've got to get out of this I've got to change my life I've got to swim against the tide of the times that I live in I have to change my ways because if not when I'm 32 when I'm 35 all of my hopes all of my horizons will narrow so much that it it's going to look very very Bleak you've got to find out what makes you unique what it is that you love that's completely who you are that is like your potential when you were born that thing that really nobody else can do it's a process it's not going to something that's going to a light bulb goes on in your mind but there are indications of it in your childhood when you were 16 or 17 things that you love that connect to you in a very deep emotional way it's not just suddenly quitting your job and going off and writing poetry or playing the guitar we all have to make a living we have to be practical but there are ways for adjusting your life's path so that that it matches something that excites you but if you have no connection to who you are and what makes what you really love you're going to hit that wall at 35 and life isn't going to be pretty but the other night I had dinner with Stevie Wonder it was the most amazing thing I ever seen he's absolutely I wish I had interviewed him for my book speaking of Genius you know and he's blind obviously but I was watching him he perform for us we were were there with a group of friends at his recording studio I was watching him play the piano and he's blind and he's he's improvising and it's just absolutely brilliant and amazing and as I'm seeing this I'm thinking I could see the thousands of hours he's been putting in just touching these keyboards and knowing where the where the where the keys are you know it was just mind mind blowing how amazing it was that is the power that the human brain naturally has through hours and hours and hours of effort he didn't get there because it was passion he was playing that as he was a kid hour after hour after hour after hour he had a love for the piano but it wasn't like every time he sat down it had to be passionate about it he had the patience to put up with all of the boring stuff to get anywhere in life you have to work extremely hard and you have to be disciplined if you wanted to be a great piano player there's no drug you can take there's no self-help book there's no guru you got to spend 5 years years 10 years learning it until it becomes something the second nature there are no shortcuts but if you learn that from an early age like 10 years old or whatever you see after a few years that an incredible pleasure happens where now you have Mastery of this piano and you can play things you could never play before suddenly the whole thing opens up this whole new universe and that's the Paradigm for everything meaningful in life if you learn something well if you learn a craft and you master it it can bring you a far greater pleasure than any kind of drug or any kind of going out to a party or socializing but you have to be patient and you have to not be afraid of boredom you have to not be afraid of the effort even with the success I've had with my books I'm never happy I'm I'm chronically dissatisfied I want to make the next book to sell even better I want to make it even better than the one before um there's a negative side to that because it means I can't relax I can't like say wow you sold millions of copies of this book that's an incredible achievement most books sell like 5,000 10,000 you sold over 2 million of 48 losss of power Robert give yourself a hug no I can't got to do better I got to do better I got to do better that's not good but it also means I don't rest on my Laurels it means I've got to improve the next book has to be better I have to work harder I have to think more deeply I can't relax I can't just repeat what worked in the past I'm never really totally satisfied and it's a very powerful motivating tool to continually improve and to say this Pro next project has to even be better than the last one people want their life to be free of struggle and conflict they want a smooth path in front of them when you face adversity or or things aren't going quite well you have to reassess Who You Are are you have to reassess your opinions you have to say maybe I'm not doing this the right way maybe my patterns of responding in the past aren't working out maybe there's something wrong with me how can I learn from this moment how can I get past this particular obstacle if you never have failure if you never have conflict you are never going to develop yourself in life and there are people who are studying children now in the world we're saying it's a major problem because parents are trying to Shield them from any kind of conflict in the world and children develop through kind of struggles and conflicts and friction with siblings and colleagues and even parents so inadvertently you could be creating a monster by trying to remove all kind forms of resistance and conflict so conflict is something you must welcome as a test and a challenge and a way to strengthen yourself up because life is Harsh life is difficult and if you're not tough in this world you're going to have a life of pain e

Channel: Robert Greene

Views: 103,679

Keywords: lessons in mastery, robert greene, robert greene books, mastery robert greene, the 48 laws of power, power, the art of seduction, the 33 strategies of war, the daily laws, the laws of human nature, career advice, career, advice, self motivation, motivation, inspiration, inspirational, motviational, psychology, wisdom, learning, learn, personal development, achievements, lessons, lesson, master, books, book, nonfiction, tony robbins, nonfiction books, motivational video, mastery learning

Id: yIZg3k4jU1I

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024