Books – Page 26

1-Page Cheatsheet: Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code

Here’s my 1-page cheatsheet to Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Anything [Amazon].

WHY THE TALENT CODE

I chose this book because #1, it was recommended by Rob Kelly (a friend and mentor), and #2, I’ve always been fascinated by world-class performers of every sort

The book is about how world-class talent is developed. Coyle dives into specific “pockets” (regions, eras, and instructors) known for producing abnormally high %s of world-class athletes, artists, and performers. These pockets include Brazil + soccer, Meadowmount + classical music, and Florence + artists.

From Coyle’s website:

Daniel Coyle is the NYT bestselling author of The Little Book of Talent, The Talent Code, Lance Armstrong’s War, and Hardball: A Season in Projects…Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four children

LESSONS AND HIGHLIGHTS

1. It’s all about growing myelin

Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin…myelin is similar to another evolution-built mechanism you use every day: muscles.

2. Deep practice (which requires hard work, mental struggle, and extreme attention to detail) is required

Struggle is not optional—it’s neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly

People called the Pietà pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

Lamm conceived of a new system of bank robbery, applying military principles to what had been an artless profession. His singular insight was that robbing banks was not about guts or guns; it was about technique. Each bank job involved weeks of preparatory work. Lamm pioneered “casing,” which meant visiting the bank, sketching blueprintlike maps, and occasionally posing as a journalist to get a look at the bank’s interior operations. Lamm assigned each man on his team a well-defined role: lookout, lobby man, vault man, driver. He organized rehearsals, using warehouses to stand in for the bank. He insisted on unyielding obedience to the clock: when the allotted time expired, the gang would depart, whether or not they had the money.

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers. When I say “observing,” I’m not talking about passively watching. I’m talking about staring—the kind of raw, unblinking, intensely absorbed gazes you see in hungry cats or newborn babies

3. Highly talented pockets develop because SECRET #1: they accelerate deep practice

A. Brazilian soccer players and futsal

B. Florence and its craft guilds

As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise of a powerful social invention called craft guilds. Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality…What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years.

C. Meadowmount and its 5x increase in learning speed for elite music players

These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms. For instance, they will play a difficult passage in dotted rhythm (the horses’ hooves sound—da-dum, da-dum).

Other examples include: the Spartak Tennis academy in Moscow, the Bronte sisters, KIPP

4. Chunking is a secret to accelerated struggle

In the talent hotbeds I visited, the chunking takes place in three dimensions. First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.

As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say, “It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly.”

5. SECRET #2: Ignition

Ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say that is who I want to be

For South Korea’s golfers, it was the afternoon of May 18, 1998, when a twenty-year-old named Se Ri Pak won the McDonald’s LPGA Championship and became a national icon…Before her, no South Korean had succeeded in golf. Flash-forward to ten years later, and Pak’s countrywomen had essentially colonized the LPGA Tour, with forty-five players who collectively won about one-third of the events.

6. Long-term commitment is a huge predictor of success

With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed. “We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”

7. Great teachers are key – but they’re not what we commonly think of as great teachers

Instead, the teachers and coaches I met were quiet, even reserved. They were mostly older; many had been teaching thirty or forty years. They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student’s personality.

On John Wooden: Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity.

Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But what I saw was not patience, exactly. It was more like probing, strategic impatience.

THAT’S IT, FOLKS!

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

Hope that was useful! What could be added or changed or removed? Which books would you like me to read and summarize?

1-Page Cheatsheet: Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones

blue-zones-dan-buettner Here’s my 1-page cheatsheet to Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones: 9 Lessons For Living Longer From The People Who’ve Lived The Longest [Amazon].

Why Blue Zones

I chose this book because #1 living longer is a strong personal interest, #2 this book is frequently mentioned in longevity journalism, and #3 you can tell Dan’s genuinely enthusiastic about the subject.

In Blue Zones, Dan explores 5 regions of the world where people live much longer than the norm. His team attempts to understand why this occurs, examining everything from diet to family structure to genealogy to culture, with a focus on field research + interviews.

From Dan’s Wikipedia entry…

Dan Buettner is an American explorer, educator, author, public speaker and co-producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary who also holds three world records for endurance bicycling…during his bicycling trips, Buettner became interested in demographics and longevity and began his research into “blue zones,” his term for the regions on Earth with the longest life expectancy, disability-free life expectancy or concentration of persons over 100.

Lessons and Highlights

There are 5 blue zones. I’m going to focus on less-common advice unique to each region (eg, we all know eating vegetables is a good thing).

