I’ve just finished Robert Greene’s Mastery — twenty hours of audiobook.
This was part of my ongoing reading plan, where I balance deeper, long-term processes like The Presence Process with other works that spark reflection.
For most of it I felt disappointed. I wasn’t listening with much attention, because I was irritated by how easily Greene slipped into interpreting the thoughts of people long gone, attributing to them motives and feelings they never wrote down.
But then I reminded myself: he devoted a huge amount of time to tracing these lives, trying to find patterns. Even if his conclusions are not always true, they are meant to show us a possibility, a direction, a narrative. And in the end I saw him for what he is — not a researcher, but a storyteller. His role is not to prove laws, but to spark curiosity.
And I decided to focus on the sparks.
What I did get from it
-
Social Intelligence. Greene drew my attention to it, especially through Benjamin Franklin. I had read Franklin’s biography before, and indeed he had that ability to approach people in the right way and win them over. Greene’s framing made me realize that this is something I want to study seriously.
-
A mentor can be a book. This resonated with me strongly, because I don’t have a personal mentor. Books hold the distilled wisdom of great people, structured as best as they could. Jim Rohn often emphasized this in his seminars, and listening to Greene only reinforced it.
-
Reflections on human “exceptionality.” Learning about the lives of Santiago Calatrava or Leonardo da Vinci, I realized their marvels were, in essence, a generation process — remixing what they saw, felt, and experienced, combining it in ways that looked divine to others. What people once called “a spark of genius” feels to me more like a diffusion model denoising latent space until something surprising emerges for the human eye. That awareness shifted my perspective on human creativity.
What stuck with me
I have the nature of a student who wants to study things deeply — but here I learned something different: the art of sifting grain from chaff. Once I realized Greene is mainly a storyteller, I decided to skim efficiently, letting the noise pass through and catching the rare sparks that were worth pausing for. And in that mode, I found value.
Some of those sparks:
- Accepting people as they are — like a rose with thorns.
- Franklin’s reminder to pause and think of the motives behind people’s actions.
- Studying people the same way one studies a science — cataloguing, observing, analyzing.
- Seeing outrage at human behavior as pointless as cursing a stone that rolls under your foot.
- Sometimes it is smarter to use people as they are, not try to change them.
Another reflection that struck me came through the story of Daniel Everett and the Pirahã. It was a confrontation with people who live in a completely different perception of reality — and are happy. In my view, they live in something very close to The Presence Process. Everett was able to recognize and accept this without trying to “fix” them. That is rare — most people, especially those from the so-called civilized West, cannot resist imposing their values. This perspective put me in deep reflection.
Final thought
The most important reminder for me: mastery is not about genius, but about persistent, hard work. Human beings can achieve anything through discipline and time. Once again the “10,000 hours” rule surfaced — often quoted without acknowledging Anders Ericsson, the true father of that research.
And I’ll close with Nietzsche, who said it better than Greene ever could:
“Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”