Mastery by Robert Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book pulls together some historical examples of learning to gain Mastery by people such a Edison and summarises some of the stages from these.

• Calling – you need to identify what is your passion, not one based on circumstances or one enforced on you by someone else.
• Apprenticeship follows three phases
  • Deep Observation – where you are watching others to understand what to do
  • Practice – trying out your understanding
  • Active – pushing yourself to get feedback from peers or the public
• Strategies for apprenticeships
  • Value learning over money – the best apprenticeships might not pay (well)
  • Keep expanding your horizons – push yourself to look broadly
  • Revert to a feeling of inferiority – be open to new learnings
  • Trust the process – invest the time, gaining skills is quick
  • Move towards resistance and pain – invest the effort, gaining skills is not easy
  • Learn in failure – what can you learn from failure when they happen
  • Combine the “how” and the “what” – seek to understand the how not just what
  • Advance through trial and error – experiment, see what works and what not
• Mentors are key to you being supported through your apprenticeship
  • Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations
  • Gaze deep into the mentors mirror – we become overly optimistic with our abilities, you need a grounding to reality
  • Transfigure their ideas – it is not about copying your mentor but absorbing the relevant parts and adapting
  • Create a back-and-forth dynamic – where mentor and mentee learn from each other so that the relationship evolves as the mentee grows their own ideas
• Social intelligence
  • The seven deadly realities – envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsession, laziness, fightiness and passive aggression
  • Speak through your work – convincing people with quality work not fighting
  • Craft the appropriate persona – so that you can be consistent to listeners
  • Suffer fools gladly – don’t lower yourself to their level or fight them
• The Creative-Active
  • Creative Tasks – choose your task wisely, one which you can obsess about, engage deeply and emotionally commit
  • Creative Strategies – we like to do the same things, it’s easy for us.
    • Negative capabilities – embracing mystery and uncertainty, suspending judgement and admit that we wound up in our own ego and vanity.
    • Allow for serendipity – random external stimuli lead us to association we can not come to on our own.
    • Alternate the mind through “the current” – cycling between speculation and observation/experimentation to dig deeper resulting in a theory which explains something beyond our limited senses.
    • Alter your perspective
      • Search for the “how” not just the “what”
      • Investigate details, don’t just generalise
      • Look into anomalies
      • What is absent, not just what is present
    • Revert to primal forms of intelligence – e.g. drawings and models
  • Creative Breakthrough – sometimes we need some distance from the problem to come back with fresh ideas and perspectives
• Mastery
  • Connect to your environment
  • Play to your strengths
  • Transform yourself through practice
  • Internalise the detail
  • Widen your vision
  • Submit to others – get an inside perspective
  • Synthesize all forms of knowledge