By Robert Greene, a how to guide on mastering your craft.
Mastery isn't innate. It's available to anyone via persistent effort. It's available to anyone via persistent effort. Charles Darwin's younger cousin, Francis Galton had a much higher IQ. But Darwin is who we hear about today. To master a skill or field, simply follow the steps of every master that came before you.
The phases of mastery are: Discovery, Apprenticeship, Creative-Active, and Mastery. The steps are:
- Discover your field - find your inner calling. The main obstacles are boredom, impatience, fear, and confusion. You must always apply persistent effort, observing, and learning.
- Learn the foundations - start to gain fluency under an apprenticeship to learn the basics. Start with imitation. Learn from a mentor.
- Fuse the creative and the active minds - retain your creativity and excitement. Fuse it with your attained skills. Together, you'll develop your own style and ideas.
- Fuse your intuition with your rational mind - as you move from student to practitioner, you'll develop better intuition. Together with your rational mind, take on difficult projects to push yourself into mastery.
Be careful not to just follow the crowd. You have to recognize your own fascination with a field to figure out your inner calling. It's better to find a life's task that you're passionate about, instead of one that satisfies your ego, need for prestige, large sums of money, or your parents' goals.
Three steps to find your calling:
- Connect with your own inclinations, whatever sparks deep curiosity within you
- Look at the career path you're about to begin, can it be connected to who you are? Not just a small part of your life to pay the bills.
- Remind yourself it's going to be a very long, non-linear journey
Some tips:
- be true to yourself -- avoid a career for money/ego/parents
- commit to your life's task -- not a specific job or company
- pick a niche you can dominate in
- what were you obsessed with when you were younger?
- avoid the sunk cost fallacy
There's a lot to learn in your field. Your goal right now should be to learn the basics/foundation.
You'll usually learn as quick as possible in an apprenticeship, so seek one out. The goal is to learn, not money or prestige. Choose a place to work that offers the best possibilities of learning. As you gain enough proficiency where learning potential is diminished, move on.
Three steps for an apprenticeship:
- deep observation (passive mode) - observe rules/procedures for success
- skills acquisition (practice mode) - find out what skills are required and imitate/practice them
- experimentation (active mode) - combine your learned skills to produce solutions
Some tips:
- learning is more important than money
- always be actively learning -- via books or training
- always be curious
- trust the process -- practice takes a long time
- push yourself out of your comfort zone
- this is your time to trial and error to figure out what works best
Learning is difficult. Make it easier by finding a mentor. Mentorships are the most efficient and productive form of learning. A mentor will:
- guide you (you want to learn from their experience)
- help you use your time effectively (they know how to focus your attention and challenge you)
- be more invested in you because they see a younger version of him/herself
- be admired by you, so you'll pay much closer attention
- provide immediate/specific feedback on how you can improve
Some tips:
- seek mentors carefully based on long term plans and your life's work
- be welcoming to tough love, honest criticism -- and act on it
- learn from your mentor but develop your own style
- develop a reciprocal relationship -- teaching goes both ways
You'll have to work in a social environment, so it's a good idea to develop your Social Intelligence.
Social Intelligence means being able to see people realistically. Learn to navigate the social environment, so you can focus on acquiring skills. Remember the long journey to mastery, don't get side-tracked into distractions.
Reduce your envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsession, laziness, passive aggression.
Some tips:
- speak through your work
- craft an appropriate persona
- see yourself as others see you
- suffer fools gladly - you will encounter foolish people. See the foolishness in yourself. Accept it in others. Don't try to change them. Move on and focus on your work.
Think about the child who's excited/open-minded about their field but has no skill versus the professor who has plenty of skill but almost no more creativity/excitement. You want to maintain your original mind and combine it with your accumulated skills. That power together is the mastery.
Don't think too narrowly. Always ask if there's a better way to solve particular problems -- even though you've been training a specific way. Train yourself to make new connections.
For example, Mozart began composing his own music by fusing styles he already learned from his own mentors. He added some of his own elements. He created new music with originality.
The steps:
- after accumulating skills, avoid being conservative and doing things "how they've always been done"
- be bold, experiment, be creative
- choose a creative task (something that will maximize your skills/knowledge)
- use creative strategies to cultivate an open mind
- push through until you come up with a creative breakthrough
Tips on coming up with a creative task:
- it must be realistic, reachable but you'll have to stretch for it
- realize that the more difficult the task, the more knowledge/skills you'll attain
- let go of comfort and security, this task needs to be uncertain
Tips on cultivating an open mind via creative strategies:
- maintain openness in spirit
- engage in activities outside of work, allow for play
- seek out solutions in adjacent fields
- seek out different perspectives
You must avoid these pitfalls:
- complacency - constantly remind yourself of how little you know
- conservatism - make creativity your goal instead of comfort, you need to constantly be reaching
- dependency - your mentor/workplace is there to guide you, don't be overly dependent on them
- impatience - it takes a long time to achieve mastery, enjoy the journey
- grandiosity - public attention is a distraction, avoid developing an ego
- inflexibility - learn when to deviate from best practices
Some tips:
- master the basics to build a good foundation
- prefer great opportunities versus fixating on your specific goals
- be adaptable to new and creative opportunities
- explore
We tend to value the rational mind and ignore the intuitive mind. After many years in your field, your intuition will develop. Trust it. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. Use both.
Mastery means responding automatically in high pressure situations and also seeing the big picture. It means viewing the high strategic level but also performing perfectly at a low tactical level. And it means connecting the two automatically, through plenty of practice.
This is attained by studying a subject for years. But not only that, intense focus is required to practice the subject also. You need to learn, study, find connections and hidden laws, experience failures and setbacks, and reflect.
But don't stop there. Keep trying to extend your knowledge. Or contribute to your field's knowledge. Or try to combine masteries from multiple fields.
Some tips:
- have a growth mindset
- at a tactical level, it boils down to time and intense focus
- after attaining enough knowledge, be ready to forge your own career path -- even if it's unconventional
- connect to your environment - practice mindful observation
- play to your strengths and accept mediocrity
- transform yourself through practice - ideally deliberate practice
- internalize the details - have an honest look at your own work
- widen your vision - have a global perspective
- submit to the other - work with other people, get a sense of their perspective
- synthesize all forms of knowledge - build connections between fields and ideas. Instead of constantly consuming for entertainment, take up hobbies that enrich and exercise your mind while expanding your horizons