Last updated April 10, 2022

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{ Mastery

Mentorship

• Life is short, and your time for learning and creativity is limited. Without any guidance, you can waste valuable years trying to gain knowledge and practice from various sources. Instead, you must follow the example set by Masters throughout the ages and find the proper mentor. The mentor-protégé relationship is the most efficient and productive form of learning.

all that should concern you in the early stages of your career is acquiring practical knowledge in the most efficient manner possible

• Find someone who you trust to learn from

The information in books is not tailored to your circumstances and individuality; it tends to be somewhat abstract. When you are young and have less experience of the world, this abstract knowledge is hard to put into practice.

• Self-learning prevents focused feedback

• Mentors take what they’ve learned and accelerate learning

• Mentors make knowledge useful and relevant

Why do mentors mentor?

• Relive youth
• See potential
• You have your energy to influence
• Having someone look up to them

Getting a mentor

• Help mentors organize their things and knowledge pursuits
  • Requires us to have a solid work ethic and organizational skills, hunger to learn
• Just be of assistance, and aim for a personal connection

In any event, you should not feel timid in approaching Masters, no matter how elevated their position. You will be frequently surprised at how open they can be to serving as a mentor, if the fit is right and you have something to offer.

• Have more than one mentor, to continue filling in gaps
• Be sure to not be drained by mentors
• Important to have your own personal development and critical analysis of them to prevent conformity
  • Mentors help shape our own identity
  • Eventually, we should surpass them and start our own legaacy

Choose mentors according to needs + inclinations

• Carl Jung initially needed Freud to bounce ideas off of, but once he realized his distaste of his ideas, he left him
• In relation to your life’s task
• Qualities your parents didn’t give, support, confidence, direction

Gaze deep into mentor’s mirror

• Ask for true authenticity from the mentor, no matter how harsh

Transfigure their ideas

• Also add your own values and understanding, don’t just solely follow their advice

Create a back-and-forth dynamic

• Manny pacquiao story hehe
• By adapting to eachother’s needs, it results in a more intimate and open connection, reducing potential rigidness of beliefs
• Make your mentors fall in love with you through your specialties and work ethic

4 - See people as they are

Success attained without social intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last.

You must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind of nature permits, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it offhand for what it is. This is the true sense of the maxim—Live and let live…. To become indignant at [people’s] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Naive Perspective

• Like when we were a child, seeing the good in everything and rarely the bad
• Social intelligence helps us view people and relationships more realistically
  • Focusing attention outward rather than inward
  • Learn to attune yourself to other people’s energies and views

By making yourself aware of the distorting process of the Naïve Perspective, you will naturally grow less comfortable with it. You will realize that you are operating in the dark, blind to people’s motivations and intentions, vulnerable to the same mistakes and patterns that occurred in the past. You will feel your lack of real connection to other people. The desire will naturally arise from within to change this dynamic—to start looking outward instead of focusing only on your own feelings, to observe before you react.

• Instead, adopt supreme acceptance

Components of Social Intelligence

Specific knowledge of human nature

• Ability to read people
• Try to vividly imagine their perspectives
  • Underlying motives
  • Less on words, more on expression

people are in a state of continual flux. You must not let your ideas about them harden into a set impression. You are continually observing them and bringing your readings of them up to date.

General knowledge of human nature

• Overall patterns in human behavior

Seven deadly realities

Important to detect and not trigger them

• Envy
  • People who are envious may not recognize it and blame it on something else
  • Can be found in people who heavily praise you, or are heavily insecure
  • Just make sure you don’t trigger envy through your actions
    • Reveal insecurities
• Conformism
  • People will shun you if you don’t conform, so don’t boldly disagree or exude your different beliefs
    • Start showing individuality once you have made it
• Rigidity
  • Don’t bother changing other people’s rigidity, just make sure it doesn’t stain your character and beliefs
• Self-obsessiveness
  • Use it to win people over
  • Always have something in it for the other person
• Laziness
  • People who want to collaborate usually only want someone to carry them
• Flightiness
  • Words can be more bipolar due to flightiness, but actions usually stay consistent
• Passive-agression
  • You will lose if you try to play the same game, as they are experts
  • Just overall draining
• Treat social intelligence the same way mastery

