PNTV - Mastery by Robert Greene

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Mastery by Robert Greene. Mastery, Robert Greene. No subtitle necessary. Awesome book. So what do Leonardo da Vinci talk? Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall. Other extraordinary human beings. What do they all have in common? Green tells us it's mastery. It's not inborn genius or talent that differentiated them. It's their supreme tenacious effort. Supreme tenacity is one of the phrases that he uses. Their intensity throughout their lives where they clocked to 20,000 plus hours to become masters in their craft and masters of their lives. And what he says that's most exciting is the fact that each of us can achieve mastery in our own lives. The book is essentially a manual on how to go about doing that. Philosopher's note. Bunch of big ideas, five of them here. Let's take a quick look. First big idea. Your life's task. Your life's task. Capital L, capital T. Life's task. Chapter number one. He says we need to turn inward and discover our work. What makes us unique? The fifth big idea. We're going to talk about deep desire. What fires you up? What are you here to do? He says we were born with uniqueness. We have a destiny to fulfill that requires a level of introspection to understand who, who we are, what our greatest strengths are and how we can give them most fully to the world. And figuring that out in actualizing our potential is the work of our lives. Similar to what Abraham Maslow says his hierarchy of needs, the peak is to actualize. He said that wasn't a casual kind of sort of nice to have thing to achieve in our lives, to self actualize. It's a need as fundamental as our need to breathe and to eat, to protect ourselves. We need to actualize. We need to do what we're here to do. That's the first big idea. The second big idea, he also says it's a meandering path, but there's a through line in your life, a voice that's there calling you to your vocation, which literally means to be called. Right? That's your vocation. What are you here to do? Figure it out. Next step is the apprentice phase. All grade masters go through a rigorous extended apprenticeship phase. Now how they do it differs. And he gives a bunch of examples of different styles of apprenticeship from the traditional Da Vincian apprenticeship to what Charles Darwin did. Benjamin Franklin did. All these different Individuals, how it shows up for you will be different. But on the path of mastery, each of us must go through the apprentice phase. The key thing here is to humble ourselves. We're not trying to impress people during this phase. We're trying to get better. And most importantly, we're trying to master ourselves. Da Vinci, who's one of the masters he talks about again and again throughout the book, says one can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. That's what we want to master during the apprentice phase. We want to go from being distracted and impulsive and pulled in 100 different directions to disciplined and focused and able to bring our vision to life as we master our craft. So you master yourself. You master your craft during the apprentice phase. Next big idea. 20,000 hours. So everyone talks about 10,000 hours. He talks about 10,000 hours and the fact that you need to be willing to put in that level of effort for that period of time, and that when you are in the apprentice phase, you should be thinking five to 10 years. That's when I'm going to see the rewards for all the effort I'm putting in right now. Everyone wants instantaneous benefit. They want to snap their fingers, oh, I worked hard for a day or a week or a month or a year, and boom, I should have all the results that I dream of sitting there on my vision board. Right? He says, no, think five to 10 years forward. That's when you're going to benefit from the hard work you're doing right now. Right? And he says, we have this really weird, counterproductive notion in our society that I talk about all the time. Right? We think that mastery is a function of inborn talent or genius. He says it's not. It's 10,000 to 20,000 hours of effort. And he says, unfortunately, our society is so backwards that we kind of don't even want to think about 10 to 20,000 hours of work. But he says we should be unequivocally excited about that because what that means is genius level performance. Mastery performance is not reserved for the lucky few who happen to have been born with it or not. We all can attain a level of mastery that would astonish ourselves if we were willing to put in the 10,000 to 20,000 hours of effort. That's awesome. So we want to get excited and check in on how you perceive it. You're like, 10,000 or 20,000 hours. That's insane. Okay, well, what are you going to do? You're going to show up and kind of halfway go through the work that you do, or you're going to unplug and check out and distract yourself in leisure time watching more TV or entertaining yourself. Okay, that's one way to do it. Or we can get fired up and say, wow, I want to attain a level of mastery. I want to actualize my potential as I give my gifts and greatest service to the world. That fires me up. Let me go put in as many hours as I can in pursuit of that and enjoy the process. That's 20,000 hours. The fourth big idea is intensity. I just kind of referenced this in a PS in the note. I didn't even make it a big idea, but it's a big idea. And I talk a lot about in books how an author comes back to one word, often more than any other, one word, more than any other, this book unequivocally. The word that Robert Greene comes back to again and again and again as he talks about masters is intensity. Intensity. Masters are intense human beings who are willing to channel all of their energy into whatever aim, their life's task that they've chosen. They work with an intensity, they focus with an intensity. They show up with a sustained intensity that allows them to achieve levels of greatness. So own your intensity. And he says, oftentimes, when you're identifying your life's task, there's a force you need to identify within you that's there. It's in all of us, he says, and it's never too late to tap into it. But he says there's a counterforce, which is society. And we get inhibited and self conscious and think that the thing that fires us up the most is actually oftentimes the thing we're a little embarrassed about and we don't want to put out there. And the counter force to our natural force, right, that's pushing us to actualize whether it's our parents or our peers or society in general. We need to be able to have a healthy relationship and trust ourselves and allow ourselves to express who we are as we master and put in this level of effort with a high degree of sustained intensity. I love that word, good idea. Fifth big idea is deep desire, which connects us back to our life's task. He says, when you're going through all your different challenges in pursuit of your life's work, first of all, it's not going to be a straight line. It's not going to be, hey, I woke up where I thought about it and then I figured it out. It was just perfect, right? There's going to be these little zigs and zags. Emerson says if you pull yourself far enough away, you'll see basically a straight line, but when you're right in it, it's kind of zigging and zagging. It says it's like a ship that would sail from New York or Boston to London. It would zig and zag, but if you pulled back, you'd see a straight line. That's how our life's work comes about, right? But we need to tap into those deep desires within ourselves. We often want to ignore and lean into them. And he says that's not a selfish thing to dream of. Attaining Mastery says you're not doing it for the power or for the money. You're doing it because it's a divine push. There's something within you that wants to be expressed, and giving expression to that is extraordinarily important. It's not selfish. What's selfish is to limit your goals and then just to consume more than you create. That's selfish. It's the height of selfishness. He says. What we want to do is figure out who we are, what we're here to give to the world, and go give it with an intensity over an extended period of time as we master ourselves and our craft and actualize our potential in pursuit of our life's task. There you go. Mastery. Robert Green super quick look. Hope you enjoyed if you're looking to create a level of greatness in your life and you're fascinated by great biographical sketches and biographies and stories of great human beings, I think you'll really enjoy this book and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things. One our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And 2 our optimal living membership program. 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