Mastery
Robert Greene
Summary
Robert does a great job using various examples from history how to become a master of your domain.
Rating: 4/5
Notes
The visual and the social - reasons how humans evolved from apes
All great masters in history: a youthful passion, a chance encounter to apply it and apprenticeship where they come alive
We think intellectual power is correlated with success and achievement but it’s really desire, patience, persistence and confidence
People get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions
You want to see work as part of your ‘creation’ and understand it as a journey w/ twists and turns rather than a straight line
‘You are and will be the only person in human history w/ your DNA’
Become who you are by learning who you are - Pindar
Understand your origins
To master a field, you must love the subject and feel a powerful connection to it
Occupy the perfect niche
Find a niche you can dominate and master
Avoid the false path
You are on your own and change is inevitable
Improve your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be like others
Concentrate on becoming sufficient at simple and immediate skills
Masters have a self directed apprenticeship usually lasting 5-10 years
The goal of apprenticeship is not money, fame or title: it’s about transforming your mind and character
Choose positions and places of work that have the greatest opportunity for learning
3 steps: deep observation (passive mode), skills acquisition (practice mode) and experimentation (active mode)
In the first little while, just deeply observe the rules and relationship dynamics
Our brains are highly suited for learning through mirror neurons: watching experts
Begin with one essential skill and understand that the first little bit will be tedious
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways
You should find a way to work w/ your hands
Value learning over money and everything else
Keep expanding your horizons and mingle with as many different kinds of people as possible
Feel a sense of inferiority: it gives you a hunger to learn
Trust the process: time is the magic ingredient. You just have to stay disciplined and consistent
Move toward resistance and pain
- Create a space for focus and deliberate work
Apprentice yourself in failure
Combine the ‘what’ w/ the ‘how’; things work
Move by trial and error
There are no shortcuts in apprenticeship
You need a mentor in your life that pushes you but you surpass them
To learn requires a sense of humility
You want person to person access so don’t shy away from menial tasks and keep their self interest top of mind
Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations
You must continually start over and challenge yourself
When reading people, focus your attention on how they think, not you
Learn specific knowledge - reading people and general knowledge - human behaviour
Pay less attention to people’s words but how they say it - tone, body language, look in the eye
- Look for common emotional experiences to relate to others
- Actions say more about a person’s character than words every do
- Avoid making judgements of people based on initial impressions
Seven deadly realities: envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsessiveness, laziness, flightiness and passive aggression
- Envy: be wary of those who are overly friendly. Be careful not to boast about success and use self-deprecating humour
- Conformism: reserve your most interesting thoughts for your friends. Be careful with what you say
- Rigidity: accept it in others but maintain your spirit on your own
- Self-obsessiveness: always appear to someone’s self interest. Give them something valuable in exchange for helping you
- Laziness: keep your ideas to yourself
- Flightiness: do not take people’s promises to help seriously. Rely on yourself to get things done
- Passive aggression: focus on people’s actions and what others do around them
The foundation of learning is reading
Your work is the single greatest means for expressing social intelligence
People will judge you based on your outward appearance
You will always deal with fools - people focused on short term matters
- Suffer fools globally - never let them affect you
Once you’ve learned, you will feel anxious and insecure about using your knowledge but you must push against that. Become bold
Aim to have a dimensional mind: a high level of knowledge on a subject and an openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new ways
Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. It has to come from deep within
You cannot find anything new if you are unwilling to leave the shore
Cultivate negative capability: suspend the need to judge everything you see
Allow serendipity to enter your life: spend your time doing other things
‘Chance favours only the prepared mind’ - Louis Pasteur
Keep a notebook on you all the time and record everything
Speculation is the heart and soul of human rationality, our way of connecting to reality and seeing the invisible
Alter your perspective
- Look at the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what’
- Pay greater attention to the relationship between things
- Study the details but don’t become lost in them
- Focus on what may be missing instead of what’s present
Resistance is the way to make the body stronger, same with the mind
Try and visualize concepts and ideas more
Always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read
Remind yourself how little you know and how mysterious the world is
The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience
Read info from all different fields - keep you mind completely open
Constantly remind yourself of your purpose, of your higher goal
The essential character trait in an entrepreneur is supreme tenacity
Let go of the need to create dualities for everything and look holistically
Make your years of study qualitatively rich
Every setback, failure or hardship is a seed being planted for cultivation later
Mastery is not a function of genius or talent; it is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge
Know your strengths and move with them
The person w/ the wider global perspective will always win out
‘Look wider and think further ahead’
In order to understand ppl, you must develop mirror neurons and imagine their perspective
Rich ideas come from extending your knowledge further and farther away
***
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How the World Works
Noam Chomsky
Summary
A combination of books Chomsky wrote in the 80s and 90s about America and it's role in the world. Fascinating read and insight into one of the great thinkers of the 21st century
Rating: 5/5
Notes
The US invaded Greece in 1947 and supported a horrendous war which led to 160k Greek deaths. This was the model for Vietnam and allowed American business to gain and thrive
US policies in the 3rd world consistently opposed democracies if they couldn’t be controlled as real democracies believe government should respond to the needs of their own population rather than those of US investors
