Mastery by Robert Greene

 I just finished reading Robert Greene's Mastery last night, and the book's broad theme was that mastery of anything - that is, achieving a very high level of performance - takes a mix of finding the right fit for your talents and then years of hard work and experimentation. Greene is at his best when he is relating examples of masters from history such as Da Vinci. The book concludes that mastery of this type is not a miracle, and ends with this Nietzsche quote that I liked:

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle.'
I would give the book 3.5 stars out of 5. I feel like it was a longish essay that got stretched into a book. Easy read, but not a terrific amount of substance.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bailey's Irish Cream Brownies!

Image
  It was Saturday, and Saturday is a day to celebrate food. And since this week was St. Patrick's Day, I made Bailey's Irish Cream Brownies! I went looking for a good recipe online and kept finding recipes like this one that provided instructions for making a cream with Bailey's, but then using store-bought brownie mix. I was not going to go half-way. So I found a nice fudgy recipe for the brownies themselves. Not hard to make. I was a little worried about the ganache, but as long as you take your time and use low heat, you won't burn the chocolate. Decadent!
Read more

corn bread recipe

Image
OK - I improvised this corn bread recipe a bit. I'm writing it down mostly for my own purposes, but hopefully you might try it as well.  (this is not a pic of this recipe - it's from a previous version) Ingredients: 1 cup corn meal 1 cup all-purpose flour 1/3 cup sugar 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 1 cup heavy cream 1 egg (beaten) 1/4 cup oil 1 small tin of diced chili peppers 1 cup whole kernel corn 1/2 cup shredder cheddar Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Blend corn meal to salt in a large bowl. Whisk together the egg, cream, and oil in a separate bowl, then blend into the dry ingredients, and add the peppers, corn, and 1/4 cup of the cheddar.  On the stove, melt 2 tbsp of butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet, just until the butter melts. Swirl it around to coat the bottom of the pan. Then pour in the mix. Top with the remaining 1/4 cup of cheddar. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until top is golden.  Slice and serve. 
Read more

un-becoming

Image
  I came across this Paul Coelho quote last week and I have been thinking about it because it reflects some of what I have been thinking about this year: “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” ― Paul Coelho I enlisted in the Massachusetts National Guard in April of 1989. I did so for a number of reasons - some of them financial - but also because I really wanted to be part of something that I thought was admirable, and to go through training that I thought would improve my character. I wasn't wrong. It was financially beneficial - I have been largely financially independent since that decision - my folks still helped me with school, but I reduced their contribution by about 90% - and then I went on active duty as soon as I graduated in 1992 and never looked back.  But something I learned fairly early on was that I was not going to be a great
Read more