Robert Greene

I cannot disguise my disgust and contempt for the idea that honesty is the overall best strategy. Many people use some iteration of this idea, and attempt to blame the other person if they do not take it constructively.

Excerpted from Mastery (A #1 New York Times Bestseller) The path to power is surprisingly simple. For great masters like Da Vinci, Napoleon, Paul Graham, Santiago Calatrava, Thomas Edison, Temple Grandin it has always been the same.

Excerpted from Mastery (A #1 New York Times Bestseller) After your formal education, you enter the most critical phase in your life—a second, practical education known as The Apprenticeship. The dangers are many.

Worn down by work and depression, everything was tightening around her until all she could think about was her own tiny world and how sorry it had become. Soon it would be hard to imagine anything besides cleaning houses.

If all of us are born with an essentially similar brain, with more or less the same configuration and potential for mastery, why is it then that in history only a limited number of people seem to truly excel and realize this potential power?

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.

You end up choosing a career that does not really suit you. Your desire and interest slowly wane and your work suffers for it. You come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes from outside your work. Because you are increasingly less engaged in your career, you fail to pay attention to changes going on in the field–you fall behind the times and pay a price for this.