Robert Greene on Mastery | Full Address | Oxford Union

basically writing the kind of books that I write I get to to meet and hang out with a very diverse group of people so for instance on my first book the 48 laws of power I had I got to have dinner with the ex-president of Italy signora andreotti who's perhaps the most one of the most Machiavellian politicians of our era and then I got to have lunch with leading members of the Russian Duma like Aronofsky and then for the art of seduction I got to give a talk or a dress excuse me a conference a worldwide conference of pickup artists and then I got to lecture a group of the leading figures in the erotica business on the art of seduction and then for the 33 strategies of war I got to address the counterterrorism school at West Point Academy and then later the elites of the Singapore military at the Singapore Military Command College and then for 50th law of course I got to hang out with 50-cent himself for several months but I also got to do a Sunday talk at the largest black church in Baltimore Maryland which was one of the highlights of my life and now for this book I get to meet and hang out with you the future masters of your field and of England and Europe and the world you're going to be the masters you're going to be ruling this planet in the next 10 20 years and quite frankly I from someone who came comes from the the city which is probably has the lowest IQ per capita of any place in the universe I'm talking about Los Angeles it's quite an honor for me I'm really quite almost intimidated but I'm quite humbled to be here so thank you very much for inviting me now I know I called you future masters but for the purposes of my talk tonight I want to pretend for the moment that you are my apprentices that I am your master and that I'm going to indoctrinate you in sort of the main ideas in the book of mastery but before I get to the meat of that I wanted to first sort of tell you a little bit about where this book came from so sometime back in the year 2009 this interesting thought began to stir in my brain for the previous 16 years I had been researching and immersing myself in the stories of the greatest power figures who ever lived and I had begun to notice certain patterns and a common trait that they all shared after years of practice and experience and study in their field the minds of these various figures they had reached a superior level of intelligence they could discover things about the world that were simply invisible to everyone else they had a sixth sense for trends and opportunities they could make the most surprising and creative connections between ideas and I decided I would call these people masters they had essentially mastered their field and in order to sort of explain this phenomenon of mastery to myself in the early days of thinking about it I came up with the following metaphor I'm going to share that metaphor with you and basically it goes like this when you first enter your career or the field that you're going to be pursuing it is as if you were looking up at a mountain and the top of that mountain represents the knowledge and experience you need in order to be successful or to achieve something in your field when you first begin or look up that it seems rather far away and quite intimidating but you begin to learn the rules and the practices and develop the skills that are necessary for you for your field and you make your way up this mountain your progress might be slow but as you get higher you have this sort of better perspective of what your field represents you have a firmer grasp on reality but what often happens to people somewhat sung at some point in their career is that they more they know about their field the more complicated it becomes all of a sudden new unforeseen problems arise they have to keep up with all kinds of new trends and changes in their field there's more and more and more information to absorb the further you rise up and often you have the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by this glut of information and the complexity of your field to the point where you don't really even feel like you're getting this better perspective well masters are people who because of their intense connection to what they're studying because of their love for it they actually learn faster they learn more intensely than other people and they generate this kind of momentum where they push past all of those obstacles and they reach the top of this mountain it could take ten it could take twenty years but at the top of that mountain they have perfect perspective they can see in all directions they have a real solid grasp on their field they can they can make connections between an idea over here and an idea over there that you can't see when you're partway down the mountain because you don't have that kind of perspective this command of their field is immensely satisfying it is even godlike and I am saying that this is the highest form of intelligence we humans can achieve whether it's Napoleon Bonaparte Leonardo da Vinci Steve Jobs it doesn't matter now as I was thinking about this it's good kind of struck me as odd because this is such an important idea to have this kind of if this is the highest level that the human brain can reach why aren't there really any books written about this there are books but the books tend to be of one of two types they're either heavy academic books on neuroscience and how the brain works and how we learn filled with statistics and they could be interesting but it would take you years to figure out how you could possibly apply that to your to your own life on the other hand you have these kind of cheap superficial self-help books like think like Leonardo da Vinci or all this other crap and you're kind of seduced and you buy the book and