Mastery

by Robert Greene

  If someone like Temple Grandin, with so much against her at birth, can find her way to her Life’s Task and to mastery, it means it must be a power accessible to us all.

  Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal calling in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am…If not this vivid and sure, the call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Looking back, you sense that fate had a hand in it…. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim…. Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it…. Extraordinary people bear the better witness because they show what ordinary mortals simply can’t. We seem to have less motivation and more distraction. Yet our destiny is driven by the same universal engine. Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent….

  —JAMES HILLMAN

  II

  SUBMIT TO

  REALITY: THE IDEAL

  APPRENTICESHIP

  After your formal education, you enter the most critical phase in your life—a second, practical education known as The Apprenticeship. Every time you change careers or acquire new skills, you reenter this phase of life. The dangers are many. If you are not careful, you will succumb to insecurities, become embroiled in emotional issues and conflicts that will dominate your thoughts; you will develop fears and learning disabilities that you will carry with you throughout your life. Before it is too late you must learn the lessons and follow the path established by the greatest Masters, past and present—a kind of Ideal Apprenticeship that transcends all fields. In the process you will master the necessary skills, discipline your mind, and transform yourself into an independent thinker, prepared for the creative challenges on the way to mastery.

  THE FIRST TRANSFORMATION

  From early in his life, Charles Darwin (1809–82) felt the presence of his father bearing down on him. The father was a successful and wealthy country doctor who had high hopes for his two sons. But Charles, the youngest, seemed to be the one who was less likely to meet his expectations. He was not good at Greek and Latin, or algebra, or really anything in school. It wasn’t that he lacked ambition. It was just that learning about the world through books did not interest him. He loved the outdoors—hunting, scouring the countryside for rare breeds of beetles, collecting flower and mineral specimens. He could spend hours observing the behavior of birds and taking elaborate notes on their various differences. He had an eye for such things. But these hobbies did not add up to a career, and as he got older he could sense his father’s growing impatience. One day, his father rebuked him with words Charles would never forget: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  When Charles turned fifteen, his father decided to become more actively involved in his life. He sent him off to medical school in Edinburgh, but Charles could not stand the sight of blood and so had to drop out. Determined to find some career for him, the father then secured for his son a future position in the church as a country parson. For this Charles would be well paid, and he would have plenty of spare time to pursue his mania for collecting specimens. The only requirement for such a position was a degree from an eminent university, and so Charles was enrolled at Cambridge. Once again, he had to confront his disinterest in formal schooling. He tried his best. He developed an interest in botany and became good friends with his instructor, Professor Henslow. He worked as hard as he could, and to his father’s relief he managed, barely, to earn his Bachelor of Arts in May 1831.

  Hoping that his schooling was forever over, Charles left on a tour of the English countryside where he could indulge in all of his passions for the outdoors and forget about the future, for the time being.

  When he returned home in late August, he was surprised to see a letter waiting for him from Professor Henslow. The professor was recommending Charles for a position as an unpaid naturalist on the HMS Beagle, which was to leave in a few months on a several-year journey around the globe, surveying various coastlines. As part of his job, Charles would be in charge of collecting life and mineral specimens along the way and sending them back to England for examination. Evidently, Henslow had been impressed by the young man’s remarkable skill in collecting and identifying plant specimens.

  This offer confused Charles. He had never thought of traveling that far, let alone pursuing a career as a naturalist. Before he really had time to consider it, his father weighed in—he was dead set against his accepting the offer. Charles had never been to sea and would not take to it well. He was not a trained scientist, and lacked the discipline. Moreover, taking several years on this voyage would jeopardize the position his father had secured for him in the church.

  His father was so forceful and persuasive that Charles could not help but agree, and he decided to turn the offer down. But over the next few days he thought about this voyage and what it could be like. And the more he imagined it, the more it appealed to him. Perhaps it was the lure of adventure after leading such a sheltered childhood, or the chance to explore a possible career as a naturalist, seeing along the way almost every possible life form the planet could offer. Or maybe he needed to get away from his overbearing father and find his own way. Whatever the reason, he soon decided that he had changed his mind and wanted to accept the offer. Recruiting an uncle to his cause, he managed to get his father to give his very reluctant consent. On the eve of the ship’s departure, Charles wrote to the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy: “My second life will then commence, and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of my life.”

