Mastery

by Robert Greene

  Self-obsessiveness: In the work environment, we almost inevitably think first and foremost of ourselves. The world is a harsh and competitive place, and we must look after our own interests. Even when we act for the greater good, we are often unconsciously motivated by the desire to be liked by others and to have our image enhanced in the process. There is no shame in this. But because being self-interested does not make us feel or appear noble, many people go out of their way to disguise their self-interest. Often those who are the most self-absorbed will surround their actions with a moral or saintly aura, or will make a show of supporting all of the right causes. Confused by these appearances, when it is time to ask such people for assistance, you will often appeal to their sense of gratitude, their seemingly charitable nature, or their friendly feelings. You are then frustrated and disappointed when they politely decline to help you, or put you off long enough that you give up. Of course, they never reveal the real reason for this behavior—that there is nothing in it for themselves.

  Instead of putting yourself in this position, you must understand and accept this Deadly Reality. When it is time to ask for a favor or help, you must think first of appealing to people’s self-interest in some way. (You should apply this to everyone, no matter their level of self-obsessiveness.) You must look at the world through their eyes, getting a sense of their needs. You must give them something valuable in exchange for helping you—a return favor that will save them time, a contact they need, and so on. Sometimes the chance to look good in doing you a favor or supporting a cause will suffice, but it is generally better to find something stronger than that—some concrete benefit they can foresee coming from you in the future. In general, in your interactions with people, find a way to make the conversations revolve around them and their interests, all of which will go far to winning them to your side.

  Laziness: We all have the tendency to want to take the quickest, easiest path to our goals, but we generally manage to control our impatience; we understand the superior value of getting what we want through hard work. For some people, however, this inveterate lazy streak is far too powerful. Discouraged by the thought that it might take months or years to get somewhere, they are constantly on the lookout for shortcuts. Their laziness will assume many insidious forms. For example, if you are not careful and talk too much, they will steal your best ideas and make them their own, saving themselves all of the mental effort that went into conceiving them. They will swoop in during the middle of your project and put their name on it, gaining partial credit for your work. They will engage you in a “collaboration” in which you do the bulk of the hard work but they share equally in the rewards.

  Your best defense is your prudence. Keep your ideas to yourself, or conceal enough of the details so that it is not possible to steal them. If you are doing work for a superior, be prepared for them to take full credit and leave your name out (this is a part of everyone’s apprenticeship and must be accepted as such), but do not let this happen with colleagues. Secure your credit in advance as part of the terms of working together. If people want you to do work for them, then pass it off as a “collaborative” effort, always gauge whether such work will add to your skill base, and examine their past record to measure the intensity of their work ethic. In general, be wary of people who want to collaborate—they are often trying to find someone who will do the heavier lifting for them.

  Flightiness: We like to make a show of how much our decisions are based on rational considerations, but the truth is that we are largely governed by our emotions, which continually color our perceptions. What this means is that the people around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires. Yesterday they were in love with your idea; today they seem lukewarm. This will confuse you and if you are not careful, you will waste valuable mental space trying to figure out their real feelings, their mood of the moment, their fleeting motivations.

  It is best to cultivate both distance and a degree of detachment from other people’s shifting emotions so that you are not caught up in the process. Focus on their actions, which are generally more consistent, and not on their words. Do not take so seriously people’s promises or their ardor in wanting to help you. If they come through, so much the better, but be prepared for the more frequent change of heart. Rely upon yourself to get things done and you will not be disappointed.

  Passive Aggression: The root cause of all passive aggression is the human fear of direct confrontation—the emotions that a conflict can churn up and the loss of control that ensues. And so because of this fear some people look for indirect means for getting their way, making their attacks subtle enough so that it is hard to figure out what is going on, while giving them control of the dynamic. We are all passive-aggressive to some extent. Procrastinating on a project, showing up late, or making offhand comments designed to upset people are common forms of low-level passive aggression. When dealing with this low-level variety in others, you can call them on their behavior and make them aware of it, which can often work. Or, if it is truly harmless, simply ignore it. But there are people out there seething with insecurities who are veritable passive-aggressive warriors and can literally ruin your life.