there's like half of an idea in there and then you throw it away and it's on your bookshelf it doesn't design of meat there you know then there could be a book maybe like Malcolm Gladwell's outliers which is an excellent book and he talks about the whole 10,000 hour idea but it's also very hard to figure out how to apply it it's got all these things about if you're going to be a great hockey player your parents have to have been born in this decade and parts of Canada and all this other stuff is you know so and then the other thing about this subject is that our culture has all of these myths and misconceptions about this form of power we ought we think of it's a function of genetics or high IQ or a larger brain or going to a great university like Oxford so I decided I was going to write the book I was going to write a book that was going to connect everything connect all of the research and I was going to debunk all of these but I think are silly ideas that people have about genius and talent and the method I was going to use to write this book was the following I was going to read all of the books that are very academic about the science of learning and creativity and how the brain works and the evolution of the brain then I was going to read the biographies of the greatest masters in history and there were quite a few of them and then I was also going to interview nine contemporary masters from all different fields take all of that large amount of research and somehow figure out how to make a book now as I started to write this book I became more and more excited because everything's sort of falling into place and I made what I consider three important discoveries radical discoveries about the nature of mastery discovery of where it comes from the source of it how you get there the process that leads to it and the nature of creative energy and mat or high-level intuition which is sort of the endgame of mastery itself so tonight as I treating you or pretending that you're my apprentices I'm going to apprentice you in these three key ideas that I discovered and I'm going to do that through telling you the stories through taking you inside the brain of three of them I consider the greatest masters that I profile in this book so I hope you ready so all of my books have kind of iconic figures like for power was Machiavelli for war it was Napoleon the icon of this book and to me the greatest master who ever lived is Leonardo da Vinci and the thing about Leonardo da Vinci is he's sort of associated with this almost superhuman power I mean how else can you explain his achievements except for the fact that he was gifted with some kind of freakish talent well in my research and going deeply into him I found that actually it's not the case at all he's an extremely human person his his power is very explicable and not only that I believe the story of Leonardo da Vinci is insanely relevant to the year 2012 and to the future that we're all facing so let me dive right in now to a little bit to his story so da Vinci was born as the illegitimate son of this Florentine a notary who worked in Florence and as a illegitimate son he was not allowed to attend university or uh or or pursue any of the noble professions such as medicine or law so he was basically this wild unschooled child grew up in the town of Vinci and as this child who was on his own he would his most his favorite thing to do was to wander through the countryside and he would go in particular to this very sort of primitive part of the landscape or there all these rock formations and really fast moving streams and all this wildlife with swans and boars he was fascinated by this landscape it was so dramatic and one day when he was maybe eight or nine years old he snuck into his father office and he stole some paper and in those days paper was a very rare commodity and it just so happened that as a notary he had a lot of paper and he took this paper and he went into this wild part of the forest that he was so attracted to and he started to draw what he saw I started to draw flowers and animals and streams and the rocks and everything so he started to draw it now you might think well what a big that's what's what's the big deal about that but really it was an extremely peculiar thing for a young boy to do because in those days the only thing really that people drew were human figures that particularly had a religious significance to actually draw flowers and plants and landscape and rocks was something nobody did there was something peculiar already about this boy when he's 8 or 9 years old so he starts to do this a lot and he doesn't have any teachers he just draws what he sees and he gets better and better at it he gets so good that his father sees his drawings and he's completely impressed and he gets Leonardo a position as an apprentice in one of the most important studios in Florence with the artist Verrocchio's so this young 14 year old boy begins his apprenticeship and in this apprenticeship he obviously has a lot to learn and he has to sort of he's Leonardo's is sort of a rebel by nature but he has to learn to to subsume all of that and learn all the various skills and as it turns out he is by far the most diligent student in that studio he takes practice to another extreme when they have this exercise where they put a room full of chairs and they drape fabric over it and you have to practice getting the folds of fabric Leonardo would stay after the class and move lights in different places so he could capture the different angles and how the creases might be depicted with different light sources he had an obsessive personality as he goes further into this apprenticeship he starts to initiate his own exercises and experiments he starts walking through the streets of Florence and drawing the people as they're walking