Book of the Month: Mastery by Robert Greene

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Did you know Albert Einstein finished near the bottom of his class in college? Or that Mozart, although a child prodigy, never composed his greatest music until he escaped his controlling father’s influence? Or that Henry Ford failed repeatedly on his first prototypes of the quadricycle? Or that the Wright brothers were among many inventors and engineers trying to build the first airplane, most of whom were much more experienced, educated, and funded?

In an ever-changing world, where wins and achievements are posted daily across social media and news feeds, it’s easy to get caught up into keeping up. I’m no different than anyone else, trying to improve and grow in multiple areas while managing change. During the journey of being a better father, teacher, writer, and real estate agent, my search has led me toward established processes, action goals, and a drive toward overcoming resistance and boredom. But while my previous book review focused on the role of deliberate practice and increasing deep work, I’m always searching for a greater understanding of the overall journey one takes from amateurism to professionalism, and eventually professional to expert.

Mastery, the best-selling book from Robert Greene, explores the process of growth, breaking down the various steps in which we improve and overcome obstacles in our quest to become better. The book, which is a meaty read, highlights the journeys of numerous successful people, including the periods when they weren’t so successful. With focused dives into the lives of known masters like Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, the Wright brothers, John Coltrane, and Henry Ford as well as lesser-known masters like Yoky Matsuoka, Martha Graham, Cesar Rodriguez, Freddie Roach, Greene establishes there is no singular path toward greatness but enough of a blueprint for others to follow.

Greene breaks the process of mastery into several steps: finding your life’s task, the apprenticeship, the creative-active phase, fusing skills and intuition, and eventually mastery, with numerous examples detailing how those before us navigated the process. One common denominator in every one of Greene’s examples is that no true master skipped steps. Each individual, even the ones we refer to as the geniuses, had to go through each phase before reaching a level at the top of their chosen field.

The first step in the process of mastery involves getting on the right track. Greene highlights masters who found their calling at different stages in their lives. The second step, the apprentice phase, takes the longest of all the phases, and involves learning from more experienced individuals or organizations. Greene breaks down the three phases of the apprenticeship into

1) Deep Observation: The Passive Mode. In the beginning, the apprentice learns by using their senses as the mentor displays the craft.

2) Skills Acquisition: The Practice Mode. The second phase is active. The apprentice learns the requisite skills and progressions with feedback from the mentor.

3) Experimentation: The Active Mode. During the apprenticeship phase, the apprentice becomes an experiential learner, gaining knowledge through trial and error, successes and failures, developing the growth mindset.

One of Greene’s examples follows Cesar Rodriguez, a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, reflecting back to his journey during the apprenticeship of becoming a fighter pilot. A successful high school football player and Citadel graduate, Rodriguez passed his flight training with ease, but when he entered flight school, he struggled initially in the unpredictable, competitive environment with other “fly boys,” highly-touted pilots with more experience and skill. As students dropped out weekly due to the high demands of the program, Rodriguez found himself near the bottom before he had to dig in and refer back to what made him a successful football player. Eventually, he finished third in his class and went on to become one of the brightest pilots in the Air Force, with three air-to-air kills in the 1990s, two away from being designated an ace.

Connecting Rodriguez’s journey to the apprenticeship phase, Greene writes:

What separates masters from others is often something surprisingly simple. Whenever we learn a skill, we frequently reach a point of frustration—what we are learning seems beyond our capabilities. Giving in to these feelings, we unconsciously quit on ourselves before we actually give up. Among the dozens of pilots in Rodriguez’s class who never made the cut, almost all of them had the same level of talent as he did. The difference is not simply a matter of determination, but more trust and faith. Many of those who succeed in life have had the experience in their youth of having mastered some skill—a sport or game, a musical instrument, a foreign language, and so on. Buried in their minds is the sensation of overcoming their frustrations and entering the cycle of accelerated returns. In moments of doubt in the present, the memory of past experiences rises to the surface. Filled with trust in the process, they trudge on well past the point at which others slow down or mentally quit.

It's during the apprenticeship phase where the rubber meets the road. We learn the value of hard work, deep focus, resilience, commitment. Most of all, we are guided by our passion for our chosen field with the assistance of others who offer their support. Eventually, every person must walk their own path, but we often share roadblocks and dead ends that force us to bust through or turn around and re-assess.

Greene believes that once we transition out of the apprenticeship phase, we enter the creative-active phase where we apply our knowledge and begin to bend and shape the rules of our professions, like Neo in The Matrix. We experiment and test boundaries, but because we are at a much more advanced stage than when we were beginners just playing around with our clay, our efforts have the potential to transform our teams, our fields, and our lives, leading us toward the point where our skills become fully immersed with our intuition and our wisdom becomes unmatched.

What makes Greene’s book so unique is the complexities of each individual and their journey toward mastery. We won’t always see ourselves in every model, but there are enough models to gather bits and pieces and utilize the information in our own journeys. Several times while reading I said, “That sounds like me” and put the book down to troubleshoot my own process. It’s both scary and reassuring to know that whatever phase we’re in, a beginner, an apprentice, or a master, trailblazers before us experienced the same. Mastery is not some golden ticket handed out a birth but something each one of us control.