Mastery

A book by Robert Green
Summarized by Brad Penney

Mastery is a 2012 book by Robert Greene, the world-famous author of “The Laws of Power” and several other best-selling books. The central idea of Mastery is to approach your life task with the mindset of a craftsperson – seeing the pursuit of excellence as something to be learned through extensive practice, persistence, and dedication. To many, viewing the acquisition of skills and knowledge as a craft may seem like an antiquated concept. It may be missing in our approach to professions; we often focus on performing well enough to get a promotion but not mastery. Greene suggests that the path to true mastery begins with an intense learning phase, followed by an active, open-minded pursuit of disparate skills and knowledge, culminating in a blend of deep understanding and intuition across multiple domains.

Greene illustrates his ideas throughout the book with biographical snippets of both “Contemporary Masters” and historical ones. He weaves in contemporary masters that the reader may not be familiar with—Yoky Matsuoka, Temple Grandin, Santiago Calatrava, and several others. This assures the reader that mastery is not a medieval concept but rather is alive and well in the 21st century. Naturally, Greene also draws examples from household names such as Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, to name a few.

Phase 1: Apprenticeship

Discover Your Calling: The Life’s Task

Greene begins with the assertion that the first step to Mastery is to look inward – the correct way to find your life’s work is to find a meaningful challenge that will continue to inspire you throughout your career. Find a pursuit that naturally inspires you, and you have some innate skill to continue to specialize in deeper areas of interest until you’ve found a niche that is so specialized you can master it.

Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

Once you’ve found the field in which you plan to pursue mastery, the next step is an apprenticeship. Greene doesn’t mean a medieval apprenticeship where you dedicate yourself to one master for 7 years, get paid little to no wages and sleep in an outbuilding. Instead, he means “spend significant time on education, skill acquisition and practice until you become reasonably skilled at your chosen craft.” The usual timeline for a medieval apprenticeship is surprisingly realistic – in any sufficiently complicated field, it takes at least 10 years to achieve high capability. Don’t rush this process – savour it, engage your growth mindset, and develop your skills.

Absorb the Master’s Power: The Mentor Dynamic

Greene strongly advocates finding a mentor to guide your growth. This is nearly impossible in the modern job market, as staying with one mentor for 10 years is almost unheard of. The spirit of this mentorship is still highly available – in each new position you acquire, find someone performing at the highest level and develop an informal mentor/mentee relationship with them. Be sure to help your mentor feel safe and secure in their superior position – don’t threaten their insecurities by being too competitive with them. Instead, be collaborative and always give plenty of credit for their contributions, even if their contribution consisted of a simple discussion pointing in the right direction. This will allow you to absorb their thought processes and find the key to their success. I advise doing this with several people at once – you won’t be nearly as burdensome on one person, and you’ll find a much broader swath of knowledge from which to learn.

See People as They Are: Social Intelligence

A key part of Greene’s strategy is to learn how to master social intelligence. He goes in-depth into the folly and eventual success of Benjamin Franklin, who at first struggled and eventually showed significant prowess in social intelligence. I couldn’t agree more – finding a way to avoid the pitfalls of petty social discord will allow much more time to devote to your life’s purpose.

Phase 2: Creative – Active

Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative

After a long and arduous apprenticeship, you’re ready to move to the next chapter of mastery. You’ve become an expert in at least one field – now it is time to explore it deeply while retaining your curiosity and growth mindset with other fields. It’s time to start looking for disparate fields that don’t have obvious connections to your body of knowledge. Exploration, with a hint of playfulness, will benefit your development, employing a growth mindset and being deeply engaged with life. It is critical to be “switched on”, paying attention to connections, never “checking out” and actively trying to disengage from life’s challenges.

Phase 3: Mastery

Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational: Mastery

A disciplined and rigorous apprenticeship followed by a lifetime of engaged growth opens the door to mastery. Greene holds the famous polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the ultimate master. As a young man, Goethe encountered some success as a writer. He then spent the rest of his life mastering social intelligence and the sciences, finally combining all his knowledge of disparate fields to create his world-famous play, Faust, considered by many as the most significant work of German literature.

Applications to the IT Industry

How does Mastery apply to the IT industry? In an ever-changing industry, is it possible to master any particular skill? To attain mastery, concentrate on the fundamentals, the first principles of IT. Don’t waste time on trends, the latest and greatest of anything. The industry moves too fast to stay on the cutting edge.

A much better approach is to follow Greene’s advice and view your career in IT as a craft. Learn the fundamentals until they’re deeply ingrained in your approach to every challenge. Become a computer networking master. Become an operating system master. Learn how these building blocks combine to build the entire internet. If you’re a software developer, consider the languages you can find. For example, Rust is shaping up to be a critical programming language and will probably be more useful in forty years than it is today. A computer science student could learn Rust and use it every day for their entire career. Find the first principles of computing, apprentice in them until you have reached the creative-active stage, and then focus on retaining your growth mindset. While this doesn’t guarantee mastery, it positions you correctly to have a fulfilling and fantastic career, and you might achieve the mastery Greene highlights in his book.

Conclusion

Interestingly, the philosophy of Mastery blends well with the other philosophical ideas that I find useful: Stoicism and Anti-Fragility. The growth mindset of mastery, coupled with the resiliency of a stoic and the resourcefulness of one pursuing anti-fragility, is a truly powerful combination. I highly recommend reading and learning Robert Greene’s lessons on Mastery. Take control of your destiny, embrace the growth mindset, and pursue excellence.