Zone 1: The Barbagia region of Sardinia, Italy

All the centenarians I met told me la famiglia was the most important thing in their lives—their purpose in life…some 95 percent of those who live to 100 in Barbagia do so because they have a daughter or granddaughter to care for them.

Maria estimated that her father drank a liter of Sardinian wine every day of his adult life, and more during festivals, when he tended to be the life of the party.

When compared to cow’s milk, goat’s milk delivers a powerful nutritional punch: One glass contains 13 percent more calcium, 25 percent more vitamin B6, 47 percent more vitamin A, 134 percent more potassium, and 3 times more niacin

Walk a lot, every day: shepherding offered the best profession. The work was neither stressful nor strenuous, but it did require miles and miles of walking a day.

Zone 2: Okinawa, Japan

“Eat your vegetables, have a positive outlook, be kind to people, and smile.” – Kamada

Sweet potatoes are a delicious way to pack in vitamins and minerals. High in fiber, vitamin A, potassium, vitamin C, and folic acid, “sweets” are also easy to prepare. Prick one with a fork, microwave it for about five minutes, and just season with salt and pepper.

Before each meal she takes a moment to say hara hachi bu, and that keeps her from eating too much.” “Hara hachi bu?” I repeated. “It’s a Confucian-inspired adage,” Craig chimed in. “All of the old folks say it before they eat. It means ‘Eat until you are 80 percent full.’

Okinawans eat an average of three ounces of soy products per day. Tofu, their main source of soy, may play a role in reducing the risk of heart disease. Greg Plotnikoff recommended that consumers select fermented soy products over nonfermented soy products whenever possible. “The medical literature demonstrates comparatively much better nutritional content in fermented soy,” he said.

“Roles are very important here in Okinawa. They call it ikigai—the reason for waking up in the morning.”

Zone 3: Loma Linda, California

We found that nut eaters also had a two-year advantage, which seemed to relate largely to heart disease.

Religion has provided Adventists with the extra nudge that seems crucial for turning intentions into habits. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” For Adventists, healthiness is next to Godliness.

Zone 4: Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica

Jorge Vindas, who was with me, had interviewed about 650 seniors in Nicoya and calculated that 75 percent of the men had had sex outside the marriage. He told me that Faustino was just being Nicoyan.

The Nicoyan diet featured portions of corn tortillas at almost every meal and huge quantities of tropical fruit. Sweet lemon (Citrus limetta), orange (Citrus sinensis), and a banana variety are the most common fruits throughout most of the year in Nicoya.

Zone 5: Ikaria island, Greece

One day at work, Stamatis, now in his early 60s, felt short of breath. It seemed to be happening more and more often. He fatigued quickly. Climbing stairs was a chore. Often he was forced to put down his brush by midday. His doctor took x-rays and quickly concluded that Stamatis had lung cancer, perhaps from years of inhaling paint fumes or his three-pack-a-day smoking habit. Stamatis wasn’t sure why. Four more doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him six to nine months to live. Sensing the end was near, he decided to reconnect with his religion. On Sunday mornings, he forced himself out of the house and hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather had once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started visiting him regularly. They would talk for hours, invariably bringing him the locally produced wine, which he sipped all day long. Today, 35 years later, he is 100 years old and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs, or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move to Ikaria.

Dr. Leriadis mentioned wild marjoram, sage (flas-komilia), a type of mint tea (fliskouni), olive tree leaf infusions, rosemary, and a tea made from boiling dandelion leaves and drinking the water with a little lemon. “People here think they’re drinking a comforting beverage, but they all double as medicine,” he said. “The panacea here is honey,” he added. “They have types of honey here you won’t see anyplace else in the world.

Your kindergarten teacher may be onto something—napping is good for you. Any time you can rest and recharge is good, but a study by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health found that people who took naps had lower coronary mortality than those who didn’t. The researchers defined “regular” naps as the kind that took place at least three times a week for about 30 minutes.

The Mediterranean diet is not a creation of some doctor or nutritionist; it’s a centuries-old eating lifestyle followed by the peoples living in southern Europe and northern Africa. It differs from country to country, but olive oil, fruits, vegetables, legumes, some fish, and wine comprise the building blocks.

The 9 Overall Lessons

Lesson 1: Move Naturally

Longevity all-stars don’t run marathons or compete in triathlons; they don’t transform themselves into weekend warriors on Saturday morning. Instead, they engage in regular, low-intensity physical activity, often as part of a daily work routine.