US-run contra forces in the 3rd world isn’t ordering killing - it’s brutal sadistic torture (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala)
From the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 till the collapse of the communist governments in eastern europe in the 80s, it was possible to justify every US attack as defense against the Soviets
If you want a global system that’s subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can’t let pieces of it wander off. It’s clearly stated in the documents of record
The US wants ‘stability’ meaning security for the upper classes and large foreign businesses
Solid case for impeaching every American president since World War 2 either outright as war criminals or involved in serious war crimes
El Salvador and Nicaragua were not covered by the US media in the 70s when US-supported brutal torture and murder were taking place
In the early 80s, America’s friends slaughtered 10s of thousands of Guatemalans with countless others tortured and raped
After Vietnam, the major US policy goal has been to maximize repression and suffering of countries demonstrated by their violence - blocked other countries from seeking aid
The US regularly carries out or supports aggression
For most of the 20th century, the US was the dominant economic power and used economic warfare as a weapon ranging from illegal embargoes to enforcement of weak IMF rules with their military becoming pre-eminent
The US tries to avoid negotiations with countries as the US fears it will lose and other countries will be better off
When a state has huge debts, it must divert the population from what’s happening and they do this by inspiring fear of our enemies (Russia in Europe)
The real enemy of the US has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’. In America, it’s the opposite and has been for generations
‘The war on drugs’ was a manufactured media blitz by the US leadership to distract the population, increase repression in inner cities and build support for attack on civil liberties
The US government blocks international effort to seek peace (Russia and Ukraine)
Major media are large companies owned and interlinked with even larger conglomerates. The market is the advertisers and the product is audiences
The power in the US lies in the hands of people who determine investment decisions as they determine production, distribution and staff the government. They want a passive, quiescent population
The struggle of freedom is never over and requires active and sustained efforts
One important consequence of globalization is it extends the third world model to industrial nations where the average person has their jobs shipped away while the rich and elite continue to amass massive amounts of wealth
We’ve moved to an international state with the IMF, World Bank, G7 & EU, WEF where the general population doesn’t know what’s happening and it doesn’t know it doesn’t know
If the borrowing the US has done was used for constructive purposes like investment or infrastructure, the US would be better off, but it was used to enrich the rich - for consumption, financial manipulation and speculation which are all harmful
The class warfare of the last few decades has successfully weakened popular organizations leaving people to feel isolated
The US is so deeply in debt to the international financial community because of debt that they have a lock on US policy
Many of the large number of security council resolutions vetoed by the US have to do with Israeli aggression or atrocities
Invaders typically use local collaborators to run things for them by playing upon existing rivalries to get onne group to work for them against another
European wars were wars of extermination. If we were to be honest about history, we would simply describe it as barbarian invasion
There has always been racism but it developed as a leading principle of thought in the context of colonialism.
A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression
In the US, you’re not allowed to talk about the class differences, which is the real issue
When the US establishment talks about jobs, it means profits for its corporations
The elite are masters and they follow what Adam Smith said about ‘the vile maxim’ - all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else
People who aren’t owners and investors have nothing much to say in the US
Jefferson warned against banking institutions and corporations and said if they grow, aristocrats would’ve won and the revolution would’ve been lost
The ‘Free market’ is for the poor. We have a dual system - protection for the rich and market discipline for everyone else
There’s been a considerable increase in inequality and has the American society moving towards a third world model, thereby seeing increased crime and signs of social disintegration
A huge area of the media is dedicated to diverting people and making them more stupid and passive
There’s nothing individualistic about corporations who are totalitarian in nature
Free trade agreements result in reduced wages for local employees while predominantly benefiting the rich consumer while also destroying unions
Operation Paper Clip imported large number of known Nazi criminals
The American army’s counter-insurgency literature begins with an analysis of the German experience in Europe written with the co-operation of Naxi officials (instruments of statecraft - book)
US involvement in Chile with the coup in 1973 to reduce social democracy
The threat of a good empire is what the US worried about with reforms on uncontrolled capitalism
The US killed a few million people and destoryed 3 countries during the Vietnam war
A huge amount of business propaganda is to create wants
The answers to solve all these issues is to organize. Being alone you can’t do anything but if you join with other people, you can make changes
Under capitalism, investment is supposed to be as risk free as possible. No competition wants free markets - what they want is power
The government subsidizes corporations’ costs, protects them from market risks and lets them keep the profits
There’s never been much difference between the 2 business parties and the differences are disappearing
The CIA has been involved in drug running for generations (the politics of heroin book)
You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what’s really happening to them. You have to engender fear and hatred
The first world lives in a highly indoctrinated society
Neoliberalism is nothing more than the imperial formula: free markets for you and plenty of protection for me. The rich would never accept it but they’re happy to impose it on the poor
The UN does mostly what US business wants
‘Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business’ - John Devery
If people dedicate themselves to organizing and activism, we’ll gain access to broader audiences
If you extrapolate to the future, it’s very ugly but the point is it’s not inevitable. It can be changed but we can’t change things till we understand them.
***
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