When I was younger, I worked at a publisher’s house in New York. One of the people we published was Toni Morrison. It was her first novel. I’ll never forget the story. Toni Morrison worked as an editor at this publication house.
She worked until 6 or 7 p.m. then took the train home to where she lived in Connecticut. She was raising two children. She would go home, cook them meals, put them to bed, and at 11 p.m. she would sit down and write. And that’s how she wrote her first novel. That’s the kind of energy and determination you have to have. I always thought that was superhuman. I know I could never do that, but look at who she became. It’s because she wanted it so badly.
Daily Law: To rise to the level of mastery requires intense dedication. You have to really want it. What would make you have such commitment and dedication?
Robert Greene in conversation at Live Talks Los Angeles, February 11, 2019
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.