by and he goes into churches and into brothels and into prisons and drawing people's faces and finally he starts to even experiment in the paintings that he's supposed to do for Verrocchio's a kin those days if you were an apprentice in his studio the apprentices would draw like the dude like mostly the backgrounds of these paintings so for instance on one painting it was Leonardo's job to paint the flowerbed in the front and then this one kneeling angel and he did something totally peculiar first of all he drew that flowerbed just as he drew those plants near the town of Vinci in this totally scientific realistic fashion that nobody painted back in those days and the other thing he did was with the angel he decided that he would be the first person to paint realistic angel wings so he went to the marketplace and he purchased all of these birds and he sat there for hours drawing the wings of the birds then he would let the birds go free and finally he did paint wings that really literally look like they grew out of the back of the angel oh and then after that of course now that he learned about birds he kind of became obsessed with birds and he went in and started studying aviation which led him to want to learn how to fly to building a flying machine his his mind kind of worked like that now after he leaves for rocío studio leonardo continues to be this weirdo the the path for an artist normally was quite a servile one you were basically a hired hand some aristocrat would Commission you to do a portrait of of the mistress or the Queen or whomever and you were sort of at their mercy and they were notoriously lacks in paying ewis it was a pretty demeaning job at times and Leonardo hated any kind of rules or lack of control so he devised a completely novel career path he decided to immerse himself in the study of engineering civil and military engineering G in hydraulics and all sorts of sciences and architecture in painting as well in sculpture and basically if you wanted Leonardo to work for you you had to hire him as someone who was a part of your court and he would have almost like a yearly stipend to be part of your court and then he would do all of these different activities for you and later on he actually got this position with the Duke of Milan and the King of France now if we could if you could go inside of this this man's brain for a moment you would see that this is someone with this incredible willfulness everything he touches he turns into his own thing and he himself called himself not an artist he said that he was an inventor that's what he wanted to do he wanted to constantly invent something new and in fact he ended up inventing some incredibly futuristic devices such as doors that would open and close automatically in a roasting spit that would turn on its own and lamps with adjustable intensity things that were quite astonishing for that day but he also applied that to his artwork with it in incredibly realistic style that is also very disturbing a couple days ago I went to the National Gallery and I saw the one painting of his that really is in England virgin of the rocks-- and the moment you entered the room your eyes are completely drawn to that one painting it is so different from anything else in the Renaissance it's it's so atmospheric and moody and emotional and even disturbing so you can clearly see that this was somebody different and the thing about it is is that it's not this comes from the superhuman genius at all all of that power came from the a person who simply worked harder who was so obsessed with detail that he put in all hours that nobody else would think of and in fact Leonardo's motto for his life was ostinato rigged or a which means relentless rigor this man had relentless rigor when he attacked a problem that was it and he would spend all of his hours of his life doing that now I think that he for me represents the fundamental lesson of mastery and everything else that I wrote about it and the idea goes as follows I maintain or it's I maintain it's the truth every human being is born unique each one of you was born with a DNA and a configuration of your brain that has never happened before in history and will never happen in the future this uniqueness that you have is manifested in your early years when you're a child by the fact that you're drawn towards uncertain activities it could be physical activity like a dance or sports it could be something more intellectual like like math or it could be music or it just bees as simple as a young boy who's drawn to nature and wants to capture it realistically with a piece of paper whatever it is it's a sign that you are drawn to this thing in a way that's pre verbal you can't even explain and that is the manifestation of your uniqueness and I compared this uniqueness that each one of you has to a voice that's inside of your head it's telling you you should be doing this you should be doing this it's what fits you it's what you're good at but what happens with all of us as you get older is that voice gets weaker and weaker you listen to your parents who say you need to be a doctor or a lawyer you need to worry about making money audited ah you listen to peers who are saying this is a cool job this is the kind of profession you should be going into you start thinking in terms of what really matters is I have to be comfortable I have to look for a position that's comfortable to the point where you could graduate from college you could be in your early 20s and you have no idea who you are that voice is totally drowned out and you end up going on a career path that seems right you're going to make money it's it's it's all everything's figured out and in your 20s you can kind of fake your way through it because you're young you're energetic you're smart and everything but what ends up happening