Mastery

Find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate. It is never a simple process to find such a niche. It requires patience and particular strategy. In the beginning you choose a field that roughly corresponds to your interests . From there you can go in one of two directions. From within your chosen field, you look for side paths that particularly attract you. When it is possible, you make a move to this narrower field. You continue this process until you eventually hit upon a totally unoccupied niche, the narrower the better. In some ways, this niche corresponds to your uniqueness. Once you have mastered your first field, you look for other subjects or skills that you can conquer, on your own time if necessary. You can now combine this added field of knowledge to the original one, perhaps creating a new field, or at least making novel connection between them. Ultimately you create a field that uniquely your own. This second version fits in well with a culture where information is so widely available, and in which connecting ideas is form of power. In either direction, you have found a niche that is not crowded with competitors. You have freedom to roam, to pursue particular questions that interest you. You set your own agenda and command the resources available to this niche. Unburdened by overwhelming competition and politicking, you have time and space to bring to flow your Life’s Task.

Let go of the past - the adaptation strategy

In dealing with your career and its inevitable changes, you must think in the following way : You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company. You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guid it correctly. It is not up to others to protect or help you. You are on your own. Change is inevitable particularly in such revolutionary moment as ours. Since you are on your own, it is up to you to foresee the changes going on right now in your profession. You must adapt your Life’s task to these circumstances. You do not hold on to past ways of doing things, because that will ensure you will fall behind and suffer for it. Your are flexible and always looking to adapt.

If change is forced upon you, you must resist the temptation to overreact or feel sorry for yourself. You don’t want to abondon the skills and experience you have gained, but to find a new way to apply them. Your eye is on the future, not the past.

Your life’s task is a living, breathing organism. The moment you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by.

Find your way back - the life or death strategy

No good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. You will be assailed by varieties of hidden pain. Most often you deviate because of the lure of money, of more immediate prospects of prosperity. The road to mastery requires patience. You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts. The process of getting there, is full of challenges and pleasure. money and success that truly last come not to those who focus on such things as goals, but rather to those who focus on mastery and fulfilling their Life’s task.

Reversal

When you are faced with deficiencies instead of strengths and inclinations, this is the strategy you must assume : ignore your weakness and resist the temptation to be more like others.Instead,  direct yourself toward the small things you are good at. This will bring you confidence and become a base from which you can expand to other pursuits.

Your life’s task does not always appear to you through some grand or promising inclination. It can appear in the guise of your deficiencies, making you focus on the one or two things that you are inevitably good at. Working at these skills, you learn the value of discipline and see the rewards you get from your efforts. like a lotus flower, your skills will expand outward from center of strenth and confidence. Do not envy those who seem to be naturally gifted; it is often a curse, as such types rarly learn the value of diligence and focus, and they pay for this later in life.

Submit to reality : The Ideal Apprenticeship

The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character, the first transformation on the way to mastery. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience. Slowly, knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end, you will master yourself and all of your weaknesses.

The Apprenticeship Phase

Deep observation - the passive mode

1. Knowing your environment inside and out will help you in navigating it and avoiding costly mistakes.
2. The ability to observe any unfamiliar environment will become a critical lifelong skill.

Skills Acquisition - the practice mode

When you practice and develop any skill you transorm yourself in the process. You reveal to yourself new capabilities that were previously latent, that are exposed as you progress. Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.

Experimentation - the active mode

Most people wait too long to take this step, generally out of fear. It is always easier to learn the rules and stay within your comfort zone.

In general, you must think of yourself as a builder, using actual materials and ideas. You are producting something tangible in your work, something that affects people in some direct, concrete way.

Keep expanding your horizons

No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you. If you desire an apprenticeship, if you want to learn and set yourself up for mastery, you have to do it yourself, and with great energy. When you enter this phase, you generally begin at the lowest position. Your access to knowledge and people is limited by your status. If you are not careful, you will accept this status and become defined by it, particularly if you come from a disadvantaged background. You must struggle against any limitations and continually work to expand your horizons. Reading books and materials to go beyond what is required is always a good starting point. Being exposed to ideas in the wide world, you will tend to develop a hunger for more and more knowledge.

