Skip to main content

Mastery


Book Review

Robert Greene’s best-selling book, The 48 Laws of Power, fascinated me no end when I read it about two decades ago. I found the book in the capacious library of the erstwhile Sawan Public School, Delhi. Greene struck me as a ruthlessly pragmatic person who knew exactly what he was dealing with. I was never interested in power, but the book taught me all I wanted to know how people acquire power and how power works. Greene brings us real examples, and a whole of lot of them from all over history, to teach us the intricacies of power.
When I stumbled on another book of his, Mastery, I ordered it without a second thought. The book is sheer delight. Once again, Greene gives us the lessons of mastery through real examples. We meet in this book Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and V S Ramachandran, and a score of other persons who were masters in their fields. We learn profound lessons from these masters.
Each one of us is unique and has a unique role to play on this planet. Greene calls it our Life’s Task. You are meant to accomplish a particular task in the time you are given here on earth. How to identify that task and accomplish it like a master? This is what the book will teach you.
Most people just float through life doing very ordinary things: follow a profession for the sake of regular income, marry and bring up a child or two, grow old and die. Aren’t we missing something vital? We are. We fail to be the masters we were meant to be.
How to observe and understand the world and your role in it? That’s one of the first lessons we learn from this book. Then it goes on to teach us the need for a mentor. “To learn requires a sense of humility,” says Greene. We have to humbly submit ourselves to the “people out there who know our field much more deeply than we do.” We learn from these masters their knowledge and experience.
The part which I loved the most is about social intelligence. I have been an utter failure in this regard and hence Greene’s lessons came to me as revelations. How to acquire social intelligence? Greene suggests four strategies: Speak through your work; Craft the appropriate persona; See yourself as others see you; and Suffer fools gladly.
The last two parts of the book enable us to look at the ingredients of mastery itself. Obviously, mastery is not an easy thing to achieve. The book offers no short-cuts. It shows you concrete examples of great masters who slogged day in and day out to reach where they did. What Greene does is to show us some strategies that the great masters employed successfully. They show us the way. We have to do the walking.
I found the book very inspiring and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in carving a niche for himself in this dull world of quotidian tasks.


Comments

  1. I haven't read this one. I am sure I will like it. Must check this out. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I read Mastery with lots of reservation. After all, I've read so many self-help and enlightenment sort of books before, so what could be new in this one right?
    Well, there were plenty. It offers plenty of examples so it's more like a show than tell sort of approach, which I appreciated. There are a lot of nuggets in it that will allow the reader to reflect on the unifying theme of what Mastery is about. In my case, it was relevant because I have mastered (no pun intended) the jack-of-all trades concept where I flit to one hobby/skill to another, getting bored if I stay on to something for too long. This book showed me why focus and dedication is important to achieve true greatness. I liked this book a lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This book differs from the usual self-help ones in that this has a lot of convincing and detailed real examples.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to