as you get older is you're not so engaged with that subject you're not learning it as deeply as other people you're not really focusing as much as you can and by the 40s something very dangerous can happen you could be made redundant someone else comes along who's younger and cheaper than you and now you're pretty much screwed because you don't haven't built up the skills that you needed to build up to to adjust your career well masters like Leonardo are people who hear that voice and they hear it so strongly that they stay true to it throughout the course of their life you could draw a line from that 8-year old boy to the 60 year old 64 year old man who's on his deathbed that doesn't mean that they go they take wrong paths that sometimes the voice goes away a little bit and they try something that doesn't suit them that happens but they hear it again they find their way back to that path and they continue all the way to the end of their life what this means and I call this your vocation that voice literally means voice or your life's task this was what you were meant to do in life it's that sea that was planted at Birth in your uniqueness and it's not just some poetic concept that I'm trying to fool you with it's actually very real because what happens when you know your life's task and you pursue it in those early years of entering your field you are so deeply engaged in it you're so curious for its own sake that you pay greater attention you learn faster you enter what I call the cycle of accelerated returns when you're excited and you learn something now the practice becomes more pleasurable and you practice harder and as you practice harder it gets more pleasurable and you practice harder and harder and harder until it's like generating a motor and you have a very intense apprenticeship and by the end of your career or ten or twenty or thirty years down the line what you're able to do is so unique it is such a reflection of your individuality that you have realized that see that was planted at Berthe now I think the greatest danger that all of you face in your careers and particularly in this weird world that we're all entering that you're entering I've been in it for a while is that you're basically going to be replaceable that's the fate that most people have you learn a trade you learn it well and you reach a point where somebody younger and cheaper can do what you can do and you better believe that somebody younger and cheaper will take your place so the game of life if it is a game the end game is to be unreplaceable you're one of a kind you're original there's nobody who can replace you just as there's nobody who can replace Leonardo da Vinci there's no one else like Napoleon Bonaparte there's no one else like Steve Jobs I know these are huge figures that are that are larger than life but even in on low on smaller levels and people I deal with in the business world I can generally say that if they're masters there's nobody else that can take their place and that is the ultimate position of power in this world and that's what everybody in here should eventually aim at and the thing about Leonardo that I think is so relevant for now is that what he wanted to do what was deep inside of him his spirit it wasn't one field he didn't feel like he just wanted to do art he didn't feel like he wanted to do just science he wanted to mix all of these things into something that reflected his unique spirit which is what he wanted to do that is the fate that you have because you live in this world where with a click of a button you have access to the kind of information that would take him two or three years to begin to have access to you have the power now to pursue these many different skills acquire as many skills as you can in your 20s and combine them in a way that suits you and your uniqueness into some kind of niche a career path that that expresses this uniqueness now there's a quote this French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu of political philosopher from the 18th century that I kind of like it goes as follows we have three education x' in our life the first is from our parents the second is from our school masters and the third is from the world and the third education contradicts all that we learn from the first two and basically what it means is you go and you learn all of these skills and all these very important things in university but essentially the years that follow what I'm going to call your apprenticeship requires a different way of thinking the rules are completely different it's not the same in fact many of the things that you learn and many of the habits that you learn early in your life are actually the wrong kinds of things that you that are going to help you that you need in this path towards mastery that I'm drawing so I call this period your apprenticeship and it essentially equals your 20s although it could be a little less or a little bit more it's roughly ten years as I said a give or take a couple of years and to me the most iconic apprenticeship in the history the one that I write about in the book is that of Charles Darwin so I wanted to talk a little bit about Darwin himself I'm sorry he went to Cambridge which isn't cool around here but still is it's a great story now the thing you don't probably know about Darwin is that he was a bad student this he did not like school he didn't like learning by rote he hated memorizing things what he loved was going out in the outdoors and hunting and collecting flower specimens and rock specimens and animals and things like that and he tells the anecdote in his autobiography that I think people in his family and they made him wonder that maybe young Charles was a little bit you know crazy and it was he was out one day collecting beetles and he tore off the bark of a tree and