The people in your field, in your immediate circle, are like worls unto themselves, their stories and viewpoints will naturally expand your horizons and build up your social skills. Mingle with as many different types of people as possible. Those circles will slowly widen. Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion. With your mind expanding, you will redefine the limits of your apparent world. Soon, ideas and opportunities will come to you and your apprenticeship will naturally complete itself.

Revert to a feeling inferiority

When you enter a new environment, your task is to learn and absorb as much as possible. For that purpose you must try to revert to a chillike feeling of inferiority, the feeling that others know much more than you and that you are dependent upon them to learn and safely navigate your apprenticeship. You drop all of your preconceptions about an environment or field, any lingering feelings of smugness. You have no fears. You interact with people and participate in the culture as deeply as possible. You are full of curiosity. Assuming this sensation of inferiority, your mind will open up and you will have a hunger to learn.

Trust the process

What separates master from others is often something suprisingly simple. Whenever we learn a skill, we frequently reach a point of frustration, what we are learning seems beyond our capabilities. Giving in to these feelings, we unconsiously quit on ourselves before we actually give up.

When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient. Assuming your practice proceeds at a steady level, over days and weeks certain elements of the skill become hardwired. Slowly, the entire skill becomes internalized, part of your nervous system. The mind is no longer mired in the details, but can see the larger picture. It is a miraculous sensation and practice will lead you to that point, no matter the talent level you are born with. Trusting this will all happen, you will allow the natural learning process to move forward, and everything else will fall into place.

Move toward resistance and pain

Path of amateurs. To attain mastery, you must adopt what we call resistance practice. The principle is simple, you go in the opposite direction of all yournatural tendencies when it comes to practice.

• First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic, you see your work as if through the eyes of others. You recognize your weakness, precisely the elements you are not good at.
• Second you resist the lure of easing up on your focus. You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two.

Apprentice yourself in failure

When a mchine malfunctions you do not take it personally or grow despondent. It is in fact a bleesing in diguise. Such malfunctions generally show you inherent flaws and means of improveent. You simply keep thinkering until you get it right. Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education.

There are 2 kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second  kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit taht you take to your reputation is greatly outweighted by what you learn.

Advance trough trial and error

You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are takingfull advantage of the openness of information the knowledge about skills now at your disposal. You see what kind of work suits you and what you want to avoid at all cost.

The Alchemy of knowledge

The best mentors are often those who have wide knowledge and experience, and are not overly specialized in their field. they can train you to think on a higher level and to make connections between different forms of knowledge.

You will want as much personal interaction with the mentor as possible. A virtual relationship is never enough. There are cues and subtle aspects you can only pick up through a person to person interaction, such as a way of doing things that has evolved through much experience. These patterns of action are hard to put into words, and can only be absorbed through much personal exposure.

Gaze deep into the mentor’s mirror

To reach mastery requires some toughness and a constant connection to reality. As an apprentice, it can be hard for us to challenge ourselves on our own in the properway, and to get a clear sense of our own weakness.The times that we live in make this even harder. Developing discipline through challenging situation and perhaps suffering along the way are no longer values that are promoted in our culture.

Masterare those who by nature have suffered to get to where they are. They have experienced endless criticsms of their work, doubts about their progress, setbacks along the way. They know in their bones what is required to get to the creative phase and beyond. As mentors, they alone can gauge the extent of our progress, the weaknesses in our character, the ordeals we must go through to advance.

Transfigure their ideas

To learn from mentors, we must be open and completely receptive to their ideas. We must fall under their spell. But if we take this too far, we become so marked by their influence that we have no internal space to incubatee and develop our own voice, and we spend our lives tied to ideas that are not our own. The solution is subtle :  Even as we listen and incorporate the ideas of our mentors, we must slowly cultivate some distance from them. We begin by gently adapting their ideas to our circumstances, alter them to fit our style and inclinations. As we progress we can become bolder, even focusing on faults or weaknesses in some of their ideas. We slowly mold their knowledge into our own shape. As we grow in confidence and contemplate our independence, we can even grow competitive with the mentor we once worshipped.

