Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene)

At the end of this term, apprentices would have to pass a master test, or produce a master work, to prove their level of skill. Once passed, they were now elevated to the rank of journeymen and could travel wherever there was work, practicing the craft.

This process of hardwiring cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain. It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours o

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid,

One of the main arguments of the time against such evolutionary theory was the nonexistence of the intermaxillary bone in humans. It exists in all lower animals in the jaw, including primates, but at the time could not be found in the human skull. This was paraded as evidence that man is separate and created by a divine force. Based on his idea tha

As part of the Coltrane phenomenon, every change he introduced into jazz was suddenly adopted as the latest trend—extended songs, larger groups, tambourines and bells, Eastern sounds, and so on. The man who had spent ten long years absorbing the styles of all forms of music and jazz now had become the trendsetter for others. Coltrane’s meteoric car

In subsequent work he was able to locate neurological damage to the part of their brains that create and control our sense of body image. This damage had occurred at birth, or very early on. This meant that the brain could create a body image in a perfectly healthy person that was highly irrational. It seemed as well that our sense of self is far m

It’s like chopping down a huge tree of immense girth. You won’t accomplish it with one swing of your axe. If you keep chopping away at it, though, and do not let up, eventually, whether it wants to or not, it will suddenly topple down. When that time comes, you could round up everyone you could find and pay them to hold the tree up, but they wouldn

Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.

THE EVOLUTION OF MASTERY For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads.

As their apprentices learned, they learned as well. Oddly enough, they discovered that what really makes successful entrepreneurs is not the nature of their idea, or the university they went to, but their actual character—their willingness to adapt their idea and take advantage of possibilities they had not first imagined. This is precisely the tra