Labeling things gives you power and control over them. Labeling people does the same. p. 20
“It is best to prove things by actual experiment. Then you know; whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you will never get educated. ..And it is delightful to have it that way; it makes the world so interesting. – Connect head on with reality YOURSELF to discover your truths. P. 48
Eve: “Yes, I know it, but how vexatious it is. Just because I can’t know, I all the more want to know.” Be what they can’t have. Give em bite sizes to the story and always wanting more. Keep secrets from them, tease them with it and make them EARN access to that truth and vulnerability. Makes them feel so much better cuz they earned it and they believe no other girl gets to know it. They feel special, significant, excited…but then add on another disqualifier or piece to fractionate them even deeper into the trance. P. 57
Love is illogical. Good. P. 69
There is no such thing as value. We were made “enough” for each other. Period. You choose your own value, and then your frame penetrates all others and vacuums them into it. P. 70
Babies have the strongest frames.
“Persistence is one of the talents.” P. 95
You are YOU, wherever you are. Feel your core, let it shone through. P. 109
Best way to describe a rainy day: “Nature has the look of trying to keep from breaking down and sobbing, poor old thing.”
Mastery – Robert Greene
When you’re creating new programs, trainings or teachings, you naturally become more alive, more energized, more focused, more directive, decisive, more influential. You become THE CAUSE, no the effect. Your mind focuses and penetrates to the core of something real, you connect even deeper to reality. P.1 and 3
Masters return to the childlike state, their works displaying degrees of spontaneity and access to the unconscious, but at a much higher level than the child. P. 4
The brain the we possess is the work of more than 6 million years of evolution , and was designed to lead us to mastery, the latent power within all of us.
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his though, because it is his.” Beast knows best. Trust yourself and your faculties to carry you through and on, and act boldly. Get the girl or the story AND lesson. Win-win either way. P. 10
The word genius originally referred to the guardian spirit that watched over the birth of each person, and later it referred to the innate qualities that make each person uniquely gifted. P.12
People who are passive create a mental landscape that is rsther barren. Because they’renot experiencing or taking action, all kinds of connections in their brain die off from lack of use. Pushing against the passive trend of these times, you must work to see how far you can extend control of your circumstances and create the kind of mind you desire (the mind that does and says exactly what it feels and believes with dominance, conviction, playfulness, challengingness, persuasion, inspiration and leading marksmanship) – not through drugs but through action. P.14
In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself. Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment you rest, thiking you have attained the level you desire, a aprt of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others will sense it. This is a power and intelligence that you want to continually renew, eternally. P 17
P. 20 – My gifts
Leonardo’s inner spirit cimpelled him to an extreme of boldness – all to discover the essence of life itself…it wasn’t to be found in the first 98% of people.. p. 24
“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-eomployed life brings a blessed death.” P. 25
Our natural uniqueness is a force from wiuthin us that comes from a place deeper than conscious words can express. By drawing us to certain experiences and away from others, they influence who we become in very particular ways. This primal uniqueness naturally wants to assert and express itself, but some experience it more strongly than others (or allow it to feel that way more than others – these people deep down know this spirits yearning to be the greatest force on earth and treat it as such). With Masters it is so strong that it feels like something that has its own external reality – a force, a voice, destiny. P. 26
In order to master a field, you must love the subject and and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious. It is your religion, it is your world, it is your passion, you love it and want to be around it all the time. P. 31
No good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. P. 42
Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Maybe its because their calling comes through so clearly in everything they do and everything they say, and because they are so loyal to it. They’re unapologetically obsessed and extremely excited/passionate/playful about ALL OF IT. P. 46