If you are forced into the path of nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor, you must follow edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit. You try to apply your knowledge in some form of experiment or practice. You find for yourself second degree mentors in the form of public figures who can serve as role model. Reading and reflecting on their experiences, you can gain some guidance. You try to make their ideas come to life, internalizing their voice. As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences, giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery.

Thinking inside

You will continue to have problems in attaining social intelligence until you come to the realization that your view of people is dominated by the Naive perspective. You can reach this awareness by reviewing your past, paying particular attention to any battles, mistakes, tensions, or disappointments on the social front. If you look at these events through the lens of the Naive perpective, you will endured from them, the slights or injuries you felt. Instead you must turn this around and begin with yourself, how you saw in others qualities they did not possess. With this new awareness and attitude in place, you can begin to advance in your apprenticeship in social intelligence. This intelligence consists of two components, both equally important to master.

1. There is what we shall call specific knowledge of human nature, namely the ability to read people, to get a feel for how they see the world, and to understand their individuality.
2. There is the general knowledge of human nature, human behavior that transcendus as individuals, including some of the darker qualities we often disregard.

Specific Knowledge - reading people

To begin this process, you need to train yourself to pay less attention to the words that people say and greater attention to their tone of voice, the look in their eye, their body language, all signals that might reveal a nervousness or excitement that is notexpressed verbally. If you can get people to become emotional, they will reveal a lot more.

Being able to place yourself to any degree in the mindset of others is a brilliant means of loosening up your own thought process, which will tend to get locked into certain ways of seeing things. Your ability to empathize with others is related to the creative process of feeling your way into the subject you are studying. This intuitive form of reading people becomes more effective and accurate the more you use it, but it is best to combine it with other, more conscious forms of observation. For instance you should take particular note of people’s actions and decisions. Your goal is to figure our the hidden motives behind them, which will often revolve around power. People will say all kinds of things about their motives and intentions; they are used to dessing things up with words. Their action, however, say much more about their character, about what is going on underneath the surface. In the end, your goal is to identify and pierce through to what make people unique, to understand the character and values that lie at their cores. This way you will be able to understand their motivations, foresee their actions, and recognize how best to win them to your side.

General knowledge - the seven deadly realities

Through study and observation, we must understand the nature of these seven deadly realities so that we can detect their presence and avoid triggering them in the first place. Consider the following as essential knowledge in acquiring social intelligence.

• Envy - If you have a gift for a certain skill, you should make a point of occasionally displaying some weakness in another area, avoiding the great danger of appearing too perfect, too talented. If you are dealing with insecure types, you can display great interest in their work and success. It is always wise to occasionally reveal your own insecurities, which will humanize you in other people’s eyes. You must be careful to nevermake people feel stupid in your presence. Intelligence is the most sensitive trigger point for envy. By standing out too much, you will spark this ugle emotion, and best to maintain a nonthreatening exterior and to blend in well with the group, at least until you are so successfull it no longer matter.
• Conformism - Think of the workplace as a kind of theater in which you are always wearing a mask. (reserve your most interesting and colorful thoughts for your friends, and for those whom you can trust outside work.) Be careful in what you say, it is not worth the bother of freely expressing your opinions. People will not acknowledge the cause of their disaffection, because they do not want to think of themselves as conformists. They will find some other reason to ostracize or sabotage you. Do not give them material for this kind of attack.
• Rigidity -People do not advertise their rigidity. You will only trip up aganst it if you try to introduce a new idea or procedure. If you press your case with logic and reason, you will tend to make them even more defensive and resistant. If you are an adventurous open-minded type, your very spirit will prove disruptive and upsetting. If you are not aware of the dangers of butting up against this fear of the new, you will create all sorts of hidden enemies, who will resort to anything to conserve the old order. It is useless to fight against people’s rigid ways, or to argue against their irrational concepts. You will only waste time and make yourself rigid in the process. The best strategy is to simply accept rigidity in others, outwardly displaying deference to their need for order. On your own, however, you must work to maintain your open spirit, letting go of bad habits  and deliberately cultivating new ideas.
• Self obsessiveness - When it is time to ask for a favor or help, you must tink first of appealing to people’s self-interest in some way. You must look at the world through their eyes, getting a sense of their needs. You must give them something valuable in exchange for helping you. In general, in your interactions with people, find a way to make the conversations revolve around them and their interest, all of which will go far to winning them to your side.
• Laziness - be wary of people who want to collaborate, they are often trying to find someone who will do the heavier lifting for them. Keep your ideas to yourself, or conceal enough of the details so that it is not possible to steal them. If you are doing work for a superior, be prepared for them to take full credit and leave your name out, but do not let this happen with colleagues.
• Flightiness - It is best to cultivate both distance and a degree of detachment from other people’s shifting emotions so that you are not caught up in the process. Focus on their actions, which are generally more consistent, and not on their words. Do not take so seriously people’s promises or their ardor in wanting to help you. If they come through, so much the better, but be prepared for the more frequent change of heart. Rely upon yourself to get things done and you will not be disappointed.
• Passive Aggression - When dealing with this low-level variety in others, you can call them on their behaviour and make them aware of it, which can often work. Or, if it is truly harmless, simply ignore it. Sometimes you are confused because you suspect sabotage or obstruction, but they present such a friendly or benign exterior. Discard the exterior and focus only on their actions and you will have a clearer picture. If they evade you and delay necessary action on something important to you, or make you seem like an accident, you are most likely under a passive-aggressive attack. You have on of two options : either get out of their way and leave their presence, or return the attack with something equally indirect, signaling in some subtle way that messing with you will come with a price. This will often discourage them and make them find another victime. At all cost, avoid entangling yourself emotionally in their dramas and battles. They are masters at controlling the dynamic, and you will almost always lost in the end.