Strategies for Acquiring

Show through action

• Sharing your ideas in a generally digestible yet detailed form shows that you’re interested in letting others understand your ideas
  • Invite for feedback, show that you want to hear other people’s opinions

Craft an appropriate persona

• It isn’t best to be yourself, be thoughtful of your outward appearance
• Control people’s judgements through a persona

Think of it as theater. By creating a persona that is mysterious, intriguing, and masterful, you are playing to the public, giving them something compelling and pleasurable to witness. You are allowing them to project their fantasies onto you, or directing their attention to other theatrical qualities. In your private life, you can let the mask fall.

See yourself as others see you

• We rarely authentically view our own weaknesses, and people rarely honestly tell us what we do wrong
• Look back at bad experience and see which of our actions caused it to further spiral, and see if it indicates a flaw in our character

Exploit fools

• Instead of letting short-term people drain you, either use them as negative role models, exploit their tendencies by manipulating them, just anything but let them influence you

5 - Awaken the dimensional mind: The creative-active

Mozart was confined by his father to play income-generating lively music, while on the inside he wished to express his inner, desolate emotions. He consistently mingled with other renowned musicians, and in combination with his skills, he gained the ability to have strong memory for musicial compositions and blocks. This allowed him to synthesize different blocks easily to compose new pieces.

Original mind

• Direct look at the word receptive to new information
  • Not biased or tarnished by past experiences
• As we grow older, we adopt new beliefs that somewhat solidify our take on the world, the conventional mind
• Creative minds stem from having an original mind, a playful and curious approach

Conventional mind

• Passive mind, fits new experiences to previous ones

Dimensional mind

• Creates new things instead of consuming
• Discipline and a child-like spirit
• Requirements
  • High level of knowledge about a field/subject
  • Openness and flexibility to use knowledge in new and original ways Steps to awaken

Choose proper creative task to maximize skills + knowledge

This is 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 results 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 may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it and that they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit it was created in. choose something that appeals to your sense of unconventionality and calls up latent feelings of rebelliousness. Perhaps what you want to invent or discover is being ignored or ridiculed by others

• Creative aspirations are naturally ambiguous, just be accepting

Opening up mind through creative strategies

Cultivate negative capability

• Negative capability is to negate our ego and gain humility towards knowledge
• Practice refraining yourself from judgement to just simply experience
  • Try not to form opinions
• Seek the uncomfortable

Alternate mind through the current

The Current is like a mental electrical charge that gains its power through a constant alternation. We observe something in the world that strikes our attention and makes us wonder what it might mean. In thinking about it, we devise several possible explanations. When we look at the phenomenon again we see it differently as we cycle through the various ideas we had imagined to account for it. Perhaps we conduct experiments to verify or alter our speculations. Now when we look at the phenomenon yet again, weeks or months later, we see more and more aspects of its hidden reality.

• Back and forth between our thoughts and reality

Alter perspective

• Break out of traditional patterns to see new perspectives
• Pay attention to relationships between things to see the greater picture

Attend to anomalies

• Sometimes contain the richest information

Attend to what is present and absent

• Example, what use cases of a technology are absent

Use visuals and primal cues

• Easier to remember than verbal facts
• Visuals are more concrete
• Synethesia
  • Using cues to trigger stimulation
• Creative people use all senses in the thinking process

Creative Breakthrough - Tension and Insight

• Losing that spark causes us to lose interest and want to objectively revise it
  • We are frustrated with getting nowhere, and decide to let go physically, but our unconscious mind continues to work on it
    • Brain is free from stress, back to original feeling of opennness but now equipped with our current learnings and progress
• Tension is required
  • Man was about to die in a fight, night before he pulled big brain math out of his ass
  • Related with the effect of deadlines

