Book Summary 26 — Mastery

1.Discover your Calling — Look Inwards

At your birth a seed is planted — your uniqueness. Find and grow it. Don’t succumb to other pressures in life — ie social proof.

1. What’s the pattern of your character?
2. Is your current path going there?
3. Slowly go there, not necessarily in a straight line but towards it

Strategies to find the Life’s Task

Obstacles

1. Voices of Others
2. Fighting over limited resources
3. Choosing false paths
4. Getting stuck in the paths
5. Losing your way

Strategies

1. Return to your origins
   it’s a feeling of what you loved as a kid
2. Occupy perfect niche
3. Avoid false path
   follow the right path independent of others and money, etc
4. Let go of the past
   you are not committed to the company or work, but to your life’s task
5. Find your way back
   even if you find fake happiness you will be empty inside

2. Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

The goal of an apprenticeship isn’t money, position, diploma — it’s the transformation of your mind and character. Do not choose apprenticeships which are easy and comfortable.

1. Deep Observation — Passive Mode
2. Skills Acquisition — Practice Mode
3. Experimentation — Active Mode

3. Absorb the Master’s Power: The Mentor Dynamic

Most efficient way of learning — knowledge and experience

Once internalised the knowledge — surpass master and pass it on

• requires humility — we don’t know best, soak up knowledge, don’t critisize
• adapt their knowledge to your circumstances
• create back and forth relationship so you both learn

4. See People as they are: Social Intelligence

Move past your usual self-absorption

Read others, see what motivates them

• don’t get emotional (take step back), take yourself out of the eqauation
• understand people — immerse your mind in their world

Seven Deadly Realities

1. Envy
   don’t boast, reveal own insecurities, don’t make people feel stupid
2. Conformism
   group setting — organisational mindset sets in
3. Rigidity
   we prefer what is familiar
4. Self-obsessiveness
   we always first think about ourselves, appeal to other people’s self-interest first
5. Laziness
   always want quickest/easiest path
6. Flightiness
   we are mostly governed by our emotions, yet we try to show that its all rational
7. Passive Aggression
   fear of direct confrontation, call them up on it, ignore it or come up with something equally indirect

Strategies to Acquire Social Intelligence

• Speak through work
  — demonstrate that you’re thinking about the group, involve others
• Craft the appropriate persona
  — Play the role of the person who would best achieve the task, look at yourself from the outside, how would others describe you?
• See yourself as others see you
  — we rarely hear the truth about ourselves, and we quickly justify our own actions — detach yourself and think about yourself
• Suffer fools gladly
  — enemies harden your resolution and improve your work with their critique, keep a steady eye on your goals

5. Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active

Adopt a child’s mind — we know see the world through filters and opinions, quickly getting defensive if our beliefs or assumptions are attacked

Requirement: High level of knowledge & openness and flexibility to use knowledge in new ways

1. Choose proper creative task
   — obsessive element
2. Loosen up the mind
   — avoid confirmation bias, don’t judge, relax, carry notebook, consider weird options
3. Create optimal conditions for Breakthrough
   — let go if you’re stuck, take a break, set deadlines
4. Avoid Emotional Pitfalls — complacency, boredom and grandiosity

Strategies

1. Authentic Voice
   - love learning, be yourself, don’t look for shortcuts, do what excites you
2. Fact of Great Yield
   - find the small irregularities instead of thinking about large solution
3. Mechanical Intelligence
   - you must test and use yourself, understand every single part of it and ‘Why?’
4. Natural Powers
   - give yourself time to wander, wide knowledge of field, never settle, accept slowness
5. Open Field
   - create something new, find a new space without people
6. High End
   - constantly remind yourself of your purpose/mission
7. Evolutionary Hijack
   - adapt your idea, take advantage of new possibilities
8. Dimensional Thinking
   - work with what you love
9. Alchemical Creativity and Unconscious
   - don’t categorise, something can be good and bad, intellectual and sensual

6. Fuse the Intuitive with the Rational: Mastery

Knowledge — know your stuff

Reflect — think about what you know and don’t know

Take up hobbies to engage/train brain

Strategies

1. Connect to your environment — Primal Powers
   - understand others
2. Play to your strength — Supreme Focus
   - follow what you love
3. Transform yourself through practice — Fingertip feel
   - make the skill become automatic
4. Internalise the details — Life Force
   - feel the changes of what’s happening, and be able to make them part of yourself
5. Widen your vision — Global Perspective
   - you will be able to think beyond the current situation, remind yourself of your overall purpose
6. Submit to the other — Inside-Out Perspective
   - don’t project yourself onto others, try to consider what they think
7. Synthesise all forms of knowledge — Universal Man/Woman
   - consider all the knowledge and include it