The principle of apprenticeship is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, or a title, or a diploma, or a good position…it is the transformation of your mind and character – the first transformation on your way to mastery. P. 55
You MUST move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. P.55
Emptying himself of any preconceptions about life and its origins, Darwin trained himself to see thiings as they are. For him to see evolution, in the face of all the socially-accepted and conditioned norms is fucking amazing, admirable and makes me hard. P.58
We learn best through watching, imitating and repetition, learning from our successes and mistakes along the way, making the necessary adjustments and tweaks along the way to mastering the skill. Once you take this far enough, you reach a new cycle of accelerated returns, where getting so good at makes you want to do it more and you do it all the time and get better and better at it. P.61
Soon your sense of pleasure becomes redefined. What offers immediate pleasure seems like a distraction, and real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, gaining fluency in your skills and experiencing the power this brings. Boredom then signifies the need for new challenges to conquer, not distraction.p.62
Often you must force youtself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready. Fuck it, let’s do it. P. 63
You must value learning, specifically the hands on kind, more than anything else. This will also set the stage for your creative expansion. P.67
The paradox of the mind is that it can travel anywhere, across time and space. It can help you do awesome, and it can hurt you do shitty. P. 68
Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion. Keep moving, with clear, big picture direction. Whenever you feel like you are settling into some circle, force yourself to shake things up and look for new challenges. With your physical world expanding and your social world expanding, your mind will expand and redfine the limits of your apparent world. P.71
Put yourself in the situations that make you uncomfortable or uncertain over and over until they BECOME comfortable. Trust the process. When you trust the process, you trudge on well pasdt the point at which others normally slow down or mentally quit. P77
You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two. In devising your own routines, you become as creative as possible. You invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses. You give yourself arbitrary deadlines to meet certain standards, constantly pushing yourself past perceived limits. In this way, you develop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others. P.81
Don’t fake nice, don’t fake mailicious, BE REAL. ALWAYS.
Poor is the apprentice who does not surpass his master. –Leo Vinci p. 119
In an apprentice ship, like pacquaio, you bring the utmost in your neutral admiration and your total attention. Gaining their respect for how teachable you are, they will fall a bit under your spell. You set the tone with your hunger to learn. Once a back-and-forth dynamic is sparked, the relationship has almost limitless potential for learning and absorbing power. P.122
Complete and radical acceptance of human nature must be your foundation of action and planning. P. 130
The Naïve perspective is a total lack of connection with people, refusing to see them for who they really are. P. 130
Train yourself to see, accept and influence the person in front of you the way they really are.
You are an observer of the human comedy (“everything is amusing”) and by operating with supreme acceptance, you gain a much greater ability to understand people and to influence their behavior when necessary. P.137
Actions say much more about someones character than their words. They’ve been unconsciously trained their whole lives to say what they think people want to hear. This if, of course, living in reaction. P. 139
Take special note of how people respond to stressful situations – often the mask they wear in public falls off in the heat of the moment. P. 139
It is often against human nature, particularly as we get older, to consider alternative ways of thinking or doing things. We develop a fear of the new. It takes away from the illusion of control you’ve constructed (ironic, eh?). Accept this in others, but on your own, you must work to maintain your open spirit, continuing to cultivate your sponatenous, adventurous, directionally-intentioned spirit. P. 143
It is best to cultivate both distance and a degree of detachment from othern people’s shifting, reactionary emotions so that you are not caught up in their process. Focus on their actions over time over their words. Actions will just about always be consistent. P. 145
When it comes to a product or making money, all that matters is the end result. How much money did it/will it make you?
