Mastery

Remember struggling to write an essay for English class when you had absolutely nothing to say but needed to fill five pages? This is exactly what this book (and most of what Robert Greene's output) is.

A book that should have stayed as a PowerPoint presentation, remained stuck in a private folder on his computer, and never shared with anyone.

I love Robert Greene. The crux of this book is that you should not look at successful people and think, “well, some people are just innate geniuses.” Greene's writing is infused with this almost Jungian sense of pneuma.
Every single person who has found sustainable and long-term success has worked incredibly hard. There is not any short-cut around this. This piece of knowledge is emancipating.
I would have liked a bit more information as to how to actually work in practice and build habits. In that way, this book is most valuable in setting you on the right track and reiterating to you that you need to do long, sustained work, and there are not any shortcuts around this. It is a book that sublimates decades of knowledge in a concise way (I occasionally skipped over some of the anecdotes) and a book I intend to be returning to for years to come.

“In our culture we tend to denigrate practice. We want to imagine that great feats occur naturally—that they are a sign of someone's genius or superior talent. Getting to a high level of achievement through practice seems so banal, so uninspiring. Besides, we don't want to have to think of the 10,000 to 20,000 hours that go into such mastery. These values of ours are oddly counterproductive—they cloak from us the fact that almost anyone can reach such heights through tenacious effort, something that should encourage us all.”

Awesome long read! A compilation of numerous masters' biography and detailed analysis of how they climbed those heights acts a guide for anyone who's intrigued about achieving mastery themselves.