  Your best defense is to recognize such types before you become embroiled in a battle, and avoid them like the plague. The most obvious clues come from their track record—they have a reputation, you hear stories of past skirmishes, and so on. Take a look at the people around them, such as assistants—do they act with unusual caution and terror in their presence? Sometimes you are confused because you suspect sabotage or obstruction, but they present such a friendly or benign exterior. Discard the exterior and focus only on their actions and you will have a clearer picture. If they evade you and delay necessary action on something important to you, or make you feel guilty and leave you unsure why, or if they act harmfully but make it seem like an accident, you are most likely under a passive-aggressive attack. You have one of two options: either get out of their way and leave their presence, or return the attack with something equally indirect, signaling in some subtle way that messing with you will come with a price. This will often discourage them and make them find another victim. At all cost, avoid entangling yourself emotionally in their dramas and battles. They are masters at controlling the dynamic, and you will almost always lose in the end.

  Developing social intelligence will not simply help you manage your relations with other people—acquiring it will also have an immensely beneficial effect on your ways of thinking and on your creativity in general. Look at the example of Benjamin Franklin. With people, he cultivated the ability to home in on the details that made them unique and to connect to their experience and motivations. He built up a high degree of sensitivity to the subtleties of human nature, avoiding the common tendency to lump people together. He made himself uncommonly patient and open-minded in his dealings with people from many different cultures and backgrounds. And this social intelligence of his became completely integrated into his intellectual labors—his sharp eye for detail in scientific work, his fluid manner of thinking and patient approach to tackling problems, and his uncanny way of getting into the minds and voices of the various characters he created in his writing.

  Understand: the human brain is an interconnected organ, which is in turn interconnected with our bodies. Our brains developed in tandem with our expanding powers as social primates. The refinement of mirror neurons for the purpose of better communication with people became equally applied to other forms of reasoning. The ability to think inside objects and phenomena is an integral part of scientific creativity—from Faraday’s feeling for electricity to the thought experiments of Einstein.

  In general, the greatest Masters in history—Leonardo, Mozart, Darwin, and others—displayed a fluid, sensitive way of thinking that developed along with their expanding
social intelligence. Those who are more rigidly intellectual and inward can go far in their fields, but their work often ends up lacking a creativity, an openness, and a sensitivity to detail that becomes more pronounced with time. In the end, the ability to think inside other people is no different from the intuitive feel Masters gain in relation to their field of study. To develop your intellectual powers at the expense of the social is to retard your own progress to mastery, and limit the full range of your creative powers.

  STRATEGIES FOR ACQUIRING SOCIAL

  INTELLIGENCE

  We must, however, acknowledge…that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

  —CHARLES DARWIN

  In dealing with people, you will often encounter particular problems that will tend to make you emotional and lock you into the Naïve Perspective. Such problems include unexpected political battles, superficial judgments of your character based on appearances, or petty-minded criticisms of your work. The following four essential strategies, developed by Masters past and present, will help you to meet these inevitable challenges and maintain the rational mind-set necessary for social intelligence.

  1. Speak through your work

  A. In 1846, a twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis began work as an assistant in the obstetrics department of the University of Vienna, and almost from the beginning he was a man obsessed. The great disease that plagued the maternity wards in Europe at the time was that of childbed fever. At the hospital where young Semmelweis worked, one in six mothers died of the disease shortly after giving birth. When their bodies were dissected, doctors would discover the same whitish pus that smelled horrifically, and an unusual amount of putrid flesh. Seeing the effects of the disease on almost a daily basis, Semmelweis could think of nothing else. He would devote his time to solving the riddle of its origins.

  At the time, the most common explanation for the cause of the disease revolved around the idea that airborne particles, ingested through the lungs, brought on the fever. But to Semmelweis, this made no sense. The epidemics of childbed fever did not seem to depend on weather, atmospheric conditions, or anything in the air. He noted, as did a few others, that the incidence was much higher among women who had had their babies delivered by a doctor as opposed to a midwife. Nobody could explain the reason for such a difference, and few seemed perturbed by this.

  After much thinking and studying of the literature on the subject, Semmelweis came to the startling conclusion that it was the direct, hand-to-hand contact between doctor and patient that caused the disease—a revolutionary concept at the time. As he was formulating this theory, an event occurred that seemed to prove it conclusively: A leading doctor in the department had been accidently pricked in the finger by a knife while conducting an autopsy on a woman who had had childbed fever, and the doctor died within a few days of a massive infection. When they dissected his body, he had the same white pus and putrid flesh as the woman.

  It now seemed clear to Semmelweis that in the autopsy room the physicians’ hands became infected, and in examining the women and delivering the babies, they passed the disease into the women’s blood through various open wounds. The physicians were literally poisoning their patients with childbed fever. If this was the cause, it would be simple to solve—doctors would have to wash and disinfect their hands before handling any patients, a practice no one followed in any hospital at the time. He instituted this practice in his ward, and the number of mortalities was instantly halved.