Even though everyone else condemns him, its impossible not to admire Don Giovanni as he remains unrepentant to the end, laughing all the way to the end and refusing to submit to authority. P. 175
The human mind is is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas, learning and adapting towards truth and success along the way. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our own apprenticeship. We become afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. What this means is that we equally possess the potential to spark this innate creative force back to life, no matter how old we are. Experiencing a return of this creative force has a an immensely therapeutic effect on our spirits and on our career. P. 177
As you emerge from your apprenticeship and enter your creative journey of rise, you must force yourself in the opposite direction of the natural pull back to center with the riff raff. As you emerge from your apprenticeship, you must become increasingly bold. P .168
You must let go of your need for comfort and security. Think of yourself as an explorer. You cannot find anything new if you are unwilling to leave the shore. P. 181
The task that you choose to work on must have an obsessive element. It must connect to something deep within you. P. 179
Go into observer mode whenever you need to really detach, course correct, reflect and see the long, higher picture. P. 184
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” Why you prepare, study and internalize then let it go, trust your faculties, and freely express intent. This is how genius can come out, and usually does. P. 185
We routinely look for patterns in the world that confirm the paradigms we already believe in. The things that do not fit the paradigm – the anomalies – tend ot be ignored or explained away. In truth, anomalies themselves contain the richest information. Why is it that w/ all the girls I somehow end up talking about guys with small penises and the truth that size does matter, fucking duh, they become super horny and literally attack me? P. 193
You must learn how to imagine more possibilities than you generally consider, being as loose and radical and unapologetically awesome with this process as you can. P. 195
If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them. But you weren’t born speaking English. You were given it as a tool, just like any other tool. Language is a tool that is often too tight and constricting compared to the multilayered powers of intelligence we naturally possess. Einstein Edison and Ford thought in visual terms and 3-D models. Tesla would visualize in minute detail a machine and all of its working parts, which he would then proceed to invent according to what he had imagined. Through an image we can simultaneously imagine many things at once, at a glance. The use of images to make sense of the world is perhaps our most primitive form of intelligence, and can help us conjure up ideas that we can later verbalize. Try what its like to see/feel the entire event as you want at once. Images and movies mean a lot to our brains in their manifestation in the physical world. P. 197
The hand-brain connection is something deeply wired within us. Draw. It will help you think in different patterns than you normally do, which will allow you to go all kinds of creative badass. To Leo Vinci, drawing and thinking were synonomous. P. 198
Really push through and adapt deeper and deeper, and thenw hen you truly hit that ‘relativity point’ like albert, completely let it go. Relax, and do other fun, new stimulating shit. Then, answers flow. P. 200
Curiosity. Presence. Wonder. Awesomeness. P. 202
Creativity by its nature is an act of boldness and rebellion. You are playing with the very rules you have learned, experimenting and testing the boundaries. The world is dying for bolder ideas, for people who are not afraid to speculate and investigate. Make creativity rather than comfort your goal. P. 203
Your internal standards and your high degree of independence must come first. P. 203
Without realizing it, we alter and shape our work to attract the praise that we crave. We fail to remember the element of luck that always goes into success – there is always an element of being in the right place at the right time that begets success. Always an element of randomness in success. What must ultimately motivate you is the work itself and the process. Public attention is actually a nuisance and a distraction. Ego stroking is just the spice on the fucking steak. P. 204
In the end, the most satisfying and powerful way to feel this deep connection to reality is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we marking something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves. Bold, rebellious unapologetic creative action is most satisfying. P. 205
Curiosity is its own reason. Stay a kid. Stay curious. Have fun for the sake of having fun. Give yourself permission to get lost in the moment and just play, carefree and intent on adventure. P. 205
By expressing his deepest self and his most primitive emotions so freely and authentically, he elicited a deep, visceral effect on his listeners that stuck with them, that moved them. By doing this, he created the soul boner in others. P. 209