Lesson 2: Hara Hachi Bu

Hara hachi bu—a reminder to stop eating when their stomachs are 80 percent full. Even today, their average daily intake is only about 1,900 calories (Sardinians traditionally ate a similarly lean diet of about 2,000 calories a day).

Lesson 3: Plant Slant

Most centenarians in Nicoya, Sardinia, and Okinawa never had the chance to develop the habit of eating processed foods, soda pop, or salty snacks. For much of their lives, they ate small portions of unprocessed foods. They avoided meat—or more accurately, didn’t have access to it—except on rare occasions.

Lesson 4: Grapes Of Life

Epidemiological studies seem to show that people who have a daily drink per day of beer, wine, or spirits may accrue some health benefits.

Lesson 5: Purpose Now

Okinawans call it ikigai, and Nicoyans call it plan de vida, but in both cultures the phrase essentially translates to “why I wake up in the morning.”

Lesson 6: Downshift

Sardinians pour into the streets at 5 p.m., while Nicoyans take a break every afternoon to rest and socialize with friends. Remember Ushi and her moai? They gather every evening before supper to socialize.

Lesson 7: Belong

Healthy centenarians everywhere have faith. The Sardinians and Nicoyans are mostly Catholic. Okinawans have a blended religion that stresses ancestor worship. Loma Linda centenarians are Seventh-day Adventists. Ikarians have traditionally been Greek Orthodox. All belong to strong religious communities. The simple act of worship is one of those subtly powerful habits that seems to improve your chances of having more good years. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu.

Lesson 8: Loved Ones First

The most successful centenarians we met in the Blue Zones put their families first. They tended to marry, have children, and build their lives around that core. Their lives were imbued with familial duty, ritual, and a certain emphasis on togetherness.

Lesson 9: Right Tribe

Seventh-day Adventists make a point of associating with one another (a practice reinforced by their religious practices and observation of the Sabbath on Saturdays). Sardinians have been isolated geographically in the Nuoro highlands for 2,000 years. As a result, members of these longevity cultures work and socialize with one another, and this reinforces the prescribed behaviors of their cultures. It’s much easier to adopt good habits when everyone around you is already practicing them.

Fun Facts

Scientific studies suggest that only about 25 percent of how long we live is dictated by genes, according to famous studies of Danish twins. The other 75 percent is determined by our lifestyles and the everyday choices we make
Most vitamin requirements are best achieved by eating six to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Very few people do that, so probably the cheapest, least expensive multivitamin you can buy is not a bad idea to help achieve them (I’m a big fan of taking lots of vitamins, will probably write a post about it!)
Jeanne Calment, the documented longest-ever lived person, attributed her longevity to port wine, olive oil, and a sense of humor :)
As he zeroed in on municipalities that had the greatest numbers of long-lived people, he circled the area on a map with blue ink—giving rise to the term “Blue Zone,” which was later adopted by demographers

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

Thanks – I hope that was useful! What could be added or changed or removed? Which books would you like me to read and summarize?

1-Page Cheatsheet: John Ratey’s Spark

spark-book-cover I started documenting and summarizing books using a concept I called the “Good Life guides”. Here are some examples. How can we take a nonfiction book’s lessons and apply them to live a good life?

However, the guides were too time-consuming and I wasn’t enjoying the creation process, so I’m trying something simpler and more straightforward where I take the most interesting findings, facts, and snippets, and pack them into a “1-page cheatsheet”.

Comes out to about 1000 words, which is closer to 3 pages, but oh well :)

HERE WE GO!

I chose Spark because it came highly recommended by Steve Pavlina and I’m always looking for motivation to exercise more.

John Ratey is a psychiatry prof at Harvard Med School. His book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain [Amazon] is about the tremendous benefits of exercise, specifically cardio-intensive activities like running and biking. Through a combination of interviews, frontline work as a clinic researcher, and extensive analysis of the latest scientific literature, it concludes that frequent, moderate-to-high intensity cardio permanently improves not only physical health, but mental and psychological health too.

LESSONS AND HIGHLIGHTS

1. Exercise helps your body utilize energy more efficiently

One of the ways exercise optimizes energy usage is by triggering the production of more receptors for insulin. In the body, having more receptors means better use of blood glucose and stronger cells. Best of all, the receptors stay there, which means the newfound efficiency gets built in.

2. Regular exercise helps you:

A. Be more social

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

B. Calm down

As for the trait, the majority of studies show that aerobic exercise significantly alleviates symptoms of any anxiety disorder. But exercise also helps the average person reduce normal feelings of anxiousness.