  On the brink of perhaps a major discovery in science—the connection between germs and contagious disease—Semmelweis seemed to be on his way to an illustrious career. But there was one problem. The head of the department, Johann Klein, was a most conservative gentleman who wanted his doctors to adhere to strict medical orthodoxies established by previous practice. He believed that Semmelweis was an inexperienced doctor turned radical, who wanted to overturn the establishment and make a name for himself in the process.

  Semmelweis argued with him incessantly over the subject of childbed fever, and when the young man finally promulgated his theory, Klein became furious. The implication was that doctors, including Klein himself, had been murdering their patients, and this was too much to take. (Klein himself ascribed the lower number of mortalities in Semmelweis’s ward to a new ventilation system he had installed.) When in 1849 Semmelweis’s assistantship was nearing its end, Klein refused to renew it, essentially leaving the young man without a job.

  By now, however, Semmelweis had gained several key allies within the medical department, particularly among the younger set. They urged him to conduct some controlled experiments to strengthen his case, and then to write up his findings in a book that would spread his theory throughout Europe. Semmelweis, however, could not turn his attention away from the battle with Klein. Day by day his anger rose. Klein’s adherence to a ridiculous and disproven theory about the fever was criminal. Such blindness to the truth made his blood boil. How could one man have such power in his field? Why should Semmelweis have to take so much of his time to do experiments and write books, when the truth was already so apparent? He decided instead to give a series of lectures on the subject, in which he could also express his scorn toward the closed-mindedness of so many in the profession.

  Doctors from all over Europe attended Semmelweis’s lectures. Although some remained skeptical, he won over more converts to his cause. His allies at the university pressed him to continue the momentum by doing more research and by writing a book on his theory. But within a few months of the lectures, and for reasons no one could understand, Semmelweis suddenly left town and returned to his native Budapest, where he found the university and medical position that had eluded him in Vienna. It seemed he could not endure another moment in the same city as Klein, and required complete freedom to operate on his own—even though Budapest was somewhat of a medical backwater at the time. His friends felt completely betrayed. They had staked their reputations on supporting him, and now he had left them in the lurch.

  In the Budapest hospitals where he now worked, Semmelweis instituted his disinfection policies with such a rigor and tyrannical intensity that he cut the mortality rates but alienated almost all of the doctors and nurses he worked with. More and more people were turning against him. He had forced upon everyone his novel ideas on disinfection, but without books or the proper experiments to back them up it seemed that he was merely promoting himself, or obsessed with some fanciful idea of his own creation. The vehemence with which he insisted on its truth only called more attention to the lack of scholarly rigor to back it up. Doctors speculated about other possible causes for his success in cutting the incidence of childbed fever.

  Finally in 1860, under pressure from colleagues yet again, he decided to write the book that would explain his theory in full. When he was finished with it, what should have been a relatively small volume had ballooned into a 600-page diatribe that was nearly impossible to read. It was hopelessly repetitive and convoluted. His arguments would turn into polemics as he enumerated the doctors who had opposed him and who were therefore murderers. During such passages his writing became almost apocalyptic.

  Now his opponents came out of the woodwork. He had committed himself to writing but had done such a bad job that they could poke holes through his arguments, or merely call attention to his violent tone, which was self-damning enough. His former allies did not rally to his cause. They had come to hate him. His behavior became increasingly grandiose and erratic, until his employers at the hospital had to dismiss him. Virtually penniless and abandoned by almost everyone, he fell ill and died in 1865 at the age of forty-seven.

  B. As a medical student at
the University of Padua in Italy in 1602, the Englishman William Harvey (1578–1657) began to entertain doubts about the whole conception of the heart and its function as an organ. What he had been taught in school was based on the theories of the second-century Greek physician Galen, which stated that some blood was manufactured in the liver and some in the heart, and was transported by veins and absorbed by the body, supplying it with nutrition. According to the theory, this blood flowed ever so slowly from the liver and heart to the various parts of the body that needed it, but did not flow back—it was merely consumed. What troubled Harvey was how much blood the body contained. How could it possibly produce and consume so much liquid?

  Over the ensuing years his career prospered, culminating in his appointment as Royal Physician to King James I. During these years, he continued to ponder the same questions about blood and the role of the heart. And by the year 1618 he had come up with a theory: blood flows through the body not slowly but rapidly, the heart acting as a pump. Blood is not produced and consumed; instead it circulates continually.