Mastery

You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become — an individual, a Master.

Mastery feels like a book I've read before; a cross between Outliers and The Alchemist, and with the inclusion of so many similar biographies, I can recognise how memoirs like Bossypants, Yes, Please, and Half Empty illustrate author Robert Greene's theories about how a person moves from interest to apprenticeship to mastery in their Life Task. I didn't find anything too earth-shattering in this examination of the roots of genius/mastery – it's been covered in cliches like “Love what you do and you'll never work a day in your life” or “Do what you love and the money will follow” – but I did appreciate, through the relevant biographies of people like Albert Einstein or Temple Grandin, that “genius” is a result of hard work, and therefore, accessible to us all. Greene's pathway is:

1. Discover Your Calling/Life Task (often what most intrigued you as a child)

2. Complete the Ideal Apprenticeship (acquiring education/skills)

3. Absorb a Master's Power (no need to reinvent the wheel: find someone with the knowledge you need and learn from him until you're ready to branch out)

4. Learn Social Intelligence (I found this part weak, and especially with manipulative advice like how to feign incompetency to avoid workplace jealousies or to return passive-aggressiveness with “something equally indirect, signaling in some subtle way that messing with you will come at a price”)

5. Awaken the Creative-Active Mind (explore related fields in order to find unique connections, and therefore, your own niche)

6. Fuse the Intuitive and Rational Minds – achieve Mastery

Also intriguing is Greene's ideas about why we should pursue Mastery – and it's not about the money; indeed, the pursuit of money seems to be the antithesis of fulfilling our Life Tasks:

We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality — to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. We indulge in drugs or alcohol, or engage in dangerous sports or risky behavior, just to wake ourselves up from the sleep of our daily existence and feel a heightened sense of connection to reality. In the end, however, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this connection is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.

I found this to be an interesting read; even if I'm going to cop out and say it's too late for me to personally achieve Mastery at anything, but I did find some interesting perspectives on how to encourage my kids to pursue their own Life Tasks. Especially interesting to me were the biographical bits and how they led me to listening to some John Coltrane and watching some Martha Graham dance routines; talk about people who have fused deep intuition with decades of focussed training.

All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel with the rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. We then come to have powers that approximate the instinctive force and speed of animals, but with the added reach that our human consciousness brings us. This power is what our brains are designed to attain, and we will be naturally led to this type of intelligence if we follow our inclinations to their ultimate ends.

I ordered this book from the library after reading some list of "the most powerful books you'll ever read" or some such, and while I don't know if it would make my own personal list, it did have some serendipitous value (and even Robert Greene himself advises following serendipity).

Just Saturday night, we were over at Dan and Rudy's, and after dinner, and after quite a few cocktails, Uncle Dan started grilling Kennedy on the value of her Theater/Art History degree. He honestly wanted to know what she hopes to do with it when she's done university. Kennedy replied: act. And Dan, slurring but attempting to be a supportive voice of reason, pushed on: just what is her plan if, after five or ten years, she hasn't "made it" at acting. I piped up, "There can't be any Plan B. You can't go into something like acting with a backup plan."

"No, no," says Dan, "what I'm asking is: if you don't end up using your acting degree, then what good was it?"

Dave felt the need to get involved at this point (making sure that Kennedy's feelings weren't being hurt), and he said, "University trains you to think, to research and evaluate ideas. All education has value."

The topic was changed, and while Dave was getting a massage from Rudy last night, she wanted to make sure that Kennedy hadn't been offended by Dan's questions -- as no one in his family has graduated university, he has difficulty seeing its value if you're not pursuing medicine or law or whatnot. Dan feels lucky to (without even a high school diploma) have secured a good and stable job in the office of a steel company and he worries about his own sons and their futures; is delighted that one is apprenticing in a machine shop and the other is studying computer programming at the community college. It's understandable that Dan is focussed on practical training for concrete jobs.

Serendipity comes in with me picking up Mastery on Sunday, after this uncomfortable exchange the night before. And according to Robert Greene, Kennedy is doing exactly what she should be doing -- having identified her Life Task (expressing herself through acting), she is serving her apprenticeship. As Greene repeatedly demonstrates through the biographies of Masters, Kennedy's next stage will be crucial: will she have the fortitude to dismiss those that call for her to make a conservative and conforming choice? Will she be able to find a mentor who can teach her how to live a life on stage? And if she finds a comfortable place in that life, will Kennedy have the strength to walk away in order to find her own path; her own method of expressing what is uniquely Kennedy?

What was the exact same in Tina Fey's and Amy Poehler's and David Rakoff's memoirs mentioned above was their willingness to do very hard work and live in very uncomfortable circumstances in order to achieve Mastery. And that takes courage and an unwavering belief in oneself. Is Kennedy capable of that? On Saturday, she mentioned softly that she could always go back for a Master's in Art History and end up teaching, but wouldn't that actually be a denial of her natural gifts? I had long thought the same way as Dan -- secretly believing that a Theater Degree can always lead to law school -- until I heard something that Martha Plimpton said. She was talking about how depressed she got in her twenties when her film career seemed to be over until she suddenly realised: If you want to act, you will find ways to act. If you want to be a movie star, that involves so much luck that it is completely out of your hands. Kennedy makes jokes about being in da pictures, but if she really examined her driving force, it's about acting itself and discovering how to share what's inside her with the world; and what kind of parent wouldn't support that effort? This was a totally timely read for me and I enjoyed being able to sketch out the basic outline of the book for Kennedy (as well as tying it to her Aunt Rudy's concerns about Saturday night) before she left for school this morning.

And about my own cop out: I do think I'm too old to start at the beginning of Greene's process, but that doesn't mean that I'm not apprenticing. Every book I've ever read has been a step along my journey of self-directed education, and if the one thing I loved to do as a child was to write stories and poems and school assignments, then reading well-crafted books has been a long period of learning from Masters. If my Life Task has therefore been to write, then the past three years that I've devoted to goodreads reviews and this blog has actually been an expression of that; am I not actually on my proper path? Just as I don't think that Kennedy needs to be a movie star in order to express mastery at her Life Task, I don't need to have written a best seller in order to be on my way to mastery. What Greene has ultimately shown me is the courage that it takes -- the declaration of and single-minded pursuit of a life goal in the face of opposition -- in order to achieve Mastery; and ultimately, I don't know if I'm capable of that. (But I have written something like a thousand pages in the past three years; the apprenticeship continues.)

And a final note: When I was googling different masters from the book, I found a video of Helen Keller visiting Martha Graham's dance studio. I don't know why it brought me to tears but it must have had something to do with recognising when someone is participating in Mastery. I get that same feeling often when reading and have been known to be brought to tears by modern dance routines on So You Think You Can Dance -- what Greene describes as "connecting to reality" has always struck me as "revealing truth" and it's a thing of beauty when reality or truth is so well expressed as to be "seen" by the blind, "heard" by the deaf: