This is a in-depth seminal book on the processes required to achieve Mastery of yourself and in finding your ife purpose.  Green’s breaks down the approach into six stages: 

1 Identify Your Life’s Task, your calling. When I work with clients as a coach I find this is a great place to start; so often people have rushed out into the world and taken a well paid job and ignored the voice that was so strong inside them when they were younger that knew exactly what they wanted to do but the pressure of teachers, parents and society to get a proper job meant they have lost contact with their true passion and that inevitably leads to a unfulfilling life. I often ask clients “What did you love doing when you where ten years old?” and the answer usually comes quickly, we just intrinsically know what makes us happy at that age. So now it is time to reconnect with our ten year olds self as an adult and find a way of integrating that feeling into our grown-up lives.

2 Submit to an Apprenticeship. Throughout the last few hundred years this was a key part of a persons education after school had taught you the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. You found a Mentor to instruct you in his ways and this typically took 7 years, totalling 10,000 hours of purposeful practice. Today we are all in such a hurry that apprenticeship’s have been lost from our world and so many young people today are having to try and learn in an abstract way at University or via books and online learning. So it is great to see the UK Government focusing more on directing young adults towards apprenticeships and practical real world experience instead of not just blindly sending everyone off to University to acquire academic knowledge. I particularly liked Greene’s view that you should value learning over money. There has been a lot of negative media coverage of Internships recently with the view that companies where exploiting young people but as Greene points out when your not paid money often Masters teach you more of the secrets of your chosen trade than when you are being paid.

3 Choose a Mentor – Life is too short to stumble around and make all the mistakes necessary to master a profession as well as life itself, so choose a great Mentor who has been there and made the mistakes so you don’t have to. In my role as a business coach I am aware that people often come to me as they have tried the cliches and the media distorted view of life and found it not to work as advertised and they want to try a different way. So I bring to my coaching sessions all of my learning, including the numerous mistakes I’ve made, hoping it can guide my clients towards a more effective approach to their lives.

4 Acquire Social Intelligence. As Greene points out you can be brillant at your chosen subject but if you lack the ability to get on with other people you can spend your life not only alone but fail to deliver your gift to the world if other people won’t want to work with you. When I look back on my previous career as a software developer this was a big problem for me, I was so attached to being right about a technical point that I would alienate those around me who could not understand the complexity of the issue. And so I lost out on many great opportunities because of this. As Steven Covey put it so well in 7 Habbits of Effective People,  ”Seek first to understand before being understood.“

5 The Creative Mind. Greene points out that once you have achieved a certain level of skill it is key to expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. Eventually this broader knowledge will allow you to turn against the very rules you have learned to create the new rules, the new zeitgeist. I like Greene’s acknowledgement of the power of the subconscious mind in this section, so often we give all the power to the conscious rational mind but this is a mere pocket calculator to the supercomputer, cloud computing that is the subconscious mind. Interestingly you can achieve more by taking time off from the task and allowing the subconscious to background process the problem for you while you enjoy a round of golf.

6 Mastery - Fuse the intuitive with the rational. after all the hard work, Greene identifies the phenomenon of suddenly possessing heightened intellectual powers of seeing more often refered to as Intuition or gut feeling. The key to attenining this higher level intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. Do not just simply absorb information – we must internalize it and make it our own by putting this knowledge to some practical use. This is at odds with some much of the academic learning style we force children and adults through. Reading a book on a subject is just the start, next you must embed the knowledge deep into your psyche by taking action. When I help a clients set goals for themselves, they are meaningless until they start to take action, even if they fail the goal will be far more real and effective with some effort taken in it’s cause.

Robert Greene – Video interview about his book Mastery

{ 0 comments }