Mastery

by Robert Greene

  The natural tendency with fools is to lower yourself to their level. They annoy you, get under your skin, and draw you into a battle. In the process, you feel petty and confused. You lose a sense of what is really important. You can’t win an argument or get them to see your side or change their behavior, because rationality and results don’t matter to them. You simply waste valuable time and emotional energy.

  In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of the human comedy, and it is nothing to get upset about or lose sleep over. This attitude—“Suffer Fools Gladly”—should be forged in your Apprenticeship Phase, during which you are almost certainly going to encounter this type. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what is important, and ignoring them if you can. The height of wisdom, however, is to take this even further and to actually exploit their foolishness—using them for material for your work, as examples of things to avoid, or by looking for ways to turn their actions to your advantage. In this way, their foolishness plays into your hands, helping you achieve the kind of practical results they seem to disdain.

  REVERSAL

  While studying for his PhD at Harvard University in Computer Science, Paul Graham (b. 1964) discovered something about himself: he had a profound distaste for any kind of politicking or social maneuvering. (For more on Graham, see here.) He was not good at it, and it irritated him to no end to be dragged into situations in which others behaved manipulatively. His brief encounter with politics within the department convinced him he was not cut out for a life in academia. This lesson became strengthened a few years later when he went to work for a software company. Almost everything they did was irrational—firing the original tech people, making a salesperson the head of the company, creating too long a time between releases of new products. All of these bad choices came about because in a group, politics and ego often trump sound decision making.

  Unable to tolerate this, he came up with his own solution: as much as possible, he would avoid any environment that involved politicking. This meant sticking to doing startups on the smallest scale—a constraint that made him disciplined and creative. Later, when he founded Y Combinator, a kind of apprenticeship system for tech startups, he could not prevent the company from growing in size—it was too successful. His solution was twofold: One, he had his wife and partner in the company, Jessica Livingston, handle all of the tricky social situations, since she possessed a high level of social intelligence. Two, he maintained a very loose, non-bureaucratic structure to the company.

  If, like Graham, you simply do not have the patience that is required for managing and mastering the more subtle and manipulative sides of human nature, then your best answer is to keep yourself away from those situations as best as possible. This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups.

  Even still, it is generally wise to try to gain the rudiments of social intelligence—to be able to read and recognize the sharks, and to charm and disarm difficult people. The reason is that no matter how hard you might try to avoid situations that call for such knowledge, the world is one large teeming court of intrigue, and it will inevitably pull you in. Your conscious attempt to opt out of the system will retard your apprenticeship in social intelligence and can make you vulnerable to the worst forms of naïveté, with all of the disasters that are likely to ensue.

  It is a great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us; I have never hoped this. I have always regarded each man as an independent individual, whom I endeavored to understand with all his peculiarities, but from whom I desired no further sympathy. In this way have I been enabled to converse with every man, and thus alone is produced the knowledge of various characters and the dexterity necessary for the conduct of life.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  V

  AWAKEN THE

  DIMENSIONAL MIND:

  THE CREATIVE-ACTIVE

  As you accumulate more skills and internalize the rules that govern your field, your mind will want to become more active, seeking to use this knowledge in ways that are more suited to your inclinations. What will impede this natural creative dynamic from flourishing is not a lack of talent, but your attitude. Feeling anxious and insecure, you will tend to turn conservative with your knowledge, preferring to fit into the group and sticking to the procedures you have learned. Instead, you must force yourself in the opposite direction. As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles. As your thinking grows more fluid your mind will become increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality. In the end, you will turn against the very rules you have internalized, shaping and reforming them to suit your spirit. Such originality will bring you to the heights of power.

  THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION

  From the moment he was born, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was surrounded by music. His father, Leopold, was a violinist and composer in the court of Salzburg, Austria, as well as a music instructor. All during the day, Wolfgang would hear Leopold and his students practicing in the house. In 1759, his seven-year-old sister Maria Anna began taking piano lessons from their father. She showed great promise and practiced at all hours. Wolfgang, enchanted by the simple melodies that she played, began to hum along to the music; he would sometimes sit at the family’s harpsichord and try to imitate what his sister had played. Leopold could soon detect something unusual in his son. For a three-year-old, the child had a remarkable memory for melody and an impeccable sense of rhythm, all without having had any instruction.