  The ship set sail in December of that year and almost instantly young Darwin regretted his decision. The boat was rather small and strongly buffeted by the waves. He was continually seasick and could not hold his food. His heart ached at the thought that he would not see his family for so long, and that he would have to spend so many years cooped up with all of these strangers. He developed heart palpitations and felt like he was dangerously ill. The sailors sensed his lack of seaworthiness and eyed him strangely. Captain FitzRoy proved to be a man of wildly swinging moods, suddenly turning furious over the most seemingly trivial events. He was also a religious fanatic who believed in the literal truth of the Bible; it was Darwin’s duty, FitzRoy told him, to find in South America evidence of the Flood and the creation of life as described in Genesis. Darwin felt like a fool for going against his father, and his sense of loneliness was crushing. How could he endure this cramped existence for months on end, living in close quarters with a captain who seemed half-insane?

  A few weeks into the journey, feeling somewhat desperate, he decided upon a strategy. Whenever he experienced such inner turmoil at home, what always calmed him down was to head outdoors and observe the life around him. In that way he could forget himself. This now was his world. He would observe life on board this ship, the characters of the various sailors and the captain himself, as if he were taking note of the markings of butterflies. For instance, he noticed that no one grumbled about the food or the weather or the tasks at hand. They valued stoicism. He would try to adopt such an attitude. It seemed that FitzRoy was slightly insecure and needed constant validation about his authority and high position within the navy. Darwin would supply that to no end. Slowly, he began to fit into the daily scheme of life. He even picked up some of the mannerisms of the sailors. All of this distracted him from his loneliness.

  Several months later the Beagle arrived in Brazil, and now Darwin understood why he had wanted so badly to go on this voyage.
He was completely mesmerized by the intense variety of the vegetation and wildlife—this was a naturalist’s paradise. It was not like anything he had observed or collected in England. One day on a walk through a forest, he stood to the side and witnessed the most bizarre and cruel spectacle he had ever seen: a march of tiny black ants, their columns over a hundred yards long, devouring every living thing in their path. Everywhere he turned he saw some example of the fierce struggle for survival in forests with overabundant life. In attending to his work, he quickly realized that he also faced a problem: All of the birds, the butterflies, the crabs, and the spiders he caught were so unusual. Part of his job was to choose judiciously what to send back, but how could he possibly distinguish what was worth collecting?

  He would have to expand his knowledge. Not only would he have to spend endless hours studying everything in his sight on his walks, and take copious notes, but he would have to find a way to organize all of this information, catalog all of these specimens, bring some order to his observations. It would be a herculean task, but unlike schoolwork, it excited him. These were living creatures, not vague notions in books.

  As the ship headed south along the coast, Darwin realized that there were interior parts of South America that no naturalist had yet explored. Determined to see every form of life that he could possibly find, he began a series of treks into the Pampas of Argentina, accompanied only by gauchos, collecting all kinds of unusual animal and insect specimens. Adopting the same strategy as on the ship, he observed the gauchos and their ways, fitting into their culture as if one of them. On these and other jaunts, he would brave marauding Indians, poisonous insects, and jaguars lurking in the forests. Without thinking of it, he had developed a taste for adventure that would have shocked his family and friends.

  A year into the voyage, on a beach some 400 miles south of Buenos Aires, Darwin discovered something that would set his mind to thinking for many years to come. He came upon a cliff with streaks of white amid the rock. Seeing that they were enormous bones of some sort, he began to chip away at the rock, extracting as many of these remains as possible. They were of a size and kind he had never seen before—the horns and armor of what seemed to be a giant armadillo, the huge teeth of a mastodon, and then, most surprisingly, the tooth of a horse. When the Spaniards and Portuguese had first arrived in South America there were no horses to be found, and yet this tooth was quite old and predated their arrival. He began to wonder—if such species had died off long ago, the idea of all of life being created at once and for good seemed illogical. More important, how could so many species become extinct? Could life on the planet be in a state of constant flux and development?

  Months later he was trekking through the high Andes, looking for rare geological specimens to send back. At an elevation of about 12,000 feet he discovered some fossilized seashells and deposits of marine rocks—a rather surprising find at such an altitude. As he examined them and the surrounding flora, he speculated that these mountains had once stood in the Atlantic Ocean. A series of volcanoes, thousands of years ago, must have raised them higher and higher. Instead of relics to support the stories in the Bible, he was finding evidence for something shockingly different.

  As the journey progressed, Darwin noted some obvious changes in himself. He used to find almost any kind of work boring, but now he could labor all hours of the day; in fact, with so much to explore and learn, he hated wasting a single minute of the voyage. He had cultivated an incredible eye for the flora and fauna of South America. He could identify local birds by their songs, the markings on their eggs, their manner of taking flight. All of this information he could catalog and organize in an efficient manner. More important, his whole way of thinking had changed. He would observe something, read and write about it, then develop a theory after even more observation, the theories and observations feeding off one another. Full of details about so many facets of the world he was exploring, ideas were sprouting up out of nowhere.

