“Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desires that stir you from within.” - Robert Greene, Mastery

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A few days ago, I was walking through Lisbon’s 96th annual book fair when I came across this Robert Greene feature:

The first thing I noticed is that his body of work, while very impressive, is not large.
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In three decades of writing, he’s only released seven books:
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About one book every four years.
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​Standing there, I imagined what those years must have looked like:
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​Struggling to pay the rent while writing The 48 Laws of Power, and waiting nearly a decade for the book to gain popularity without knowing if it ever would.
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I read that he worked ~80 different “weird, horrible jobs” in his lifetime:
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Everything from construction, to debt collection, to magazine editing, to manual labour.
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His longest job lasted just 10 months.
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Robert himself said he “felt like a loser until his late 30’s” — wandering and directionless, unsure if he would ever make it.
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He must have questioned his own sanity, and wondered if he was wasting his life on a path that was doomed to fail.
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​And yet, somehow, he remained committed to the craft.
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​Finally, in his 50’s, his books broke into the mainstream, and he achieved enough financial security to write full time.
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Today, his work is celebrated in multiple languages, on multiple continents, by multiple generations of readers.
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The long road is a rare path, taken by rare individuals, who are rarely celebrated until they’ve reached the end of it.
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It’s a road full of struggle and challenge and quiet moments of despair.
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But it is the only road that leads to mastery.
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Big thanks to Robert for the inspiration.
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Well earned and well deserved.
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- T
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​P.S. This just went live:
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​How To Survive Stage 2 Of AI​
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​Watching it back I was struck by how themes this talk shares with Robert Greene’s book “Mastery”.
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In his words:
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​“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways... the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds, and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn."
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​Much (much) more on this in today’s talk.
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