he saw two amazing beetles that he had never seen before he grabbed one with one hand and grabbed one with the other hand and then he looked and he saw there was a third beetle one that he had never seen before but he had no place to put it so he popped one of the beetles in his mouth and grabbed the other one and as he popped it into his mouth it gave off the most noxious disgusting acrid thing and he had to spit it out and he lost all of the beetles but that's how much he loved things like collecting that he would literally I mean who else would do that like think of putting a beetle in their mouth and I imagine his family when they heard stories like that that they wondered about the son and his father was a very successful doctor who after by the time Charles was 15 he was really seriously concerned in fact he yelled at him and said all you care about is hunting and riding horses and you're going to be a disgrace to our family and so the fathers decided that he would get young Charles to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor so he sent him to the University of Edinburgh and it ended up that Charles couldn't stand the sight of blood so he had to leave Medical School and so the father decided to get him a job as a church vicar and if as a member of the church he could do all that collecting and be kind of eccentric and that would be fine but in order to get that church position he had to go to a grade school so they sent him to Cambridge now he hated Cambridge not because it's Cambridge but because he just didn't like school and he was getting barely passing grades the only subject that he did even remotely well in was botany because he liked to collect plant specimens and he got along fairly well with the professor he did his four years at Cambridge and he as I said he barely passed so that summer that he graduated he went on a tour of England doing his hunting and collecting and when he came back there was a letter from his professor of botany offering him this position to be unpaid naturalist on the boat that was sailing around the world now Charles had never thought of doing something like that it wasn't a career he was thinking of in fact his father had found him a very important position within the church and when he showed the letter to his father his father was dead set against him doing it you this is going to take several years of your life I worked so hard to get you this position you you can't do it and Charles basically agreed but then as he thought about it he thought I don't know I can't there's something inside of me that is calling me to taking this voyage I don't know why it I'm not it's an unpaid position it's a risk but I've got to do it so he went against the wishes of his father and he took the job the ship is called the HMS Beagle you might have heard and basically he leaves England and from the moment he leaves England he feels like he made a horrible mistake first of all he's never been on a ship before so he's throwing up every day left right and center he has no sea legs second of all the crew he's never been among people like this he's always grown up in a kind of a upper-class environment but students at Cambridge these are all you know hardcore proletariat sailors who were cussing and drinking and have their own stuff and he it's shocking and he feels out of place and he misses his family and he's so depressed and on top of it the captain of this ship is this sort of insane man named Robert Fitzroy who's like a Bible freak who believes that everything in the Bible is literally true and young Charles is going to go discover evidence of the flood in South America and things like eyes is a little bit crazy so entitle it so he's feeling like he's working for this madman he's among all these sailors he's missing his family's throwing up what the hell did he do but then he realizes there's nothing he can't get out of it he's signed a contract and they left Harbor and also he wants to try and fit in so he decides on the strategy he's going to act like these sailors in this environment is just like nature he's going to sit back and he is going to observe them as if they were plant and insect specimens and he's going to try his hardest to learn the rules of what it's like to be a sailor which basically means to do your job and don't complain and don't whinge and work harder than anyone else and he's going to learn how to get along with the captain and feed his ego and talk about the Bible and do all these other things and just managed fit in and be part of the group so this strategy actually works and several months later they arrived in South America and as he gets off and he walks through his first day in South America he sees the most insane thing he's ever seen in his life a group of marching ants like the width of this room and going back hundreds of yards and they're moving towards him and they're devouring every living thing in its path including these small animals and you know they don't have things like that in England so he's incredibly excited by what he's seeing in South America but now he's starting to panic in another way he realizes that none of his skills are suited for South America he'd he's learned these sort of how to collect the kinds of specimens and things that you have in England but the variety of life here is so much more intense that he has to almost basically start over he has to learn how to identify birds by their sound of their song by the color of their eggs by how they take flight and the sound that that makes on and on and on and there are hundreds of different bird species and the same for all the insects and the plants and to capture some of these animals required skills that he never had before so instead of complaining or freaking out he decides that he's slowly going to transform himself