Mastery

by Robert Greene

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge. But there is another element, an X factor that Masters inevitably possess, that seems mystical but that is accessible to us all. Whatever field of activity we are involved in, there is generally an accepted path to the top. It is a path that others have followed, and because we are conformist creatures, most of us opt for this conventional route. But Masters have a strong inner guiding system and a high level of self-awareness. What has suited others in the past does not suit them, and they know that trying to fit into a conventional mold would only lead to a dampening of spirit, the reality they seek eluding them.

  And so inevitably, these Masters, as they progress on their career paths, make a choice at a key moment in their lives: they decide to forge their own route, one that others will see as unconventional, but that suits their own spirit and rhythms and leads them closer to discovering the hidden truths of their objects of study. This key choice takes self-confidence and self-awareness—the X factor that is necessary for attaining mastery. The following are examples of this X factor in action and the strategic choices it leads to. The examples given are meant to show the importance of this quality and how we might adapt it to our own circumstances.

  1. Connect to your environment—Primal Powers

  Among the many feats of human navigation of the sea, perhaps none are more remarkable and mysterious than the voyages of the indigenous peoples in the area known as Oceania—comprising the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. In an area that is 99.8 percent water, the inhabitants of this region were able for many centuries to deftly navigate the vast spaces between the islands. Some 1,500 years ago they managed to travel the several thousand miles to Hawaii, and perhaps at one point even voyaged as far as parts of North and South America, all in canoes with the same design and technology as those of the Stone Age. During the nineteenth century, mostly because of Western interference and the introduction of charts and compasses, these ancient navigating skills died out, and the source of their uncanny skill remained mostly a mystery. But in the area of Micronesia known as the Caroline Islands, certain islanders maintained the ancient traditions well into the twentieth century. And the first Westerners who traveled with them were astonished at what they witnessed.

  The Islanders would travel in outrigger canoes fitted with a sail with three or four men aboard, one serving as the chief navigator. They had no charts or instruments of any kind, and for the Westerners who accompanied them this could be a disconcerting experience. Taking off at night or day (it didn’t matter to them), there would be apparently nothing to guide them along the way. The islands were so far apart that one could travel for days without spotting land. To go off course only slightly (and storms or weather changes could certainly cause that) would mean never spotting their destination, and probably death—it would take too long to find the next island in the chain, and supplies would run out. And yet they would embark on their sea voyages with a remarkably relaxed spirit.

  The chief navigator would occasionally glance at the night sky or the position of the sun, but mostly he talked with the others or stared straight ahead. Sometimes one of the men would lie belly down in the middle of the outrigger canoe and report some information he had gleaned. In general they gave the impression of being passengers on a train, serenely taking in the passing scenery. They seemed even calmer at night. When they were supposedly getting closer to their destination, they would become slightly more alert. They would follow the paths of birds in the sky; they would look deeply into the water, which they would sometimes cup in their hands and smell. When they arrived at their destination, it was all with the air of pulling into the train station on time. They seemed to know exactly how long it would take and how many supplies were required for the voyage. Along the way, they would make perfect adjustments to any changes in weather or currents.

  Curious as to how this was possible, some Westerners asked to be initiated into their secrets, and over the decades such travelers managed to piece together the system the Islanders used. As these Westerners discovered, one of their principal means of navigation was following the paths of stars in the night sky. Over the course of centuries, they had devised a chart comprising the path of fourteen different constellations. These constellations, along with the sun and the moon, described arcs in the sky that could translate into thirty-two different directions around the circle of the horizon. These arcs remained the same, no matter the season. From their own island, they could map out the location of all of the islands in their area by locating what stars they should be under at particular moments at night, and they knew how this position would change to another star as they traveled toward their destination. The Islanders had no writing system. Apprentice navigators simply had to memorize this elaborate map, which was in continual motion.

  During the day, they would chart a course by the sun. Toward the middle of the day they could read the exact direction they were headed in by the shadows that were cast on the mast. At dawn or at sunset they could use the moon, or the stars sinking below the horizon or starting to rise. To help them measure the distance they had covered, they would choose an island somewhere off to the side as a reference point. By following the stars in the sky they could calculate when they would be passing by this reference island, and how much time remained to reach their destination.

  As part of this system, they envisioned that their canoe was completely still—the stars moved above them, and the islands in the ocean were moving toward and then away from them as they passed them. Acting as if the canoe were stationary made it easier to calculate their position within their reference system. Although they knew that islands did not move, after many years of traveling this way, they would literally experience the trip as if they were sitting still. This would account for the impression they gave of looking like passengers in a train viewing the passing landscape.

