Author Robert Greene
Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law (co-written with 50 Cent), has come out with a ripping new book, entitled Mastery. His soft-spoken manner belies the cool, critical eye he uses to analyse history and our society.
Mastery is split structurally into six parts, which are (roughly speaking) discovering your life’s calling, apprenticeship, mentorship, social intelligence, awakening the creative, and fusing the intuitive with the rational. Notice how the titles get longer toward the end? Yeah, it gets complicated. You didn’t think it’d be easy, did you?
But Mastery is a rewarding read for anyone who ever wished for a fresh approach to career-building. Robert Greene is a true master of the genre of historical analysis and its application in the modern age.
When I spoke to him about his reasons for writing the book, he said: “The ability to pay attention to detail, to build something from the ground up, to have a vision, to be creating a thing with a spirit, is what’s often missing.”
When that happens people fake it by creating an interesting exterior, he added.
“People find it almost offensive that you have to be like a craftsman to make something. They want us to believe that we’re all just natural geniuses and that what we spontaneously come up with on Facebook is so brilliant that it doesn’t need craftsmanship. It’s a delusion, and that’s really something I wanted to aim my heavy artillery at.”
And his aim is pretty spot-on. Reading the book, he gets inside the minds of historical figures, and concisely tells their stories from their perspective.
“I talk in the book about the whole phenomenon of empathy and mirror neurons and the peculiar ability that we humans have to think of ourselves inside the minds of other people. We take it totally for granted like it’s the air we breathe. There are no other animals that do that except primates, but we’ve taken it to a whole higher level.”
He has been obsessed with forms of intelligence that aren’t acknowledged in our culture, but that are very real and really interesting – and hard to describe.
“So I wanted to be able to try and describe it. I wanted to try and describe something that most people don’t try and describe.”
You name it, it’s in there. From Faraday to Ramachandran, from Bonaparte to Mozart, he is able to flip between the ancient and the modern seemingly without effort in his quest to reveal the inner workings of the forward thinkers of our time.
At age seven or eight Greene had his own catalytic moment.
“I had this English teacher that I really liked, and I wrote this essay. I thought it was the most brilliant thing that anybody had ever written, and he said it was the worst thing that anyone had ever written,” he recalled.
“And he said, ‘you’re writing for yourself, and you need to write for other people. You’re hearing yourself and how great it is, and you’re not thinking about the reader…’ And that was kind of a turning point for me. Ever since then I never wrote for myself. I always thought about who I’m writing to, and having a conversation with them.”
Later, Greene had only “negative mentors” through a period when he admits he was “a bit of a lost soul”. Then he had to deal with “this asshole in Hollywood” and “this guy when [he] worked in a detective agency” who all became grist for the mill of his books. None of it was wasted, through his own “apprenticeship phase”.
After that, Greene met his mentor, Joost Elffers, in Italy in 1995.
“He ended up being the producer of my first three books and he was a great kind of mentor for the business side of books, for the whole publishing and design aspect,” he said. “He taught me an awful lot, and it was a great relationship… but at a certain point, I had to kind of break away.”
Just as Greene posits it is necessary to transcend the mentor in Mastery.
You get the idea. Greene is transposing personal experiences from his own life, as he has always done, and projecting those experiences into the lives of the Greats, just as we all interpret information through the lens of our pasts.
Greene empathises with those who struggle to improve in modern western culture but he does not necessarily consider specialisation the enemy.
“It’s not really the particular side that you fall on that’s the problem, because people can specialise, and it kind of sucks the soul out of them, and they are only good at one thing, they don’t ask interesting questions,” he said.
“Or people can learn many different things, but not be a master – they’re just a dilettante. It’s really who you are. And I think that what I’m trying to say is we have a real problem with diversity, with the notion of diversity.”
I ask whether it’s really intrinsically something to do with ego. Greene is ambivalent suggesting that it’s necessary to feel a sense of pride, of ambition, and a desire to accomplish and to achieve recognition and success.
“[This] is a positive motivating factor and for people to deny that is just sort of silly. But on the other hand if you’re primarily motivated by it, getting attention, or you’re so insecure that you just need that constant feed, your work has a kind of soullessness. You’re never operating from the right starting principle which is: it has to come from within.
“You have to have an idea that’s your own, and it excites you, and that you love, and you build from there. But if it comes from the fact that you want attention or that you want people to like you, or you want to feed your ego, it’s not coming from you, it’s coming from your relationship to other people.
“[That’s] a false way to begin, and it’s going to give you lots of problems. So it’s not black or white. You need that sense of drive, uniqueness, of wanting to accomplish something, but you have to know that it’s definitely something that has to be controlled, like a horse that you tame, that you’re astride, and you have to be able to ride the horse, not be ridden by it.”
That suggests a kind of genius but Greene is more pragmatic.
“It’s just really knowing who you are – not listening to other people – doing what really satisfies you. If you do that something brilliant will come from it. You don’t have to follow a formula. You don’t have to do what other people tell you. You have to figure out what makes you tick. What makes you different and weird and special.”
Well said. But how would I know? I didn’t invent Faceb- err… iPa- err… hybrid cars…