into the best collector and the thing he realizes is that this was what he was meant to do this was his life's task because it's not like school it's not like memorizing thing this is the real world and it's really exciting and the better he gets at it the more fun it is so slowly Charles Darwin transforms himself from this sort of impatient young man who hates schooling into this incredibly diligent worker and as the trip progresses he starts to amass evidence of something weird going on on this planet he sees bones in a hillside that he manages to excavate and there of animals that are thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old obviously older than anything in the Bible and so that starts him to question he's trekking through these mountains and the other thing about is he becomes this incredible adventure trekking through all parts of South America and living with Gauchos and he has like no fear he's trekking through the mountains of Peru and he sees all of these marine plants and he realizes that this high mountain in Peru used to be under water how could that have been that that also must have taken hundreds of thousands of years finally at the end of this trip he arrives at the Galapagos Islands the story that we all know and in two weeks he sees this unbelievable variety of life that so clearly tells a story that fits in with the other things that he had been discovering the theory that essentially is evolution and later natural selection it all comes to him at that point at the age of centrally twenty six years old he returns home and the first thing that happens when its father sees him he's he he goes my god your head looks larger you're not the son that left here you look completely different you look serious it's not it's not Charles Darwin who left here five years ago he never ends up leaving England for the rest of his life he spends the next 30 years in his country house essentially amassing evidence to prove the theory that he got when he was 26 on the island of Galapagos now the reason I call this an iconic apprenticeship is the following the goal of your apprenticeship is not to make money it's not to get Fame or to get attention or to get some cushy position with a nice title the goal of your apprenticeship is to literally transform yourself you enter the apprenticeship as someone who's essentially naive there's no knock of on it we all do you're essentially someone who doesn't have the skills that are necessary you're probably someone who's a little bit impatient most young people are and essentially you are going to transform all of those qualities into someone who's skilled who's realistic who understands the political nature of people who learns the rules that govern this this field and you're going to develop patience and a solid work ethic I call it reality this is reality the reality is in your field for hundreds of years people have been devising ways of success procedures these are the practices that have been passed through tradition if you want medicine would be an easy example but it pertains to any field that amount of rules and procedures represents reality and you don't have any connection to it when you first enter the field your goal is to literally submit in the deepest sense of the word you submit to this reality you recognize that you're starting over and you're going to immerse yourself in it so that eventually you're going to be the one who is actually going to rewrite those rules like all masters do you're going to calm down yourself down you're going to stanch this natural impatience this desire for fame and money you're going to transform yourself into the consummate observer of the rules and then you're going to be the one that's going to change those rules for good I say that there are these are the kinds of skills that you want first of all you don't want to choose that opening field the first one that you go into because of money or whatever you want to choose a place where you have the maximum opportunities to learn and that's what Darwin did he could have had this cushy job going into the church and he could have spent the rest of his life collecting specimens in England and we would have never heard of him instead he opted for the risky job in which it ended up he was exposed to such a wide variety of life that he was able to create I maintain the greatest discovery in the history of science which is evolution the other thing is you want to attack this apprenticeship with a completely open mind you realize that you don't have the necessary skills and knowledge so you have no preconceptions and you're open to all experiences and you're going to observe as deeply as possible the people around you learn it having the ability to observe people and figure out what they're like and be able to read them which is I maintain a critical part of the apprenticeship is a lifelong skill I call it social intelligence I devoted an entire chapter to it and it's a key element because you could be the most knowledgeable person in your field but if you don't know how to deal with people forget it the other thing is you want to accumulate and learn as many skills as possible so you want to choose a position or a place that offers you the ability to learn all of these different skills and finally you want to treat this apprenticeship like an adventure obviously you're not going on a five-year voyage around the world in the 1830s which is a lot different than than entering the careers that you are but the sense that your twenties are a time of exploring and experimenting and it's an adventure it's not like a job it's like I'm rushing to get a job and I going to get paid know you're exploring you're figuring out what you want to do you have this parameter of what we have what I call your life's task it's not this narrow thing