The human brain is an interconnected organ, which is in turn interconnected with our bodies. Our brains developed in tandem with our expanding powers as social primates. The refinement of mirror neurons for the purpose of better communication with people became equally applied to other forms of reasoning. The ability to think inside objects and phenomena is an integral part of scientific creativity.

The ability to think inside other people is no different from the intuitive feel masters gain in relation to their field of study. To develop your intellectual powers at the expense of the social is to retard your own progress to mastery, and limit the full range of your creative powers.

Speak through your work

Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence. By being efficient and detail oriented in what you do, you demonstrate that you are thinking of the group at large and advancing its cause. By making what you write or present clear and easy to follow, you show your care for the audience or public at large. By involving other people in your projects and gracefully accepting their feedback, you reveal your comfort with the group dynamic. Work that is solid also protects you from the political conniving and malevolence of others, it is hard to argue witht he results you produce. By remaining focused and speaking socially through your work, you will both continue to raise your skill level and stand out among all the others who make a lot of noise but produce nothing.

Craft the appropriate persona

People will tend to judge you based on your outward appearance. If you are not careful and simply assume that it is best to be yourself, they will begin to ascribe to you all kinds of qualities that have little to do with who you are but correspond to what they want to see. All of this can confuse you, make you feel insecure, and consume your attention. Internalizing their judgement, you will find it hard to focus on your work. You never settle on one image or give people the power to completely figure you out. You are always one step ahead of the public.

You must see the creation of a persona as a key element in social intelligence, not something evil or demoic. We all wear masks in the social arena, playing different roles to suit the different environments we pass through. You are simply becoming more consious of the process. think of it as a theater. In this diverse, multicultural world, it is best that you learn how to mingle and blend into all types of environements, giving yourself maximum flexibility.

Suffer fools gladly

In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what is important, and ignoring them if you can. The height of wisdom, however, is to take this even further and to actually exploit their foolishness, using them for material for your work, for example by looking for ways to turn their actions to your advantage.

If you simply do not have the patience that is required for managing and mastering the more subtle and manipulative sides of human nature, then your best answer is to keep yourself away from those situations as best as possible.

Second transformation

Masters not only retain the spirit of the original mind, but they add it their years of appreticeship and an ability to focus deeply on problems or ideas. This leads to high-level creativity. Although they have profound knowledge of a subject, their minds remain open to alternative ways of seeing and approching problems. They are capable of thinking beyond words, visually, spatially, intuitively, and have a greater access to preverbal and unconsious forms of mental activity, all of which can account for their surprising ideas and creations.

We all ppossess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveal such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude.

The Dimensional mind has two essential requirements: one, a high level of knowledge about a field or subject; and two, the openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways. Once the mind is freed from having to learn these basics, it can focus on higher, more creative matters.