C. Fight depression

In Britain, doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, but it’s vastly underutilized in the United States, and that’s a shame.

D. Improve focus

Paradoxically, one of the best treatment strategies for ADHD involves establishing extremely rigid structure. Over the years, I’ve heard countless parents offer the same observation about their ADHD children: Johnny is so much better when he’s doing tae kwon do.

E. Fight unhealthy addictions

In smokers, just five minutes of intense exercise can be beneficial. Nicotine is an oddball among addictive substances as it works as a stimulant and a relaxant at the same time. Exercise fights the urge to smoke because in addition to smoothly increasing dopamine it also lowers anxiety, tension, and stress levels—the physical irritability that makes people so grouchy when they’re trying to quit. Exercise can fend off cravings for fifty minutes and double or triple the interval to the next cigarette.

F. Make better decisions

…the participants reported that an entire range of behavior related to self-regulation took a turn for the better. Not only did they steadily increase their visits to the gym, they reported that they smoked less, drank less caffeine and alcohol, ate more healthy food and less junk food, curbed impulse spending and overspending, and lost their tempers less often.

G. Have healthier babies

Exercise seems to be more than just not harmful, though. In one study, Clapp compared thirty-four newborns of exercisers to thirty-one of sedentary mothers five days after birth. There’s only so much you can do to gauge behavior at this early stage, but the babies from the exercise group “performed” better on two of six tests: they were more responsive to stimuli and better able to quiet themselves following a disturbance of sound or light. Clapp sees this as significant because it suggests that infants of exercising mothers are more neurologically developed than their counterparts from sedentary mothers.

H. Live longer!

If your brain isn’t actively growing, then it’s dying. Exercise is one of the few ways to counter the process of aging because it slows down the natural decline of the stress threshold.

[A subject I’m personally very interested in. Here are my resources on living forever]

3. How much and what types of exercise?

#1: AEROBIC. Exercise four days a week, varying from thirty minutes to an hour, at 60 to 65 percent of your maximum heart rate.

#2: STRENGTH. Hit the weights or resistance machines twice a week, doing three sets of your exercises at weights that allows you to do ten to fifteen repetitions in each set.

#3: BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY. Focus on these abilities twice a week for thirty minutes or so. Yoga, Pilates, tai chi, martial arts, and dance all involve these skills, which are important to staying agile.

#4: MENTAL EXERCISE: KEEP LEARNING. My advice here is to keep challenging your mind. You know by now that exercise prepares your neurons to connect, while mental stimulation allows your brain to capitalize on that readiness. It’s no coincidence that study after study shows that the more education you have, the more likely you are to hang onto your cognitive abilities and stave off dementia

Doing a mix of low, medium, and high intensity exercise is important as they all do different (good) things for your brain & body

FUN FACTS

It turns out that marijuana, exercise, and chocolate all activate these same receptors in the brain.
As an illustration of the power of drugs, consider that while sex increases dopamine levels 50 to 100 percent, cocaine sends dopamine skyrocketing 300 to 800 percent beyond normal levels.
The brain is made up of more than 50 percent fat, so fats are important too, as long as they’re the right kind. Trans fat, animal fat, and hydrogenated oils gum up the works, but the omega-3s found in fish are enormously beneficial
The one proven way to live longer is to consume fewer calories—at least if you’re a lab rat. In experiments in which rodents eat 30 percent fewer calories, they live up to 40 percent longer than animals allowed to eat as much as they want.
Low-carb diets may help you lose weight, but they’re not good for your brain. Whole grains have complex carbohydrates that supply a steady flow of energy rather than the spike and crash of simple sugars, and they’re necessary to transport amino acids such as tryptophan into the brain.
Vitamin D is being recognized not only for its importance in strengthening bones but also as a measure against cancer and Parkinson’s. I would recommend 1000 IU (international units) of vitamin D…I would also recommend taking vitamin B with at least 800 mg of folate, which improves memory and processing speed.

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

May: Books I finished and my Ever-notebook of articles + highlights

These are the books I finished in March, April, and May. It was a slower period than January and February.

Before I jump into books, let me share my new experiment: a public Evernote notebook of all the articles I read and highlight. I use Clearly to accomplish this.

It’s a true representation of the text content I consume online – roughly 50% startups/tech, 20% China, 30% other (eg, sports, pop culture, psychology, science).

Here’s the link again.