it's a little bit wider than that and you're going to experiment and try four or five different jobs with a sense of this is an exciting experience and I'm accumulating skills I'm not accumulating money now of all of the fields that would seem to contradict what I'm talking about I think music would be the one field how else could you explain someone like a Mozart he would seem to be someone born with this natural excuse me with this genius with this IQ with this natural talent for music and of all of the forms of music the one that would be them seem to be the most exemplify this would be jazz which is so wild and spontaneous and creative but in fact I profile what I consider the greatest jazz artist of our time in the book and I believe it tells a completely different story where even music fits the path of mastery that I'm talking about and this master the final one that I'm going to introduce to you is the the great jazz artist John Coltrane now Coltrane was born to poor parents in North Carolina they were basically gospel singers in a church and he had no pronounced love of music he took up the saxophone in high school because he wanted to get in the band basically and everybody who heard him in those years said he was a completely unexceptionable player of music but then one day when he's 16 years old John Coltrane goes to a club and he hears Charlie Parker the great jazz artist perform and suddenly he's transformed this man plays the the alto sax he plays it as if it's his own voice there's something there's this connection this emotional connection is as if you're looking inside Charlie Parker's soul when he's playing and John Coltrane never even realized that music could sound like that it's so unbelievable that write that in there he discovers his life's task he's going to learn to play music like Charlie Parker but he takes a peculiar path he enters an apprenticeship of essentially 10 years that I don't think anybody ever has ever done in the history of music or in jazz basically he's going to teach himself and he starts to practice for 810 hours a day practicing so long that the reeds of the saxophone are turning red with blood and his family's going crazy and they're trying to get him out of the house he goes he teaches himself how to read music and he goes to the public library he reads the scores of classical composers and he listens to all forms of music he begins to initiate these exercises that no one had ever created before and he starts getting into some bands like Dizzy Gillespie's but he never stays in one band for more than a few months or a year he seems to want to learn as many different styles of jazz as possible when it came time for him to to do a solo which was sort of the key for any jazz artist he was not good at all he was to pastiche of all these different styles that he learned that he had no no sense of style and he didn't have any confidence but what he had done in those 10 years is he had developed the greatest technique in saxophone and perhaps in all of jazz that anyone had ever heard and that technique was so impressive that it got him a job in the Miles Davis quartet the most famous quartet of the time in 1956 so now in this quartet Coltrane slowly develops his own style he has this kind of lilting rhythm to the way he plays if you've ever heard his music it's totally unique it's kind of this hip hoppy sort of strange rhythm and he plays as if he's speaking into the saxophone almost as if you can hear his voice and it's very breathy people critics would say he didn't play notes he would create like sheets of sound after a few years he leaves Coltrane's quartet and he begins this wild series of experiments where he starts playing Broadway show tunes and East Indian music and Latin music and Negro spiritual music going from one to the other and then mixing them all together in some weird way and in 1963 he creates his most famous album probably the high the biggest selling jazz album ever called love supreme that sort of exemplifies this very strange jazz artist where they have these extended numbers and it's very spiritual where he's he's revealing his his sort of spiritual life and he's got all these new instruments etc basically he's the one who spent all of these years learning other people's styles and now he becomes the leading trendsetter in the history of jazz and jazz has never been the same after a man it also had a huge impact on on rock after that it was as if you were being transported inside him and you could feel what he was feeling at that moment now if you look at Coltrane for a moment it's really kind of interesting on this level he emerges from hearing Charlie Parker and he decides that he wants to be like that and he wants to express he these emotions that he can't express through words and if if he had tried at that moment to just simply play the saxophone expressing these emotions it would have been nonsense no it wouldn't have communicated to anybody it would be just noise he understood that instead of trying to just express himself he had to learn and command the basics of jazz so he learned one technique and mastering it he could learn another technique on and on and on and the more techniques that he learned and the more Chandra's he learned what happened was he could combine them in a completely unique way and bend them to that voice that he felt inside him and personalize this very impersonal process of learning these styles of jazz now what happens is we have the sort of wrong notion of what is creativity because basically what I'm describing to you is a highly creative person 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 doesn't 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 and we 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 rational with this material that's the brain it's a