Definitely one of the greatest books I've ever read.



Greene brings together the stories of various masters over the centuries - from scientists to pilots to boxers to writers - to show how one truly masters a field. Combating the pernicious myth of the naturally-talented genius who comes out of nowhere with the world-changing idea, he shows how an intense apprenticeship is necessary for the deep insights these masters produce - even though this apprenticeship does not often take the route of a conventional education.



I feel like the pieces of this have been dancing around the edges for a long time. You see hints of it in Greene's first book, The 48 Laws of Power, and a strong feel of it is in his recent collaboration with 50 Cent, The 50th Law. But more than that, in blogs posts and things like Kirby Ferguson's video series Everything Is A Remix - our culture has some powerfully wrongheaded ideas about the natures of intelligence, creativity, power, and many other forces, and our traditional educational institutions are ill-equipped to prepare us for reality.



I do have some minor nitpicks with some of the "rational vs intuitive" parts, and Greene does have a slight tendency to mythologise certain aspects of the world - he often talks about things being "impossible to explain" (as opposed to just "difficult to explain" or "beyond the scope of this book") and he commits the naturalistic fallacy a lot - but I suspect most of this is not really a problem with the ideas, just a problem with simplifying them for a mass audience.



To quote Greene's protege, Ryan Holiday, this book is "a master studying mastery in what turns out to be a masterpiece". I cannot recommend it highly enough.