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.