Emotional Pitfalls

Prevent us from seeking creativity

Complacency

• Feeling satisfied in our current progress and not wanting more. True mastery requires us to keep going

Conservatism and Inflexibility

• Sticking to previous ideas

Dependency

• After mentorship, you need to learn to be independent

Impatience

• Wanting to take shortcuts, prematurely finishing work

Strategies for Creativity

Create an authentic voice

Understand: 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 basics; 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

• Technical lock is when we are so immersed in details and specifics that we only use the same things over and over again without looking for other alternatives

• Your project or the problem you are solving should always be connected to something larger—a bigger question, an overarching idea, an inspiring goal. Whenever your work begins to feel stale, you must return to the larger purpose and goal that impelled you in the first place. This bigger idea governs your smaller paths of investigation, and opens up many more such paths for you to look into. 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 connections on higher and higher levels.

what constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit

• Think of it like a branch rather than a linear pattern, where a new connection is made upon interaction with a different stimuli
• Creativity and adaptability are inseparable.

Reading between the lines

• Things are usually categorized based on polar opposite (hot vs cold, good vs evil), but what if we decided to try to debunk and see if there were more layers to the categories?

6 - Fuse the intuitive with the rational: mastery

High Level Intuition

• Marcel was a peculiar man that had a bad reputation for having little discipline and publishing a book that was receivved poorly. However, he began to translate the works of John Ruskin, and his translations received praise. Additionally, he adopted his form of thinking, and used his knowledge paired with his previous novel attempt to craft “In Search of Lost Time”, a recollection of his own life

• high-level intuition does not involve rationality, but is more accurate and perceptive, known as the way/dynamic

  • Focusing less on the specifics and more on the whole
    • Stems from immense practice and experience, just instantaneously knowing results when stimuli come and various interactions
    • Only achieved through hard work as the next step, and such insights must be refined and reviewed
  • Cultivation
    • Internalizing information, rather than just storing
    • Marcus took books apart, analyzed, learned lessons to apply to his own life
      • Didn’t just socialize, he understood people and their motivations

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 angles, 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.

• Intuition comes from the strength of our memory and its neural connections
• When on our way to mastery, we need to
  • learn to manage anxiety during obstacles
  • practice enhancing our memory

Rationality

• True rationality is pooling different perspectives rather than specialization

When you move toward mastery, your brain becomes radically altered by the years of practice and active experimentation. It is no longer the simple ecosystem of years gone by. The brain of a Master is so richly interconnected that it comes to resemble the physical world, and becomes a vibrant ecosystem in which all forms of thinking associate and connect. This growing similarity between the brain and complex life itself represents the ultimate return to reality.

• True mastery is when we own the information ourselves

Strategies

Connect to environment

• Indigenous Oceanic people used stars, animal cues to sense their location when travelling between islands
  • All was needed was a simple glimpse, and they could also state where everything else was

Play to strengths

• Albert Einstein sucked at academia and didn’t like it, but was innately curious
• Someone with autism had strong empathetic skills with animals and used it for behavioral progress with cattle

Transform through practice - fingertip feel

• Cesar Rodriguez was an american ace that experienced flow state during one of his encounters
  • 3 minutes felt like few seconds
  • performed maneuvers perfectly, was able to improvise and come up with new thing on the spot

If we are learning a complex skill, such as flying a jet in combat, we must master a series of simple skills, one on top of the other. Each time one skill becomes automatic, the mind is freed up to focus on the higher one. At the very end of this process, when there are no more simple skills to learn, the brain has assimilated an incredible amount of information, all of which has become internalized, part of our nervous system. The whole complex skill is now inside us and at our fingertips. We are thinking, but in a different way—with the body and mind completely fused. We are transformed. We possess a form of intelligence that allows us to approximate the instinctual power of animals, but only through a conscious, deliberate, and extended practice.

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Created:: 2022-02-20