  Although he had never attempted to teach someone so young, Leopold decided to begin teaching piano to Wolfgang when he turned four, and after only a few sessions he realized the boy had other interesting qualities. Wolfgang listened more deeply than other students, his mind and body completely absorbed in the music. With such intensity of focus, he learned more quickly than other children. Once when he was five years old, he stole a rather complicated exercise meant for Maria Anna, and within thirty minutes he could play it with ease. He had heard Maria Anna practice the piece, and remembering it vividly, the moment he saw the notes on the page he could rapidly reproduce the music.

  This remarkable focus had its roots in something that Leopold saw almost from the beginning—the boy had an intense love of music itself. His eyes would light up with excitement the moment Leopold laid out a new challenging piece for him to conquer. If the piece was new and hard to figure out, he would attack it day and night with such tenacity that it would soon become part of his repertoire. At night, his parents would have to force him to stop practicing and send him to bed. This love of practice only seemed to increase with the years. When it came time to play with other children, he would find a way to transform a simple game into something that involved music. His favorite game, however, was to take some piece he had been playing and improvise on it, giving it a personal flair that was quite charming and inventive.

  From his earliest years, Wolfgang was exceptionally emotional and sensitive. His moods would swing wildly—he would be petulant one moment, highly affectionate the next. He had a perpetually anxious look on his face that would only disappear when he sat down at the piano; then he was in his element, losing himself in th
e music.

  One day in 1762, as Leopold Mozart heard his two children playing a piece for two pianos, an idea came to him. His daughter Maria Anna was a very talented piano player in her own right, and Wolfgang was a veritable marvel. Together, they were like precious toys. They had a natural charisma, and Wolfgang had a showman’s flair. As a mere court musician, Leopold’s income was rather limited, but he could see the potential for making a fortune through his children. And so, thinking this through, he decided to take his family on a grand tour of the capitals of Europe, playing before royal courts and the public and charging money for the entertainment. To add to the spectacle, he dressed the children up—Maria Anna as a princess, and Wolfgang as a court minister, complete with wig, elaborate waistcoat, and a sword dangling from his belt.

  They began in Vienna, where the children charmed the Austrian emperor and empress. They then spent months in Paris, where they played for the royal court and Wolfgang bounced on the knee of the delighted King Louis XV. They continued to London where they ended up staying for over a year, playing before all kinds of large crowds. And while the sight of the two children in their costumes charmed audiences enough, Wolfgang’s playing astounded them. He had developed numerous parlor tricks, stage-managed by his father. He would play a minuet on a keyboard that was hidden from his view by a cloth, using only one finger. He would deftly sight-read the latest composition by a famous composer. He would play his own compositions—it was impressive to hear a sonata composed by a seven-year-old, no matter how simple it was. Most marvelous of all, Wolfgang could play at an incredible speed, his tiny fingers flying over the keyboard.

  As the tour continued, an amusing pattern began to develop. The family would be invited to do some sightseeing, tour the countryside, or attend a soirée, while Wolfgang would find some excuse to stay behind—a feigned illness or complaints of exhaustion—and would devote his time instead to music. His favorite ploy in this vein was to attach himself to the most illustrious composers in the particular court they were visiting. In London, for instance, he managed to charm the great composer Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. When the family was invited out on a jaunt, he declined to join them with the perfect excuse—he had already engaged Bach to give him lessons in composition.

  The education he received in this fashion, from all of the composers he met, went far beyond anything any child could hope to receive. Although some argued that it was a waste of childhood for someone so young to be so single-minded, Wolfgang felt such an ardent love for music and the constant challenges it presented that in the end he derived much greater pleasure from his obsession than any amusement or game could provide.

  The tour was a great financial success, but it nearly ended in tragedy. In Holland in 1766, as the family was beginning its return journey, Wolfgang fell ill with a powerful fever. Losing weight rapidly, he drifted in and out of consciousness, and at one point appeared near death. But miraculously, the fever passed, and over the course of several months he slowly recovered. The experience, however, altered him. From that moment on, he had a constant feeling of melancholy and a foreboding that he would die young.

  The Mozart family had come now to depend on the money that the children had generated through the tour, but as the years went by the invitations began to dry up. The novelty had worn off, and the children no longer seemed so young and precious. Desperate to generate money, Leopold came up with a different scheme. His son was turning into a serious composer, with the ability to compose in different genres. What was needed was to secure for him a stable position as a court composer, and attract commissions for concertos and symphonies. With this goal in mind, in 1770 father and son embarked on series of tours of Italy, then the center of all things musical in Europe.

