This year I’ve committed to reading one book a week.
The purpose of this blog is not to be a destination for reviews or opinions on the artistic style of the writing. I’m not here to scrutinize the use of a semicolon; nor am I here to talk about the oxford comma. I don’t much care whether the author used the hero’s journey or broke the mold by doing something daring and exciting. I could care less if the book is considered a classic or if it’s written by some illiterate sitting on the street.
The purpose of this blog is very different. I believe in something fundamental—it is in our curiosity of the world that we can find some truth about ourselves, our purpose, and put a little ounce of meaning to life.
Before this last year, I thought of myself as a decently intelligent person. I graduated from Duke University with a degree in Computer Science and landed a powerful job at a top ranking fortune 50 company. But as I’ve entered the real world, it’s been shocking the realization of how little I really know. There is so much to learn that sometimes I want to bash my head into a wall. Everything from mindset to nutrition, relationships to financial well-being. There’s a whole host of topics that I never learned growing up that I feel the need to understand better.
Because life feels so short.
And I just hope that I can do something—anything—on this planet to make a difference.
So without further ado, I present the first book of 2020: ‘Mastery’ by Robert Greene. The decision to read this book was pretty simple—if there is so much in this world that needs to be understood, then the science of learning—the art of learning how to learn—is the closest thing to a real life super power. Not to mention the fact I have been dying to read this book for a while.
Mastery’s message is quite simple: all of us have it within us the ability to become masters in the skills of our lives. On the surface, this message seems quite mundane, and perhaps overly optimistic, but if you let the message really sink in, it has profound implications. Whether it’s our financial wellbeing, our relationships, or our career, we all can achieve a level of mastery. But even more so, the path to mastery isn’t something shrouded by luck or innate talent, rather it’s a formula that’s been repeated over and over again for thousands of years.
In my next post, I plan to discuss Ray Dalio’s Principles, but to jump ahead—it’s the same and powerful idea as ‘Another one of those’. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it’s simply to say that everything has been done before. Not necessarily to the specifics of your life, but if you abstract your story, you can find hundreds of examples that follow the same pattern. Anyway, we’ll get into this later…
Robert Greene breaks down mastery into three simple steps: Apprenticeship, Creative-Active, and finally Mastery.
For example, if I wanted to learn data science, I might start by watching videos online (passive phase). From there I’ll repeat the activities in the video using the same data sets (practice phase). Finally, I’ll take the concepts I learned and apply to a new situation (experimentation).
This simple way of describing how we learn is effective, though I do wish he went further into the details of meta-learning. For example, in learning theory, there is evidence to support that skills break down into what we call component skills, which can themselves break down even further.
For example, let’s take basketball. If I wanted to become a master in basketball, what I would do is take basketball and break it down into the set of component skills: passing, dribbling, shooting, and defense. I might take dribbling and break it down further into left hand dribbling and right hand dribbling. From there I’ll practice each skill over and over again until I reach a certain level of proficiency. Then I’ll take the component skills and practice putting them together—i.e. dribbling with both left and right hands. Greene never explores this idea of component skill breakdown which I found a little disappointing.
Instead Greene focuses on finding skills that are meaningful for you as an individual, and simply devoting an ungodly amount of time to them moving through the three phases.
He says you may or may not get a mentor. Mentorship is simply someone who can help you ask the right questions, not necessarily someone who can speed up the process towards mastery.
If I can distill the learnings from Mastery into a few short steps, I would do it as follows:
- Find your life’s calling. Life’s calling is simply an interest that you help cultivate and grow. Over time it is likely to change, and the change is what enables masters to create large sweeping innovations. Don’t worry on finding the right thing to learn, instead focus on becoming a master in field of interest, and keep following that little interest wherever it takes you.
- Apprenticeship is simple, but rigorous—there are three phases: passive, practice, and experimentation. You’ll need to get near 10,000 hours before you can reap the rewards of an apprenticeship. Don’t give up.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment—rote memorization is not enough to learn a topic. You need to take the concepts you’re learning and apply them in new ways to challenge yourself.
- Mentorship is useful, but not mandatory. If you find a mentor, stick with them, but you may eventually encounter a situation that makes it hard for you to break away from them and become your own person.
Again, I would have enjoyed if Greene dived further into component skill breakdown, as well as a deeper study into how we optimize past the basic 10,000 hour rule.
Before I finish off my first blog post, I’d like to add that it’s certainly worth giving Mastery a read through. There’s a lot of content in the book I didn’t cover here, but that’s particularly because I didn’t find it useful in terms of implementation at this point in my life. I do expect, however, to return to this book a year from now and review it again.
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