  Their sky chart was complemented by dozens of other signs they had learned to read. In their apprenticeship system, young navigators would be taken to sea and made to float in the ocean for several hours. In this way, they could learn to distinguish the various currents by how they felt on their skin. After much practice, they could read these currents by lying down on the floor of the canoe. They had developed a similar sensitivity to winds, and could identify various wind currents by how they moved the hairs on their head, or the sail on the outrigger.

  Once they approached an island, they knew how to interpret the paths of land birds, which left in the morning to fish or returned at dusk to their homes. They could read the changes in the phosphorescence of the water that indicated closeness to land, and they could gauge whether the clouds in the distance were reflecting land beneath them, or simply ocean. They could touch the water to their lips, sensing any changes in temperature that indicated they were approaching an island. There were many more such indicators; the Islanders had learned to see everything in this environment as a potential sign.

  What was most remarkable was that the chief navigator hardly seemed to be paying attention to this complex network of signs. Only an occasional glance upward or downward would indicate any kind of reading that was going on. Apparently, Master navigators knew the sky chart so well that with the sight of one star in the sky they could immediately sense where all of the others were located. They had learned how to read the other navigational signs so well that it all had become second nature. They had a complete feel for this environment, including all of the variables that seemed to make it so chaotic and dangerous. As one Westerner put it, such Masters could travel hundreds of miles from island to island as easily as an experienced cab driver could negotiate the labyrinthine streets of London.

  At some point in history, the original navigators in this region must have felt a great degree of fear as they confronted the need to travel to find other food sources, realizing the tremendous dangers
this involved. The ocean must have seemed much more chaotic than the tiny patch of land on their islands. They slowly overcame this fear and evolved a system that was magnificently suited to the environment they lived in. In this part of the world, the night sky is particularly clear through much of the year, giving them the ability to use the changing position of stars to great effect. Using smaller craft allowed them to maintain closer contact with the water, which they had learned to read as accurately as the undulating earth on their island. Imagining themselves as stationary and the islands as moving helped them keep track of their reference points and had a calming effect. They did not depend on a single tool or instrument; this elaborate system existed entirely in their minds. By building a deep connection to the environment and reading all of the available signs, the Islanders could approximate the remarkable instinctual powers of animals, such as various bird species that can navigate around the globe through their extreme sensitivity to the earth’s geomagnetic field.

  Understand: 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. It applies equally well to the waters of Micronesia as it does to any modern field or office. We gain such power by first transforming ourselves into consummate observers. We see everything in our surroundings as a potential sign to interpret. Nothing is taken at face value. Like the Islanders, we can break these observations down into various systems. There are the people with whom we work and interact—everything they do and say reveals something hidden below the surface. We can look at our interactions with the public, how they respond to our work, how people’s tastes are constantly in flux. We can immerse ourselves in every aspect of our field, paying deep attention, for example, to the economic factors that play such a large role. We become like the Proustian spider, sensing the slightest vibration on our web. Over the years, as we progress on this path, we begin to merge our knowledge of these various components into an overall feel for the environment itself. Instead of exerting and overtaxing ourselves to keep up with a complex, changing environment, we know it from the inside and can sense the changes before they happen.

  For the Caroline Islanders, there was nothing unconventional in their approach to mastery; their method fit perfectly their circumstances. But for us, in our advanced technological age, such mastery involves making an unconventional choice. To become such sensitive observers, we must not succumb to all of the distractions afforded by technology; we must be a little primitive. The primary instruments that we depend on must be our eyes for observing and our brains for analyzing. The information afforded to us through various media is only one small component in our connection to the environment. It is easy to become enamored with the powers that technology affords us, and to see them as the end and not the means. When that happens, we connect to a virtual environment, and the power of our eyes and brain slowly atrophy. You must see your environment as a physical entity and your connection to it as visceral. If there is any instrument you must fall in love with and fetishize, it is the human brain—the most miraculous, awe-inspiring, information-processing tool devised in the known universe, with a complexity we can’t even begin to fathom, and with dimensional powers that far outstrip any piece of technology in sophistication and usefulness.

  2. Play to your strengths—Supreme Focus

  A. In the first years of the life of their child, the parents of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) had cause for concern. It took longer than usual for little Albert to talk, and his first attempts at language were always so halting. (See here and here for more on Einstein.) He had a strange habit of first muttering to himself the words he was going to speak out loud. His parents were concerned that their son might have a mental deficiency, and they consulted a doctor. Soon, however, he lost his hesitancy with words and revealed some hidden mental strengths—he was good with puzzles, had a knack for certain sciences, and he loved playing the violin, particularly anything by Mozart, whose music he would play over and over.