I’m doing this for a few reasons:

I read a lot and have always wanted to share interesting articles, blogs, forums, podcasts, and videos with friends
I now have a permanent archive of every article I’ve read
I hope through sharing that readers will offer recommendations and feedback

I’d love to hear what you think, after you check it out. I will explore Flipboard’s create-your-own-magazine feature at some point. If you’re interested in doing something similar, I’m happy to help.

Books I’m reading

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande [Amazon]
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville [Amazon]
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant [Amazon]
What Does China Think? by Mark Leonard [Amazon]

Books I finished

postcards-from-tomorrow-square Postcards from Tomorrow Square by James Fallows [Amazon]. Great essays from a great writer on a variety of China topics: the environment; politics; manufacturing; pop culture and more. I first came across Fallows while reading his college admissions pieces in high school, and since then, I’ve enjoyed his clean, elegant prose, and his ability to combine a clear point-of-view with level-headed, thorough research. He’s also open about what he doesn’t know. You’ll enjoy this book if you want a buffet-style approach to understanding China’s myriad opportunities, peoples, and problems.

delivering-happiness Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh [Amazon]. Several friends independently recommended this book, plus they said it was a fast read, plus I’ve heard good things. It is indeed a fast read, with some great stories – Tony’s success speaks for itself. The first half – which covers Tony’s first startup LinkExchange and his early struggles with Zappos – is better than the second half. Not the best “startup textbook” if that’s what you’re looking for, because Tony is so unique that his secret sauce isn’t easily explained, but he gives it the old college try and you’ll certainly pick up a few tips (for me: a great culture takes care of everything else; be willing to go big on things you believe in; never stop having fun).

ready-player-one Ready Player One by Ernest Cline [Amazon]. Alan Tien recommended this book, and when I read fiction I tend towards sci-fi (recently enjoyed Name of the Wind). It’s well-written, packed with 80’s pop culture references, a classic David-v-Goliath, hometown-boy-does-good story.

I enjoy futuristic sci-fi – it’s one of my few guilty pleasures and I’m fascinated by smarter, more thoughtful peoples’ visions of the future (Ray Kurzweil is the man). Ernest doesn’t disappoint. If you enjoy the premise of Tron, you’ll like this book.

See here for a full list of books I’ve read since I’ve begun tracking.

What have you read and loved? Please share! Thanks as always for your time.

The Good Life: Lessons from Robert Greene’s Mastery

mastery-by-robert-greene Tl;dr: download the Good Life guide, a 4-page PDF drawing life lessons from Robert Greene’s Mastery.

This is my 4th Good Life guide. Here are the other 3:

Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life [link]
Ben Franklin’s 13 Virtues [link]
Greg Epstein’s Good Without God [link]

I chose Greene’s Mastery because I feel like a “jack of all trades but master of none”. This book crystallizes why highly successful people are masters at a specific (and often narrow) discipline, and the steps they took to get there. In addition, it comes highly recommended by Tim Ferriss and I’m a fan of Greene’s 48 Laws of Power.

The Good Life guides are “CliffsNotes for personal growth”. Less comprehensive summary, more focus on how a book’s stories, themes, and facts can help us live a Good Life: one of personal fulfillment, long-term purpose, and value to society (usually all intimately-related anyway :).

It’s a 4-page PDF, free to download and share. You can also view it in Google Docs.

I’ve included below some of my favorite highlights from Mastery. This is my 4th Good Life guide – I’d love to hear how I can make them more useful for you!

If you’d like to buy the original, here’s my Amazon affiliate link.

EXCERPTS FROM THE GUIDE

Learn from existing Masters through apprenticeships

Before it is too late you must learn the lessons and follow the path established by the greatest Masters, past and present

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
There are 3 steps to the Apprenticeship:

Step 1: Deep Observation (observe and notice everything, especially the details)
Step 2: Skills Acquisition (learn to do what they do extremely well)
Step 3: Experimentation (learn to make those skills your own, and go beyond them!)

Feedback, feedback, feedback. Learn to love criticism

It helps also to gain as much feedback as possible from others, to have standards against which you can measure your progress so that you are aware of how far you have to

Sometimes greater danger comes from success and praise than from criticism. If we learn to handle criticism well, it can strengthen us and help us become aware of flaws in our work. Praise generally does harm. Ever so slowly, the emphasis shifts from the joy of the creative process to the love of attention and to our ever-inflating ego.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE BOOK

At these times, other people seem less resistant to our influence; perhaps we are more attentive to them, or we appear to have a special power that inspires their respect.