dual processing system the more information that comes into the brain 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 and if you were to look into the side the brain of a chess master or a great jazz artist or somebody who's excels at a sport or anything like that you would see in that brain all of these neural pathways that go off and on in different directions it's like this rich ecosystem and all of these different pathways can connect up that is what true creativity is and musicians for instance who don't have all of that experience and don't have all of those years of study and experience what they end up doing is merely imitating what other people have done or creating noise or just something that seems interesting in the moment but isn't really creative in the long run so the lesson that I take from from someone like Coltrane is a following you enter a career path which you've discovered your life's task more or less you found it you in your apprenticeship and you learn as deeply as you can observing the rules and the practices etc you slowly begin to experiment with these rules and then you enter a phase in the book that I call the creative active you've assimilated so much information that the brain awakens naturally with creative energy it starts to associate things and connect things that had never been connected before because you fed it with all of this stuff sometimes what happens to people they leave the apprenticeship phase and they feel like they've learned it all and they stop this process of feeding the brain experiences and it all kind of dies and they become what I call conventional I say the children are born with what we call an original mind which is a creative and a childlike way and that what happens to people as they get conventional a conventional mind that goes around in the same grooves that's what Steve Jobs called it it's like the grooves of a record you just go round and round and round this mind that I'm talking about is the dimensional mind it has vast dimensions that it can explore because you've fed it and when you enter this phase you want to keep that momentum learning more practicing more experimenting failing if you want constantly feeding it with new experiences and that creativity comes of its own because that's how the brain operates so the thing about that I'd say about Coltrane is it's clearly not genetics that made him a genius he's not doesn't come from a musical family he's not Mozart he is the most creative musician I believe of the 20th century because of the process that he went through which is a great lesson for all of us it's that you have this natural creativity and if you go through the process that I talked about it will come to you I just want to leave you with one final thing and that's this the sometimes the notion of power and mastery is seen as something a little bit ugly or selfish it's as if being ambitious and taking this path you're only thinking about yourself it's like it's egocentric and in fact I think it's the opposite and here's why I think it's actually the opposite in a in in nature we have made a recent discovery which is biodiversity and and what that means is an ecosystem that is diverse that have as many different species as possible is a much more resilient ecosystem it can withstand any kind of traumas in the climate changes etc what makes an ecosystem have this diversity is through natural selection through mutations in an animal's genetic code there suddenly appears a mutation that in some way enhances its ability to survive that mutation is then passed through the population it leads to a slight alteration in the species which can even lead to a completely new species which now has a new niche that it can live in this ecosystem and so this system feeds itself more and more and more we humans are biological but we also are cultural we've created culture which lid opens we literally can pass down the knowledge from one generation to the next and speed up this process of evolution which can take millions of years into the span of hundreds of years and in culture the equivalent of a mutation is the is your uniqueness that is what drives the diversity of a culture a culture that is diverse that has thousands millions of voices of people men women every different ethnicity feeding the system with their own unique contributions is an ecosystem that is much more resilient that is why we celebrate a period like the Renaissance because it was so diverse because there were so many different kinds of Leonardo DaVinci's and you have the good fortune of finally living in a world where there are no more barriers where power and mastery is no longer the domain of just white men where you have access to the kind of information that a DaVinci could could dream of and you live in a world with incredible problems that we are facing and so it's almost your responsibility to become a master and to bring out that uniqueness and contribute the most selfish people in the world are those who merely consume what other people have created in the past and don't contribute anything so that's sort of my ultimate message to you all and that's the end of my talk you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 501,716

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Keywords: Robert Greene Mastery, Oxford Union, Robert Greene, Mastery, Book, Author, Oxford Union Society, Master, Masters, Master of your field, knowledge, Charles Darwin, Evolution, Leonardo Di Vinci, Art, Engineering, John Coltrane, Jazz, Technique, Style, Genre, Creative Active, Creative, Genius, Unique, Individual, Full Address, Oxford University, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, sfn:Robert, sln:Greene, top:Mastery

Id: 8sYmQFPXmJA

Length: 52min 20sec (3140 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2012