  The problems began again, however, as he advanced his way through school. He was not a particularly good student. He hated having to memorize so many facts and numbers. He hated the stern authority of the teachers. His grades were mediocre and, concerned for his future, the parents decided to send their sixteen-year-old son to a more liberal-minded school in the town of Aarau, near their home in Zurich. This school used a method developed by the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, which emphasized the importance of learning through one’s own observations, leading to the development of ideas and intuitions. Even mathematics and physics were taught in this manner. There were no drills or facts to memorize; instead, the method placed supreme importance on visual forms of intelligence, which Pestalozzi saw as the key to creative thinking.

  In this atmosphere, young Einstein suddenly thrived. He found the place intensely stimulating. The school encouraged students to learn on their own, wherever their inclinations would take them, and for Einstein this meant delving even more deeply into Newtonian physics (a passion of his) and recent advances in the study of electromagnetism. In his studies of Newton while at Aarau, he came upon some problems in the Newtonian concept of the universe that deeply troubled him and caused him many sleepless nights.

  According to Newton, all phenomena in nature can be explained through simple mechanical laws. Knowing them, we can deduce the causes for almost everything that happens. Objects move through space according to these mechanical laws, such as laws of gravity, and all of these movements can be measured mathematically. It is a universe that is highly ordered and rational. But Newton’s concept relied upon two assumptions that could never be proven or verified empirically: the existence of absolute time and space, both of which were thought to exist independently of living beings and objects. Without these assumptions there would be no supreme standard of measurement. The brilliance of his system, however, was hard to call into question, considering that based on his laws scientists could accurately measure the movements of sound waves, the diffusion of gases, or the motion of stars.

  In the late nineteenth century, however, certain cracks began to emerge in Newton’s concept of the mechanical universe. Based on the work of Michael Faraday, the great Scottish mathematician James Maxwell made some interesting discoveries about the properties of electromagnetism. Developing what became known as field theories, Maxwell asserted that electromagnetism should not be described in terms of charged particles, but rather in terms of fields in space that have the continual potential to be converted into electromagnetism; this field consists of vectors of stress that can be charged at any point. By his calculations, electromagnetic waves move at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, which happens to be the speed of light. This could not simply be some coincidence. Light must therefore be a visible manifestation of an entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves.

  This was a groundbreaking and novel concept of the physical universe, but to make it consistent with Newton, Maxwell and others assumed the existence of a “light-bearing ether,” a substance that could oscillate and produce these electromagnetic waves, analogous to water for ocean waves, or air for sound waves. This concept added one more absolute to the Newtonian equation—that of absolute rest. The speed of the movement of these waves could only be measured against the backdrop of something at rest, which would be the ether itself. This ether would have to be something strange—covering the entire universe but not in any way interfering with the movement of planets or objects.

  Scientists around the world had been struggling for decades to prove somehow the existence of this ether, concocting all sorts of elaborate experiments, but it seemed an impossible quest, and this raised increasingly more questions about the Newtonian universe and the absolutes on which it depended. Albert Einstein devoured everything he could about Maxwell’s work and the questions it raised. Einstein himself had a basic need to believe in laws, in the existence of an ordered universe, and experiencing doubts on these laws ca
used him great anxiety.

  One day, in the midst of all of these thoughts and while still attending the school at Aarau, an image appeared in his mind: that of a man moving at the speed of light itself. As he pondered this image, it turned into a sort of puzzle, or what he would later call a thought experiment: if the man were moving at the speed of light alongside a light beam, he should be able to “observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating.”

  Intuitively, however, this made no sense to him for two reasons. The moment the man would look at the light source to see the beam, the light pulse would be moving ahead of him at the speed of light; he could not perceive it otherwise, since visible light travels at that constant speed. The speed of the light pulse with respect to the observer would still be 186,000 miles per second. The law governing the speed of light or any electromagnetic wave would have to be the same to someone standing still on Earth, or someone theoretically moving at the speed of light. There could not be two separate laws. And yet in theory it still could be supposed that one could catch up with and see the wave itself before it appeared as light. It was a paradox, and it made him unbearably anxious as he contemplated it.

  The next year Einstein entered the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, and once again his dislike for traditional schooling returned. He did not do particularly well at math. He disliked the way physics was taught, and he started taking many classes in totally unrelated fields. He was not a promising student, and had not attracted the attention of any important professor or mentor. He quickly developed a disdain for academia and the constrictions it placed on his thinking. Still deeply troubled by his thought experiment, he continued to work on it on his own. He spent months devising an experiment that could perhaps allow him to detect the ether and its effects on light, but a professor at the Polytechnic revealed to him that his experiment was unworkable. He gave Einstein a paper describing all of the failed attempts to detect ether that had been attempted by eminent scientists, perhaps trying to deflate the pretensions of a twenty-year-old student who thought he could uncover what the greatest scientists in the world had failed to accomplish.