When Leonardo da Vinci wanted to create a whole new style of painting, one that was more lifelike and emotional, he engaged in an obsessive study of details. He spent endless hours experimenting with forms of light hitting various geometrical solids, to test how light could alter the appearance of objects. He devoted hundreds of pages in his notebooks to exploring the various gradations of shadows in every possible combination. He gave this same attention to the folds of a gown, the patterns in hair, the various minute changes in the expression of a human face. When we look at his work we are not consciously aware of these efforts on his part, but we feel how much more alive and realistic his paintings are, as if he had captured reality.
In general, try approaching a problem or idea with a much more open mind. Let your study of the details guide your thinking and shape your theories. Think of everything in nature, or in the world, as a kind of hologram —the smallest part reflecting something essential about the whole.
Immersing yourself in details will combat the generalizing tendencies of the brain and bring you closer to reality.
Daily Law: Uncover the secret to any reality by uncovering the details.
Mastery, V: Awaken the Dimensional Mind—The Creative-Active
In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself. Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. Your whole life, therefore, must be treated as a kind of apprenticeship to which you continually apply your learning skills. The month of March will teach you how to activate your skills and internalize the knowledge necessary for a life of mastery.
When I began writing my fifth book, Mastery, several years ago, something very strange and exciting occurred. This was a particularly difficult and complicated book to write. First of all, I had done my usual research: reading several hundred books, taking thousands of note cards on them, structuring them into various chapters, etc. But in addition, I had read a lot of books on science, which I had never done before—books examining the nature of the human brain—to give Mastery more of a scientific foundation. And that added yet another layer of difficulty to the writing. Furthermore, I had also interviewed six or seven contemporary masters to give the book a more upto- date feel. Incorporating the science and the interviews into Mastery made it a particularly challenging project. And so, when I began the actual writing process, it was very slow going with the first couple of chapters; it took longer than usual to get into a flow.
And then chapter by chapter, week by week, month by month, I started to gain a little bit of momentum. And then by the fifth chapter, something unexpected happened. The fifth chapter is about the creative process itself.
And the idea is that once you do enough work on a project, enough preparation, and you’ve had all of these months of experience delving into the subject, you often reach a state of creativity where ideas come to you out of nowhere. And suddenly this was happening to me. After all my research and all the preparation, by the time I had reached chapter five, ideas for that chapter were coming to me while I was taking a shower, while I was taking a walk. I was even dreaming about the book and ideas were coming to me in my sleep, confirming what I was writing about.
And this made me very surprised and very inspired. And then I came to chapter six, which is about mastery itself—the final chapter. The idea is that even further along in the process, you start to have a very intuitive feel for the subject. It’s almost as if the book or the project is living inside of you. You can compare it to a chess master where the chessboard feels like it is inside his brain, inside his body, and he can feel what comes next. I felt that the book was living inside of me and that I had what I call a fingertip feel for what I should be writing. There was this sort of fast-paced, intuitive series of ideas that would come to me out of nowhere. And this was an incredible experience, an incredible feeling—a feeling of great power.
I’m not claiming that I’m special, that I’m some sort of genius, or particularly gifted or talented. In fact, the whole point of the book is to demythologize our concept of genius and creativity. We tend to think that it is something you were born with, something in your DNA, some special way that you’re wired. And I wanted to prove that it was actually a product of hard work and discipline, that when you practice something for so many months or years, you can reach this high level of creativity and mastery. And the writing of the book literally confirmed my idea. And because it is a function of relentless dedication, boring into a problem, it is an exhilarating experience that almost anyone can have, if they follow the pattern I have laid out.
It doesn’t mean that if you spend years studying something, creative powers will inevitably come to you. You must have a certain intensity to your focus, as well as a love for the work itself that animates the final product.
And it also depends on years of prior labor in the Apprenticeship Phase, which I had gone through in writing four other books.
There are no shortcuts to the creative process; drugs and alcohol are more of a hindrance. The very impatience that drives you to desire shortcuts makes you unsuited for mastery. But if you trust the process and take it as far as you can, you will be amazed at the results.