  In September 1835, the Beagle left the Pacific Coast of South America and headed west for the journey home. Their first stop along the way was a series of virtually unoccupied islands known as the Galápagos. The islands were famous for their wildlife, but nothing could prepare Darwin for what he would find there. Captain FitzRoy gave him one week to explore one of the islands, and then they would be on their way. From the moment he stepped on the island, Darwin realized something was different: this small speck of land was crammed with life that was not like anywhere else—thousands of black marine iguanas swarming around him, on the beach and in the shallow water; 500-pound tortoises lumbering about the shore; seals, penguins, and flightless cormorants, all cold-water creatures, inhabiting a tropical island.

  By the end of the week, he had counted twenty-six unique species of land birds on this one island alone. His jars began to fill up with the most bizarre plants, snakes, lizards, fish, and insects. Back on board the Beagle, he began to catalog and categorize the remarkable number of specimens he had collected. He was struck by the fact that almost all of them represented completely new species. He then made an even more remarkable discovery: the species differed from island to island, even though they were only some fifty miles apart. The tortoise shells had different markings, and the finches had developed different types of beaks, each designed for a specific kind of food on their particular island.

  Suddenly, as if the four years of this voyage and all of his observations had distilled in him a deeper way of thinking, a radical theory took shape in his mind: These islands, he speculated, had first been pushed up out of the water by volcanic eruptions, much like the Andes. In the beginning, there was no life to be found on them. Slowly, birds visited and deposited seeds. Various animals arrived by sea—lizards or insects floating on logs; tortoises, originally of a marine variety, swam over. Over thousands of years, each creature adapted to the food and predators that were found there, changing their shape and appearance in the process. Animals that failed to adapt died out, like the fossils of those giant creatures Darwin had unearthed in Argentina. It was a ruthless struggle for survival. Life was not created on these islands at one time and for good by some divine being. The creatures here had ever so slowly evolved to their present form. And these islands represented a microcosm of the planet itself.

  On the journey home Darwin began to develop this theory further, so revolutionary in its implications. To prove his theory would now be his life’s work.

  Finally, in October 1836, the Beagle returned to England after nearly five years at sea. Darwin hurried home, and when his father first saw him he was astonished. Physically, he had changed. His head seemed larger. His whole manner was different—a seriousness of purpose and sharpness could be read in his eyes, almost the opposite look of the lost young man who had gone to sea years before. Clearly, the voyage had transformed his son in body and spirit.

  KEYS TO MASTERY

  One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI

  In the stories of the greatest Masters, past and present, we can inevitably detect a phase in their lives in which all of their future powers were in development, like the chrysalis of a butterfly. This part of their lives—a largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years—receives little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discovery. Often in their Apprenticeship Phase, these types are not yet much different from anyone else. Under the surface, however, their minds are transforming in ways we cannot see but contain all of the seeds of their future success.

  Much of how such Masters navigate this phase comes from an intuitive grasp of what is most important and essential for their development, but in studying what they did right we can learn some invaluable lessons for ourselves. In fact, a close examination of their lives reveals a pattern that transcends their various fields, indicating a kind of Ideal Apprenticeship for mastery. And to grasp this pattern, to follow it in our own ways, we must
understand something about the very idea and necessity for passing through an apprenticeship.

  In childhood we are inculcated in culture through a long period of dependency—far longer than any other animal. During this period we learn language, writing, math, and reasoning skills, along with a few others. Much of this happens under the watchful and loving guidance of parents and teachers. As we get older, greater emphasis is placed on book learning—absorbing as much information as possible about various subjects. Such knowledge of history, science, or literature is abstract, and the process of learning largely involves passive absorption. At the end of this process (usually somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five) we are then thrust into the cold, harsh work world to fend for ourselves.

  When we emerge from the youthful state of dependency, we are not really ready to handle the transition to an entirely independent phase. We carry with us the habit of learning from books or teachers, which is largely unsuited for the practical, self-directed phase of life that comes next. We tend to be somewhat socially naïve and unprepared for the political games people play. Still uncertain as to our identity, we think that what matters in the work world is gaining attention and making friends. And these misconceptions and naïveté are brutally exposed in the light of the real world.

  If we adjust over time, we might eventually find our way; but if we make too many mistakes, we create endless problems for ourselves. We spend too much time entangled in emotional issues, and we never quite have enough detachment to reflect and learn from our experiences. The apprenticeship, by its very nature, must be conducted by each individual in his or her own way. To follow precisely the lead of others or advice from a book is self-defeating. This is the phase in life in which we finally declare our independence and establish who we are. But for this second education in our lives, so critical to our future success, there are some powerful and essential lessons that we all can benefit from, that can guide us away from common mistakes and save us valuable time.