Book: Mastery by Robert Greene. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

One of the best books I ever read.

This book goes through the life of various masters of our history. Some of them I did not know and decided to look after their life, which was a great experience as well.

If you want to be a master of something, be prepared to use a huge amount of time dealing with it and practicing. Masters don’t become what they are by just working 9-5 and watching television in their spare time. They are passionate about what they do and most of the time they don’t care about how much money it will generate for them.

In the last moments of his life, Einstein was still writing equations about his hypothesis. Champollion tried to decipher the Rosetta stone for 20 years of his life, trying multiple time and learning from it. Daniel Everett had to immerse in the life of Pirahã people for 12 years in order to understand their culture and language, which made him abandon his faith in Christianity (because of the relation between culture and religion).

These are just some of the stories from the book. This book resonated with the Einstein: His Life and Universe and with the stories I heard about Benedito de Espinoza. Masters like them had strong beliefs on what they were doing/researching and dedicated their life to it.

Some of the stories presented in the book made me think differently about how to approach problems and how to plan my life to reach my goals.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • In the past there was no information about many topics and now we have information that ancient masters could not even dream about
  • Learn who you really are is the first step
  • For ppl/Leonardo da Vinci, the end product is not what matters, but the process of building it.
  • ppl/Leonardo da Vinci: a well employed life brings a blessed death
  • You have to express your uniqueness through your work, you have a destiny to fulfill.
  • Social pressure to conform may let you down because of your uniqueness. Your parent may be a force against as well, they may want you to go to a more lucrative career path. Don’t let these forces to be strong enough or you may loose contact with your uniqueness.
  • Make your work your vocation. We spend much of our wake life there.
  • To find what you really like, you may look to your past. What do you really find interesting? What makes you wnat to know more every day?
  • ppl/Charles Darwin noticed that animals change between islands according to the habitat
  • ppl/Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gave up his family because his dad was jealous of his talent. He had to do that in order to keep growing.
  • It’s better to have a few hours of concentration than many hours of multi-tasking
  • To master is to become part of an instrument
  • 10000 hours of practice to master something
  • Apprenticeship: watch, practice, master
  • ppl/Albert Einstein found a job that was simple to do and has interesting knowledge for him. This job was mastered and could be done in 2 or 3 hours, so he will have the chance to work on his ideas.
  • Your thoughts tend to evolve to what you value the most. If it’s money, you will find a job that has the better paycheck and work hard to be worthy.
  • When learning a new thing, feel inferior like a child to absorb everything from a superior (knowledgeable) master.
  • If you’re feeling uncomfortable about something, do it often until you feel comfortable.
  • Be your own critic, push yourself to the limit and look your acts through the eyes of others.
  • It’s a good thing to fail, you just have to learn from it and improve your ideas to try again. ppl/Henry Ford failed multiple times but still got what he wanted with hard work and persistence
  • You want to learn as much skills as possible but avoiding the ones that not contribute to the career path you want. You avoid the following of just one strict career path. You know what kind of skill suits you and what to avoid at all cost.
  • If you follow just one strict career path, you may find a dead end or lay in boredom when you’re older.
  • Find a mentor and work with him. It you make you discover how to think about solving problems and the process to connect ideas to the solution. When you’re mature enough, follow your own path
  • Poor is the apprentice who does not suppress their master - ppl/Leonardo da Vinci
  • Look to the situation from the others perspective to be able to understand what they want and take advantage of it
  • The definition of fool. Thinks about the short term, ego and how they will look to the others. They don’t care about the truth but their career instead. We may have our own moments of foolishness, its natural. The best way to deal with fools is to ignore them or use their actions in your favor to accomplish long term goals and important things.
  • Choose the right task. The task that you will emotionally commit. Tasks with shallow connections with you will just drop your commitment rate and make you sad to work on it. It would be a worthless creativity expend. #needsreview
  • Think not just about what is happening, but what is missing. Why something that should have happened didn’t.
  • Don’t hurry up learn the basics (chapter 14 30 min). With the basic knowledge mastered you may use your own style to create new things, using everything you leaned in a combination to develop you brand new idea.
  • When you look back through tne years, you have to feel that it was enjoyable to work on that. It should not be a laborious work. Enjoy it, time is on your side.
  • Things do not come from nowhere, you can use something you already know and transform (or reverse it) to something completely new. People like (or get used to it with time) new things and you will get your own audience.
  • Sometimes we focus too much on the details that we forget the reason why we’re doing it, the true goal. It’s always important to keep this goal in mind. In the case of the prosthesis, the important is to make a good hand, not to make the best engineering possible for it.
  • We should exercise our brain in our spare time. Games, Music, etc. Currently, we don’t do that much, the devices do that for us.
  • Masters use intuition for many things. The amount of time working brought a lot of knowledge that is used automatically
  • Masters chose to follow their own path at a given moment in their lives. It may seem unconventional for others​but make them feel happy.
  • Mastery is just like swimming, it’s difficult to achieve when you’re creating your own resistance or swimming against the current. Know yours strengths and move with them.
  • Practice makes connections in our brains. It’s insane to try to learn something complex without many hours of practice. Practice is the way to Mastery.
  • The missionary that went to learn a new language from a tribe to convert them to Christianity reached the conclusion that his work as a missionary didn’t make sense. Convert that tribe to Christianity would destroy their culture that works perfectly for their needs, in the environment they are living in. He lost his faith in Christianity because he got to the conclusion that it’s not possible to have one faith that works for everyone.
  • When he went to the first with the tribe, he truly understood their culture. They have a language for hunting and understand every inch of the forest. By knowing the dangers and diseases of place, they don’t that that much empathy by the people because being attached generates suffering. When they see a person dying, they prefer to end their suffering as soon as possible.
  • The false self. Other people’s ideas for a society, your own ego and some other things. It tries to make you think Mastery is just for the genius, the amount of work doesn’t work the return, or that masters were just people that were in the right place in the right time.
  • When pursuing Mastery you are following your inclinations and contributing to society. To just use things other people create is selfishly.
  • Motivation is one of the things that keeps you on the path. Feel bored only keeps you down