Mastery (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1)

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Once you decide on a field, discipline, or skill to master, the best way to make progress fast is to take an internship.

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All significant learning is composed of brief spurts of progress followed by long periods of work where if feels as if you’re going nowhere. We imagine that creativity and brilliance just appear out of nowhere, the fruit of natural talent, or perhaps of a good mood, or an alignment of the stars. It would be an immense help to clear up the mystery— to name this feeling of power, to examine its roots, to define the kind of intelligence that leads to it, and to understand how it can be manufactured and maintained. Let us call this sensation mastery— the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves. Although it might be something we experience for only a short while, for others— Masters of their field— it becomes their way of life, their way of seeing the world. (Such Masters include Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, and Martha Graham, among many others.) And at the root of this power is a simple process that leads to mastery— one that is accessible to all of us.” The chapter on Muay Boran is always going to be open to interpretation. I have seen some of the drills before shown in a completely different way (but with the same name). Christophe has obviously worked with some great Muay Thai fighters and coaches when producing this book but that does not mean there is just one way to perform these movement sequences I would even go so far as to say it is very much under appreciated in this area. Most Thai fighters will regularly use the concepts and methods shown within.

Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one. The High End: Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger— a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place. Now, I know it may seem a little narcissistic to talk about my own book. Never mind feature it within a list of great Muay Thai books on my own blog. But, please bear with me (and forgive me) whilst I explain!

2. Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

Creative-active: With immersion and practice, you deepen your understanding of the field and experiment with your own methods. Around the globe, people are facing the same problem - that we are born as individuals but are forced to conform to the rules of society if we want to succeed. To see our uniqueness expressed in our achievements, we must first learn the rules - and then how to change them completely. During the apprenticeship phase, your goal is not to seek money or status, but to transform your mind and character. Go beyond the theoretical knowledge from your formal education to gain practical insights of how the world truly works, develop practical skills and discipline, and train yourself to think independently. Revert to Primal Intelligence: Try to think beyond language, get visual or physical, use diagrams and models, Da Vinci had his when he found himself stealing expensive paper from his father’s office to draw animals out in the woods. Tim Ferriss had his when learning about the death of a friend and terminal illness of a child on the same day.Chad Fowler called it his Harajuku momentbecause it happened in a district of the same name in Tokyo.