To awaken the Dimensional mind and move through the creative process requires 3 essential steps: first, choosing the proper creative task, the kind of activity that will maximize our skills and knowledge; second, loosening and opening up the mind through certain creative strategis and third creating the optimal mental conditions for a breakthrough or insight. Finally, throughout the process we must also be aware of emotional Pitfalls, complacency, boredom, grandiosity and the like, that continually threaten to derail or block our progress.

Step one: The creative task

You must begin by altering your very concept of creativity and by trying to see it from a new angle. People associate creativity with something intellectual, a particular way of thinking. The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self, our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds. You must have patience and faith that what you are doing will yield something important. You could have the most brilliant mind, teeming with knowledge andideas, but if you choose the wrong subject or problem to attact, you can run out of energy and interest.

The primary law of the creative dynamic that you must engrave deeply in your mind and never forget: your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster result and in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. You must never simply embark on any creative endeavor in you field, placing faith in your own brilliance to see it through. You must make the right, the perfect choice for your energies and your inclinations.

Step two: Creative Strategies

Think of the mind as a muscle that naturally tightens up over time unless it is consciously worked upon. What causes this tightening is twofold. First, we generally prefer to entertain the same thoughts and ways of thinking because they provide us with a sense of consistency and familiarity. Sticking with the same methods also saves us a lot of effort. We are creatures of habit. Second, when ever we work hard at a problem or idea, our minds naturally narrow their focus because of the strain and effort involved. The only antidote is to enact strategies to loosen up the mind and let in alternative ways of thinking.

Cultivate Negative Capability

All Masters possess this negative capability and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive.

To put negative capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. You seek out what unfamiliar, for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth.

Allow for serendipity

To help yourself to cultivate serendipity, you should keep a notebook with you at all times. The moment any idea or observation comes, you note it down. You keep the notebook by your bed, careful to record ideas thatcome in those moments of fringe awareness, just before falling asleep, or just upon waking. In this notebook you record any scrap of thought that occurs to you and include drawings, quotes from other books, anything at all. In this way you will have the freedom to try out the most absurd ideas.

Alter your perspective

The mind can be trained to loosen itself up and move outside the grooves. To do this you must become aware of the typical patterns your mind falls into and how you can break out of these patterns and alter your perspective through consious effort.  Once you engage in this process, you will be astonished at the ideas and creative powers it will unleash.

• Looking at the “what” instead of the “how”
• Rushing to generalities and ignoring details
• Confirming paradigms and ignoring anomalies
• Fixating on what is present, ignoring what is absent

As you work to free up your mind and give it the power to alter its perspective, remember the following: the emotions we experience at any time have an inordinate influence on how we perceive the world. If we feel afraid, we tend to see more of the potential dangers in some action. If we feel particularly bold, we tend to ignore the potential risks. What you must do then is not only alter your mental perpective, but reverse your resistance and setback in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is quite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you touger and more aware of the flaws you need to correct.

Revert to primal forms of intelligence

This use of images, diagrams, and models can help reveal to you patterns in your thinking and new directions you can take that you would find hard to imagine exclusively in words. With your idea exteriorized in a relatively simple diagram or model. you can see your entire concept projected at once, which will help you organize masses of information and add new dimensions to your concept.

Creative people do not simply think in words, but use all of their senses, their entire bodies in the process. They find sense cues that simulate their thoughts on many levels, whether it be the smell of something strong, or the tactile feel of a rubber ball. What this means is that they are more open to alternative ways of thinking, creating and sensing the worlds. They allow themselves a broader range of sense experience. You must expand as well your notion of thiking and creativity beyond the confines of words and intellectualizations. Stimulating your brain and senses from all directions will help unlock your natural creativity and help revive your original mind.

Step 3 : The creative breakthrough - tension and insight

The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Our lack of intensity makes it hard for the brain to jolt into a higher gear. The connections do not occur.For this purpose you must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured. Faced with slenderest amount of time to reach the end, the mind rises to the level you require. Ideas crowd upon one another. Every day represents an intense challenge, and every morning you wake up with original ideas and associations to push you along.