Although you are beginning within a particular field that you understand deeply, you must not allow your mind to become tethered to this discipline. Instead you must read journals and books from all different fields. If an apparent anomaly calls into question your own beliefs or assumptions, so much the better. You must speculate on what it could mean, this speculation guiding your subsequent research but not determining your conclusions. If what you have discovered seems to have PROFOUND ramifications, you must pursue it with utmost intensity. Better to look into 10 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 thje fact that eill expose a once-hidden reality with profound consequences. P. 214
Pushing boundaries, multiple test runs (and moving up the learning curve with each one), taking chances and field experience over and over is the ultimate teacher. P. 219
The projects would take root in his mind with some emotion or idea, and slowly grow through the drawings, always alive and as fluid as life itself, like the stages of a plant leading to a flower. The seed knows exactly what it will become. Not 98, not 99…100% belief. Total trust in the process and a clear vision/feeling of where its going. P. 223
Imagine yourself years inb the future looking back at what you have done. From that future vantage point, the extra months and years you devoted to the process will not seem painful or laborious at all. In truth, they’ll look, feel and smell fucking glorious. Smell that shit bitch. P. 224
Everything they taught her she had a away of transforming into something sharper and more aggressive. Express your truth boldly FOR how good it makes YOU feel, for the self state-pump you ALWAYS get from it. This shit is easy. P .225
The torso as the “house of truth”. In body language, the whats going on in the ventral area is full of honest signals and communication and can almost always be trusted. P .226
If you’re actions are not eliciting strong emotions (positive or negative), you’re not acting powerfully and you’re not expressing truth. You’re expressing mediocrity. Only be that CAUSE (be the cause) strong emotions fron others are acting powerfully. P. 227
Creativity is not a “big idea”. It’s a flow of fluid, forward, always resilient adapting action over time - it usually ends up looking like the crooked upward branching of the tree. P .236
Seduction is not rigid. There’s always a randomness (called she’s a human being with real thoughts. They may not be amazing thoughts (common), or they may be fucking awesome (less common), but nevertheless…they will always be there) and this begets a constantly changing, charging flow of energy that can and will be influence and directed. Your ability to exert your frame will strongly influence what outcome that influence brings. P. 242
To see and connect with as close to real, objective reality is what it took for Darwin to see evolution. He saw the truth in the face of an entire world and upbringing that taught and believed an opposite of what he found, of what objective reality was telling him and everyone else everyday, forever, from the very start. His commitment to truth, to REALITY and to unfolding his own UNIQUE SPIRIT was the only reason he was able to see, feel and embrace it completely. p. 188
They internalize and re-hardwire themselves the way their unique spirit directs, so it all becomes intuition based on years of rational focus, study, practice and rising to the singularity point of the learning/internalization curve. P. 259
Do you know any countries that claims one thing but goes the other way entirely? Like Freedom of Speech in America then using mind control and media and an oppressive code of political correctness and quiet or loud judgements from their unconscious social robots to to influence expression down down down and to their will. Yeah. Fuck that shit with a fat ass dildo. P. 245
If you’er going thru the motions, it’s not worth it. At all points in the various moments leading to mastery, we attack with intensity. Every moment, every experience contains deep lessons for us. We are continuously awake, never going thru the motions. Should you ever feel like you’re in the motions (which will happen, think contraction and expansion), take time off and away allow full expansion and re-energizing to fully supercompensate. (This is just like long term periodization and recovery in training, see supercompensation effect in weight training.) p .260
Like Proust, you must also maintain a sense of destiny and feel continuously 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. 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 rom tons of 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, primitive or high level, is driven by memory., stored in mnemonic networks in the brain. The stability and durability of these netowrks depends on 1. Repetition (hitting it hard and often, and not stopping) 2. intensity of experience (emotionally charged) and 3. how deeply we pay attention (what things make YOU pay attention? Deadlines, big rewards, newness etc) p. 263
Seeing things before they happen, like Larry Bird or Bobby Fischer = internalized networks at work beneath our consciousness. P. 264
The brain can grow flabby like a muscle if not exercised. Your spare time should be spent in checked-out mode. Take up hobbies that make you feel awesome but also make your brain strengthen its memory capacities and flexibility. Exercise your brain with shit that coincides in some crazy but indirect way.