  The trip went well. Wolfgang performed his magic on the piano before all of the major courts in Italy. He gained acclaim for his symphonies and concert pieces—they were quite impressive for a teenager. He mingled yet again with the most celebrated composers of his time, intensifying the musical knowledge he had gained on his previous tours. In addition, he rediscovered his greatest passion in music—the opera. As a child he had always had the feeling that he was destined to compose great operas. In Italy he saw the finest productions and realized the source of his fascination—it was the drama translated into pure music, the nearly limitless potential of the human voice to express the full range of emotion, and the overall spectacle. He had an almost primal attraction to any kind of theater. But despite all of the attention and inspiration he received, after nearly three years of visiting the various courts in Italy, he was not offered a position or a commission that was worthy of his talents. And so, in 1773, father and son returned to Salzburg.

  After some delicate negotiation with the archbishop of Salzburg, Leopold finally managed to secure for his son a relatively lucrative position as court musician and composer. And by all appearances the arrangement was good: not having to worry about money, Wolfgang would have endless time to work on composing. But almost from the beginning Wolfgang felt uncomfortable and restless. He had spent almost half of his youth traveling throughout Europe, mingling with the leading minds in music, and listening to the most renowned orchestras, and now he was relegated to life in provincial Salzburg, isolated from the European centers of music, in a city that had no theater or opera tradition.

  More troubling, however, was the mounting frustration he felt as a composer. For as long as he could remember, his head was continuously filled with music, but it was always the music of other people. He knew that his own pieces were simply clever imitations and adaptations of other composers. He had been like a young plant, passively absorbing nutrients from the environment in the form of the different styles he had learned and mastered. But he could feel stirring from deep within something more active, the desire to express his own music and to stop imitating. The soil was now rich enough. As an adolescent, he was assailed by all kinds of conflicting and powerful emotions—elation, depression, erotic desires. His great desire was to transpose these feelings into his work.

  Almost without being aware of it, he began to experiment. He wrote a series of slow movements for various string quartets that were long and drawn out with strange mixes of moods, full of anxiety that would rise to great crescendos. When he showed these pieces to his father, Leopold was horrified. Their income depended on Wolfgang supplying the court with the kind of pleasant melodies that would delight people and make them smile. If they or the archbishop heard these new compositions, they would think Wolfgang had gone insane. Besides, the pieces were too complicated for the court musicians of Salzburg to perform. He begged his son to stop indulging in such strange music, or at least to wait until he had a position somewhere else.

  Wolfgang acquiesced, but as time went on he grew increasingly depressed. The music he was being forced to write seemed so hopelessly dead and conventional; it had no relation to what was going on inside him. He composed fewer pieces and performed less often. For the first time in his life he was losing his love for music itself. Feeling imprisoned, he grew irritable. When he heard an operatic aria sung in public he was reminded of the kind of music he could be composing, and he would go into a funk. He began to quarrel incessantly with his father, passing from anger to begging for forgiveness for his disobedience. Slowly he resigned himself to his fate: he would die in Salzburg at an early age, without the world ever hearing the kind of music he knew existed within him.

  In 1781 Wolfgang was invited to accompany the archbishop of Salzburg to Vienna, where he was planning to showcase the musical talents of his various court musicians. Suddenly, in Vienna, the nature of his status as a court musician became clear. The archbishop ordered him about as if he were simply one of his personal staff, a mere servant. Now all the resentment Wolfgang had felt for the past seven years bubbled and rose to the surface. He was twenty-five years old and losing valuable time. His father and the archbishop were actively holding him back. He loved his father a
nd depended on his family for emotional support, but he could tolerate his circumstances no longer. When it was time to return to Salzburg, he did the unthinkable—he refused to leave. He asked to be dismissed from his position. The archbishop treated him with the utmost contempt, but finally relented. His father sided with the archbishop and ordered his son to return, promising that all would be forgiven. But Wolfgang had made up his mind: he would stay in Vienna, for what would turn out to be the rest of his life.

  The rift with his father was permanent and extremely painful, but sensing that his time was short and that he had almost too much to express, he threw himself into his music with an intensity that was even greater than what he had displayed in childhood. As if all of his ideas had been pent up for too long, he exploded in a creative outburst unprecedented in the history of music.

  The apprenticeship of the past twenty years had prepared him well for this moment. He had developed a prodigious memory—in his mind he could hold together all of the harmonies and melodies that he had absorbed over the years. Instead of notes or chords, he could think in terms of blocks of music and write them out as quickly as he heard them in his head. His speed of composing would now astonish those who witnessed it. For instance, the night before the premiere in Prague of the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart had gone out drinking. When his friends reminded him that he had not yet written the overture, he hurried home, and while his wife kept him awake by singing to him, he wrote one of his most popular and brilliantly conceived overtures in a matter of hours.