The Authentic voice

The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash. What happens in such a case is that you do not master the basicsl you have no real vocabulary at your disposal. What you mistake for being creative and distinctive is more likely an imitation of other people’s style, or personal rantings that do not really express anything. Audiences, however, are hard to fool. They feel the lack of rigor, the imitative quality, the urge to get attention, and they turn their backs, or give the mildest prase that quickly passes. The best route is to love learning for its own sake. Anyone who would spend ten years absorbing the techniques and conventions of their field, trying them out,ploring and personalizing them, would inevitably find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive.

The fact of great yield

You must read journals and books from all different fields. Sometimes you will find an interesting anomaly in an unrelated discipline that may have implications for your own. You must keep your mind completely open, no item is too small or unimportant to escape your attention. Better to look into ten such facts, with only one yielding a great discovery, than to look into twenty ideas that bring success but have trivial implications. You are the supreme hunter, ever alert, eyes scanning the landscape for the fact that will expose a once-hidden reality, with profound consequences.

Mechanical intelligence

Mechanical intelligence is not a degraded form of thinking, as compared to abstract reasoning. It is in fact the source of many of our reasoning skills and creative powers. Our brain develop to its present size because of the complex operations of our hands.The principles behind mechanical intelligence can be summarized as follows: whatever you are creating or desingning, you must test and use it yourself. Separating out the work will make you lose touch with its functionality. Through intense labor on your part, you gain a feel for what you are creating. In the end, you win through superior craftsmanship, not marketing. This craftmanship involves creating something with an elegant, simple structure, getting the most our of your materials, a high form of creativity.

The high end

You must make this a model for your own work as well. Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger, a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. When ever you work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place. By constantly reminding yourself of your purpose, you will prevent yourself from fetishizing certain techniques or from becoming overly obsessed with trivial details. In this way you will play into the natural strengths of the human brain, which wants to look for connection on higher and higher levels.

The evolutionary hijack

What constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit. When we see or experience something we must be able to look at it from several angles, to see other possibilities beyond the obvious ones. We imagine that the objects around us can be used and co-opted for different purposes. We do not hold on to our original idea out of sheer stubbornness, or because our ego is tied up with its rightness. Instead we move with what presents itself to use in the moment, exploring and exploiting different branches and contingencies. The difference then is not in some initial creative power of the brain, but in how we look at the world and the fluidity with which we can reframe what we see. Creativity and adaptability are inseparable.

Alchemical creativity and the unconscious

To create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention  requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. Drugs and madness only destroy such powers. Do not fall for the romantic muths and cliches that abound in culture about creativity, offering us the excuse or panacea that such powers can come cheaply. When you look at the exceptionally creative work of masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured. Creative enery is the fruit of such efforts and nothing else.

The third transformation

In all cases of rational thinking, we can reconstruct the various steps that were taken to arrive at some kind of conclusion or answer. This form of thinking is extremely effective and has brought us great powers. We developed it to help make sense of our world and to gain some control over it. The process that people go through when they arrive at an answer through rational analysis can generally be examined and verified, which is why we esteem it so highly. We prefer things that can be reduced to a formula and described in precise words. But the types of intuitions discussed by various masters cannot be reduced to a formula, and the steps they took to arrive at them cannot be reconstructed.

It would be misconception, however, to imagine that masters are simply following their intuitions and moving beyond rational thinking. First, it is through all of their hard work, the depth of their knowledge, and the development of their analytical skills that they reach this higher form of intelligence. Second, when they experience thisintuition or insight, they invariably subject it to a high degree of reflection and reasoning. In science, they must spend months or years verifying their intuitions. In the arts, they must work out the ideas that come to them intuitively and rationally shape them into a form. This is hard for us to imagine, because we find intuition and rationality mutually exclusive, but in fact at this high level they operate together in a seamless fashion. The reasoning of masters is guided by intuition. their intuition springs from intense rational focus. The two are fused.

You must also maintain a sense of destiny, and feel continously connected to it. You are unique, and there is a purpose to your uniqueness. You must see every setback, failure, or hardship as a trial along the way, as seeds that are being planted for further cultivation, if you know how to grow them. No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience. By constantly applying yourself to the subject that suits your inclinations and attacking it from many different angle, you are simply enriching the ground for these seeds to take root. You may not see this process in the present, but it is happening. Never losing your connection to your Life’s task, you will unconsciously hit upon the right choices in your life. Over time, mastery will come to you.