“Dr. Franklin…He is 82 years old and possesses and activity of mind equal to a youth of twenty-five years of age.” P. 266
The purpose of consciousness has always been to connect us to reality (because it supports survival and replication). P. 268
Recap of Mastery process. P.268-269
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 of a Master and complex life itself represents the ultimate return to reality. P. 269
Masters have a strong inner guiding system and a high level of self-awareness. This is a frame of the world hardened and impenetrable, built up by years of focused work and intense love/self-love for themselves and what they do/what they’re working towards. P. 269
Einstein became “Einstein” because he consciously decided if he took the normal route as all the other scientists, he would be mediocre. He would beat best mediocre in the system. So he decided he’d go his own way, where his distaste for authority and conventions would be a strength, where he would unburden himself of all assumptions and attack from the outside. The underground king. Your own path, w/blinders on, is always the best choice. P. 279
In the end, all of this in the physical world is meaningless. How liberating is that! How liberating is it that you 100% get to choose every single one of your own beliefs, and exert that frame on the world and get all the references to back it up? Empowering beliefs, bitches. P. 279
We think there’s a difference between the mind and body. Ha. Is a plant separate from its roots? Mind and body are one and the same. P. 288
The fact that we can completely transform our brains and mold them to complete mastery of any skill is fucking amazing and should be seen as so. This is the lifetime journey to Jedi in your chosen field. JEDI motherfucker. P. 289
Da Vinci loved/obsessed over the details – he believed they led him deep to the truth of the creator, the source. Peoples tiny details, the ones they weren’t taught from a young age to cloak, are almost always sure fire honest signals. And to train himself , he would create all kinds of rigorous, crazy exercises to commit all the intricacies and details of the human face, for instance, to memory. He would go over them at night before bed. He was literally carving and molding himself into the reality he envisioned and desired .And of course, as always, to other artists, he seemed insane. Geniuses always seem insane to the masses (their connection to groupthink tells them to see them that way) P. 291
Seeing your work as something alive, your path to mastery is to study and absorb all these details in a universal fashion, to the point which you feel the life force and can express it effortlessly in your work. P. 294
In any competitive environment in which there are winners or losers, the person who has the wider, more global perspective will inevitably prevail. The reason is simple: such a person will be able to think beyond the moment and control the overall dynamic through careful strategizing. Moving toward mastery will naturally bring you a more global outlook, but it is always wise to expedite the process by training yourself early on to continually enlarge your perspective. P. 297
The Piraha only live or give credence to the present. That’s why their language only developed to describe the present moment. That’s why all these other people from other countries couldn’t crack the code on their language.. When I’m speaking/coaching, alive in the moment…that’s my love.
Guided by an inner force call his daemon – a spirit of restlessness that impelled him to explore beyond literature, to the core of life itself (reality). All that was necessary was to master and channel the spirit, implanted in him at birth. P. 309
Goethe epitomizes what was known in the Rennaisance as the Ideal of the Universal Man – a person steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people. That’s motherfucking power fool. When you learn deeeeeeeeply about social intelligence, nature, life – you make all these crazy connections and associations across the board, you move closer and closer to reality, grounded in it, in love with it, embodying it with the power emanating from your cultivated spirit. P. 309
As you must know by now, these voices of “To work so long at something that requires so much pain and effort, why bother? Better to enjoy my short life and do what I can to get by,” do not speak the truth. Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desire that stirs you from within. It is not ego or power that motivates you, but a deep expression of something natural, something that marked you at birth as unique. It is the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Your true self does not speak in words or banal phrases. Its voice comes from deep with you, from the substrata of your psyche, from something embedded physically within you. It emanates from your uniqueness, and it communicates through sensations and powerful desires that seem to transcend you. In following this voice you realize your own potential, and satisfy your deepest longings to create and express your uniqueness. It exists for a purpose, and it is your Life’s Task to boldly, fully bring it to fruition.
All these activities are explicable if one pictures to onself people whose thinking is aactive one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius, but none is a ‘miracle’. Genius is everything in that one clear direction with conviction and playfulness, intent and excitement/passion, free from out come, and in love with the process, eternally.