Play to your strengths — Supreme Focus: Mastery is like swimming— it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. When it comes to mastery, it is not a question of should I master something, but instead, what should I master? Self-obsessiveness: In the work environment, we almost inevitably think first and foremost of ourselves. Connect to your environment — Primal Powers: The ability to connect deeply to your environment is the most primal and in many ways the most powerful form of mastery the brain can bring us. In this awareness, the man or woman on the path of mastery sometimes makes a conscious decision to do just that.

The question remains: Where in our upbringing, our schooling, our career are we explicitly taught to value, to enjoy, even to love the plateau, the long stretch of diligent effort with no seeming progress? It's clear that outside of these stories there is no easy single thread to be found connecting the mastery of Mozart to that of Einstein or Keats, except perhaps that they didn't have to read an instruction manual on finding their own inner greatness. I think in our culture, with everything seeming “so easy” or “fast acting”, it’s very discouraging to tackle taking on new things. If a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, then perhaps a moving picture is worth 10,000 words. Such Masters include Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, and Martha Graham, among many others.In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain. After ten long years of incessant thinking on the problem of general relativity, Albert Einstein decided one evening to simply give up.

If you want to master the skill all by yourself not taking any help then you would lose decades of time, so, learn from the masters. The problem with such repetitive phrasing is that just having read it in the last chapter, our brains are inclined to think we’ve read what follows this before, and so we skim. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. In such a case, an alternate strategy is to find several mentors in your immediate environment, each one filling strategic gaps in your knowledge and experience.The point of little or no progress where we spend most of our lives: practicing until you break through to the next one.

Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes. For while the earlier book was about how to gain and hold control of other people, this one is about how to find, develop, and fully realize one's own Life's Task. Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. To help capture this mood, Leonardo had spent time in the local church observing those in fervent prayer, the expression of one young man serving as the model for the angel.Apparently stagnating for longer periods of time is normal and should be embraced as part of a larger picture. The Fact of Great Yield: “Better to look into ten such facts, with only one yielding a great discovery, than to look into twenty ideas that bring success but have trivial implications. At the very end of this process, when there are no more simple skills to learn, the brain has assimilated an incredible amount of information, all of which has become internalized, part of our nervous system. He was also a former United States Army Air Corps pilot, and held a fifth degree black belt in aikido. Look for mentors who can do that, and beware of falling into the opposite trap— opting for a mentor who resembles one of your parents, including all of his negative traits.

The only way to truly press on in the path to mastery is to love what you’re doing and love the practice.Creative active phase: After learning the skill inside-out, you start experimenting on the skill by being creative, you need to let go of the fixed mindset, complacency and need to accept criticism. True, some elements of the book will seem obvious (find a good teacher) or already be known to you--I'm thinking of how he describes Mastery as the journey and not the goal--but it's good to have all this info in one place, like a brief book, to act as a reference. There are limits, of course, and we do need healthful rest and relaxation, but for the most part we gain energy by using energy.