Masters return to this childlike state, their works displaying degrees of spontaneity and access to the unconscious, but at a much higher level than the child.

As a classic example, compare the lives of Sir Francis Galton and his older cousin, Charles Darwin. By all accounts, Galton was a super-genius with an exceptionally high IQ, quite a bit higher than Darwin’s (these are estimates done by experts years after the invention of the measurement). Galton was a boy wonder who went on to have an illustrious scientific career, but he never quite mastered any of the fields he went into. He was notoriously restless, as is often the case with child prodigies. Darwin, by contrast, is rightly celebrated as the superior scientist, one of the few who has forever changed our view of life.

“Why bother working for years to attain mastery when we can have so much power with very little effort? Technology will solve everything.”

What we lack most in the modern world is a sense of a larger purpose to our lives. In the past, it was organized religion that often supplied this. But most of us now live in a secularized world. We human animals are unique—we must build our own world. We do not simply react to events out of biological scripting. But without a sense of direction provided to us, we tend to flounder. We don’t how to fill up and structure our time.

A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on.

The road to mastery requires patience. You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts.

You must adopt such a spirit and see your apprenticeship as a kind of journey in which you will transform yourself, rather than as a drab indoctrination into the work

The initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it

You will know when your apprenticeship is over by the feeling that you have nothing left to learn in this environment. It is time to declare your independence or move to another place to continue your apprenticeship and expand your skill

Your access to knowledge and people is limited by your status. If you are not careful, you will accept this status and become defined by it, particularly if you come from a disadvantaged background.

To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice. The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic; you see your work as if through the eyes of others. You recognize your weaknesses, precisely the elements you are not good at.

We live in the world of a sad separation that began some five hundred years ago when art and science split apart.

We must constantly ask the questions—how do things work, how do decisions get made, how does the group interact?

What makes the mentor-protégé dynamic so intense and so productive is the emotional quality of the relationship. By nature, mentors feel emotionally invested in your education. This can be for several reasons: perhaps they like you, or see in you a younger version of themselves, and can relive their own youth through you; perhaps they recognize in you a special talent that will give them pleasure to cultivate; perhaps you have something important to offer them, mostly your youthful energy and willingness to work hard.

You will want as much personal interaction with the mentor as possible. A virtual relationship is never enough.

People often err in this process when they choose someone who seems the most knowledgeable, has a charming personality, or has the most stature in the field—all superficial reasons.

What immediately struck him was the intensity with which Pacquiao focused on his instructions and how quickly he caught on. He was eminently teachable, and so the progress was more rapid than it had ever been with any other fighter. Pacquiao seemed to never tire of training or to worry about overdoing it. Roach kept waiting for the inevitable dynamic in which the fighter would begin to tune him out, but this never came. This was a boxer he could work harder and harder. Soon, Pacquiao had developed a devastating right hand, and his footwork could match the speed of his hands.

By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills.

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

Often it is the quiet ones, those who give out less at first glance, who hide greater depths, and who secretly wield greater power.

It is always wise to occasionally reveal your own insecurities, which will humanize you in other people’s eyes.

It is not generally acknowledged or discussed, but the personality we project to the world plays a substantial role in our success and in our ascension to mastery.

This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability.

Many of the most interesting and profound discoveries in science occur when the thinker is not concentrating directly on the problem but is about to drift off to sleep, or get on a bus, or hears a joke

In moments of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial.

The hand-brain connection is something deeply wired within us; when we attempt to sketch something we must observe it closely, gaining a feel through our fingers of how to bring it to life. Such practice can help you think in visual terms and free your mind from its constant verbalizations. To Leonardo da Vinci, drawing and thinking were synonymous.

The more experienced, wiser types, such as Ramachandran, are opportunists. Instead of beginning with some broad goal, they go in search of the fact of great yield—a bit of empirical evidence that is strange and does not fit the paradigm, and yet is intriguing.

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.

What is interesting to note is that many Masters who come to possess this high-level intuitive power seem to become younger in mind and spirit with the passing years—something that should be encouraging to us all.

Empathy plays an enormous role in learning and knowledge.

One time he learned a new word that a Pirahã explained to him meant “what is in your head when you sleep.” The word then means to dream. But the word was used with a special intonation that Pirahã use when they are referring to a new experience. Questioning further, he saw that to them dreaming is simply a different form of experience, not at all a fiction. A dream is as real and immediate to them as anything they encounter in waking life.

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