The roots of master intuitions

This intuitive form of intelligence was developed to help us process complex layers of information and gain a sense of the whole. And in the world today, the need to attain such a level of thinking is more critical than ever before. To follow any career path is difficult, and requires the cultivation of much pationce and discipline. We have so many elements to master that it can be intimadating. We must learn to handle the technical aspect, the social and political gamesmanship, the public reactions to your already-daunting quantity of study the vast amounts of information now available to use, and that we must keep on top of, it all seems beyond our capability.

We must learn how to quiet the anxiety we feel whenever we are confronted with anything that seems complex or chaotic. In our journey from apprenticeship to mastery we must patiently learn the various parts  and skills that are required, never looking too far ahead. In moment of perceived crisis, we must develop the habit of mainting our cool and never overreacting. If the situation is complex and others are reaching for simple black and white answers, or for the usual conventional responses, we must make a point of resisting such a tempation.

The problem that technology presents us is that it increases the amount of information at our disposal, but slowly degrades the power of our memory to retain it. Tasks that used to exercise the brain , remembering phone numbers, doing simple calculation, navigating and remembering streets in a city, are now performed for us, and like any muscle the brain can grow flabby from disuse. To counteract this, in our spare time we should not simply look for entertainment and distractions. We should take up hobbies, that bring p;easure but also offer us the chance to strengthen our memory capacities and the flexibility of our brain.

The return to reality

The ultimate distinction you make is between yourself and the world. There is the inside and theres the outside. But every time you learn something, your brain is altered as new connections are formed. Your experience of something that occurs in the world physically alters your brain. The boundaries between you and the world are much more fluid than you might imagine. When you move toward mastery, your brain becomes radically altered by the years of practice and active experimentation. It is no longer the ecosystem of years gone by. The brain of a master is so richly interconnected that it comes to resemble the phusical world, and become a vibrant ecosystem in which all forms of thinking associate and connect.

Connect to your environment - primal power

The ability to connect deeply to your environment is the most primal and in many ways the most powerful form of mastery the brain can bring us. It applies equally well to the waters of micronesia as it does to any modern field or office. We gain such power by first transforming ourselves into consummate observers. We see everything in our surroundings as a potential sign to interpret. Nothing is taken at face value.

Play to your strength - primal focus

Achieving mastery in life often depends on those first steps that we take. It is not simply a question of knowing deeply our Life[s task, but also of having a feel for our own ways of thinking for perpectives that are unique to us. A deep level of empathy for animals or for certain types of people may not seem like a skill or an intellectual strenth, but in truth it is. Empathy plays an enormous role in learning and knowledge. Mastery is like swimming, it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. Know your strengths and move with them

Transform yourself through practice - the fingertip feel

The ability to master complicated skills by building connections in the brain is the product of millions of years of evolution, and the source of all of our material and cultural powers. When we sense the possible unity of mind and body in the early stages of practice, we are buing guided toward this power. it is the powers through repetition. To lose our connection to this natural inclination is the height of madness, and will lead to a world in which no one has the patience to master complex skills. As individuals we must resist such a trend and venerate the transformative powers we gain through practice.

Submit to the other - the inside our perspective

We can never really experience what other people are experiencing. We always remain on the outside looking in, and this is the cause of so many misunderstandings and conflicts. But the primal source of human intelligence comes from the development of mirror neurons, which gives us the abiity to place ourselves in the skin of another and imagine their experience. Through continual exposure to people and by attemting to think inside them we can gain an increasing sense of their perpective, but this requires effort on our part. Our natural tendency to project onto other people our own beliefs and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware. When it comes to studying another culture, it is only through the use of our empatic powers and by participating in their lives that we can begin to overcome these natural projections and arrive at the reality of their experience. To do so we must overcome our great fear of the other and the unfamiliarity of their ways. We must enter their belief and value systems, their guiding myths, their way of seeing the world. Slowly, the distorted lens through which we first viewed them starts to clear up.