Mastery

This item that I received looks very old and USED. It has even some black stains on the book cover.

The book cover and everything was damaged and n a worst condition.

This book really makes you think. Robert Greene breaks down the idea of mastery as a long-term process, using real-life stories, historical examples, and practical advice. It’s not a quick motivational fix — it’s more about understanding how real skill and success come from patience, discipline, and deep focus. It’s written in a clear and structured way, with each chapter building on the last. Some parts are quite dense, but it’s worth taking your time with it. I found it especially useful for thinking differently about career growth and learning. Tip: Take notes or highlight as you go — there’s a lot of insight you’ll want to come back to later. Highly recommend if you're into personal development, psychology, or just want a fresh perspective on what it really takes to become great at something.

A masterpiece. Should be in the reading list of everyone. To visit and revisit... Timeless and practicle wisdom

Poor condition. Looks used and poorly stored

I have not finished this book yet, but I know that it changed people's live. Listen to you heart and go for it. If you have a goal or if you have a plan in your mind: just get as much information as you can and work it out. You will find happiness when you have mastered "the skill" and you should choose that path that you're dreaming about. Don't listen to other people because they envy you. They want you to fit in their world. But if you want to chase your dream....just go for it.

There are countless self-help books--some good, some trite. Then there are self-help books that revolutionize the genre. Robert Greene's Mastery is such a book. It's Greene's fifth book broadly tackling the art of strategy, and like all his books, it's entertaining, educational, densely packed with biographies of powerful and interesting people, and almost completely devoid of fluff. Greene's overarching thesis challenges the conventional notion of "genius" as a genetic gift bestowed upon a handful of individuals--Mozart and Einstein immediately come to mind. To Greene, such a conception of genius is illusory. All "genius," Greene contends, is acquirable, and all masters, regardless of intrinsic ability, go through roughly the same process on their path towards mastery: 1) Finding your Life's Task. Greene argues that there's an inner force that guides you towards what you're "destined" to accomplish. Once you discover your Life's Task, throw everything at it. 2) Finding an ideal apprenticeship--the time when you hone the necessary skills and acquire the discipline vital to mastery. 3) Finding the right mentor. This is the key to a fruitful apprenticeship, enabling you to absorb the master's knowledge and power. Greene cautions that you must know when it's time to sever ties with your mentor and craft your own path in order to prevent remaining in your mentor's shadow indefinitely. The goal, Greene advises, it to eventually surpass your mentor. 4) Acquiring social intelligence. Social intelligence is an important theme in all of Greene's books. Quite simply, our personal and professional advancement will invariably stall if we don't learn to read people and deftly maneuver through the labyrinth of others' whims, passions, and ambitions. 5) "Awaken the Dimensional Mind: The Creative-Active." This stage involves expanding your knowledge to fields related to your craft, thereby challenging you to "make new associations between different ideas." Greene believes this is a critical step to optimizing your creative output and achieving mastery. 6) Fusing the intuitive with the rational. Greene argues that Einstein's discoveries can be as much attributed to his intuition as to his mathematical analysis grounded in pure reason. Practice and intimate knowledge of our field foster the integration of intuition with reason. For each stage, Greene outlines concrete steps to take to achieve these goals, including approaching difficult problems from unconventional angles or altering your perspective, embracing the holistic approach--i.e. utilizing and synchronizing the full range of resources and options your environment has to offer. One of the features that distinguishes Mastery from Greene's two other masterpieces, 33 Strategies of War and 48 Laws of Power, is its greater focus on the biographies of contemporary masters, most of whom are not well known to the general public. Greene delves into the lives of legendary masters like Mozart, Einstein, Goethe, Darwin, and da Vinci, but also of lesser known contemporary masters like software engineer and entrepreneur Paul Graham, animal scientist and inventor Temple Grandin, and linguistic archaeologist Daniel Everett, who cracked the previously thought to be indecipherable language of the reclusive Amazonian tribe, Piraha. Linking the human capacity for mastery to our biology and indeed, metaphysics, Greene writes in a veritably spiritual manner, making Mastery highly compelling and exceedingly motivational. The title Mastery is fitting, since Greene is undoubtedly a master in the art of strategy. It is amusing to hear some of his detractors bemoan the "amoral" nature of his books. Amoral virtues--be it courage, prudence, or temperament--are indispensable to achieving moral ends. A strategically inept well-meaning person will likely fail to achieve any significant good, because he is ill-prepared to deal with endless obstacles that stand in his way. Whereas a person well versed in the art of strategy and equipped with the amoral virtues necessary to overcome such obstacles, has the potential to achieve noble ends. The one area where I could quibble with Greene has to do with the age old debate over the role of nature vs. nurture. Since genetic makeup is a fixed variable outside of our control, it is perhaps pointless to dwell on its role in our development when writing a book about the concrete things we can actually do to better ourselves. Still, I wonder if Greene's unequivocal dismissal of the traditional interpretation of genius as inherent isn't to some extent mistaken. Regardless of how many thousands of hours Mozart spent studying his craft, is it really conceivable that any person of sound mind and body could replicate his success? I tend to think that there is something to be said about intrinsic genius; that there are masters who are born with an uncanny and natural ability to perceive things others do not and cannot, no matter how hard they try. Nevertheless, even if Greene errors in downplaying the role DNA plays in cultivating "genius," it in no way diminishes his strategy for acquiring mastery. Whether all of us can become the Einstein in our field makes little difference. What matters is that we can reach our maximum potential--become men and women in full--by following Greene's blueprint.