So Mastery, so how did everyone find it?

I know Saurabh, you're a big fan.

I'm a

big fan.

This version you guys got?

Yes.

Because we just learned that is this regular version and that

is a compact version, right?

Oh, what's the difference between the versions?

Which version did I read?

If you read the very repetitive one then that's

the normal complete version.

I was just glancing over the compact one over the library.

I regretted not to have taken that one because a lot of the repetition he goes

through, especially around the stories,

Yes.

Streamlined.

It's a really good, so much better edit.

You don't have to read twice about every single character in the story.

Okay, good, because the original book is too long.

Yes, it's a great

book, but it's too long, I

think he probably got the feedback.

I

mean I whatever, but I love the book but that's because I love books.

And I thought I could just, I could be in and out of this for a year, but I

thought, who else is going to do this?

And the answer was nobody.

Yeah.

That's

not too many people.

I didn't know the author.

I was curious to ask about him because then I did a little bit of research.

I found that he wrote this 48 power laws of power.

And that this is the big book or the kind of transformative book.

Yes.

Yes.

And I heard that is a very controversial book.

It's even banned in penitentiaries in the United States.

So it seems that is something there for me to read.

And absolutely.

Like it's a book that will make you crawl from inside our 48 laws of

power, because it's like, it hops up on, on the, the negative side of human nature.

So all his other books as well.

I liked his controversial takes.

I would not say I treat him as a good person or think

about him as a good person.

But just as books, just the research, he's very nonjudgmental in the

way he takes out his books 48 laws of power, laws of human nature.

It's another classic read this and then mastery.

What I feel is he's much more positive about the human race But the rest of

the books it's, he takes in the dark sides like very well in that sense.

So 48 laws of power.

I tried to read it a couple of times, like after 10, 12 chapters like from within, I

feel like I'm going to vomit or something.

Like it's so bad.

Like it takes out all the negative things about human nature.

I got the

feeling that should be something like that.

Reading the chapter about the social.

Intelligence in mastery.

Yes.

In mastery, that comes back.

Yes, absolutely.

He touches it

in a way that, this is opinion, right guys?

It's cynical it's skeptical, it's negative, to your point.

So I could feel that there was something there and then I got

very curious to research more.

Thank you for sharing your impressions.

That's interesting because I did a bit of research.

I really, I want to say sorry, Saurabh but I really didn't like the book.

I struggled to take anything in from it because of its style.

It's very American self help.

It's like the modern day Napoleon Hill.

And I hate all that stuff.

I think, Napoleon Hill was the biggest shyster going.

If you tell me you must do this, you mustn't do this, every

other word was you must do this, you mustn't and I'm like, okay.

So I looked up and I couldn't find a bad review of it.

I think I'm the only person that feels this way.

I Googled him and I watched a bit of him speak because My perception was

this is someone who's writing a book to make a buck, like Napoleon Hill type

thing and I felt like he jumped on the outliers train and after that, yeah,

and after that, I think he, because his first, his 48 laws was basically

reading Machiavelli and updating it.

So I did some research and I watched him on a video and he was talking sense.

So it may be just me.

The key thing for me was I read mastery by George Leonard, much

simpler book, much more basic book.

But I like that idea.

And for me There's this American thing, which it may be my perception on a few

Americans talking to, but Americans often seem to have this division of

if you're poor, you're a bad person.

If you're rich, you're a good person.

If you're rich you're spiritual and you're self

developed and all of this stuff.

And what he seems to be saying in mastery is that there are masters who

are these people who are enlightened, who would develop and he's trying

to fit everyone in the same box.

Whereas I think you can be technically proficient you can have mastery

of the field, but it doesn't make you any better than anyone else.

It just means you're better at that particular topic.

For that sense, it, there's very much the sense of the Napoleon

Hill even the way he capitalizes negative capability and what was it?

It was Napoleon.

He was definite life purpose, but he has something similar.

Yeah.

Life tasks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Napoleon Hill, basically, his chapters came from

the most popular sermons.

And he, I don't know if it's true.

I've had read a lot which is verifiable about, but basically he

looked around and which sermons got the most collection so it's a Measure

of the popularity and he took 28 of them and made them in the chapters.

So it felt that style and I don't know how much is my personal bias

of I don't like to be told you must do this and you mustn't do that.

So I didn't disagree with it.

But I had trouble with the style of it

What you're saying I felt more or less the same at the beginning

you guys know what I do, right?

I then take the books and write the summaries about them.

And that forces me to go through the chapters in different ways.

Even the structure, which I agree, Rob, it's not really helpful with

the formatting and everything, but then it gave me a slightly different

perspective on the content to your point.

I also agree with what he's saying in principle that you choose a life's task

then you go through apprenticeship, then you practice it and then you achieve

mastery through actually doing more of it and getting creative about it.

It's that simple, the book, if you think about it then I noticed that what

was not reasoning with me very well was when you get to the sub points of

bullets on how you do each of these things, because then I started noticing

incongruences between across the stories that you would say, okay, but you

just said that you had to do this and this person did exactly the opposite.

And you were telling that the person achieved mastery to the point that

I even took a picture of something he wrote that one he is identifying

your life's task very early.

And then you get back to his history.

He had 50, 60 jobs and only very late in the game started writing books.

And I guess we are agreeing.

We wouldn't really call him the master.

We would call him successful.

That's for sure, but not necessarily a master.

Is it the same person?

Those are the things that didn't resonate with me, but from the storyline,

thinking about what he's selling mastery is and that it's achievable by.

And I think this was also something you just mentioned.

I didn't feel this, that he was linking it directly with

success or financial success.

I rather had a feeling that at this point he was quite straightforward

to say this is achievable by anyone can you just follow this and

that's there for you to to get it.

That's how.

I like there are some parts of the book I really like about I had

never read so widely about Da Vinci.

So the, those stories like really, brought a lot of things inside of me.

Like, how did he go about his life?

How was he able to connect things?

And the story about Benjamin Franklin, the whole thing.

That also interested me a lot.

Like within that, there were lives of masters, which I took a lot from in

that sense, the stories about them, I had not read individual stories about

these masters their lives or in that sense, but that really interested me.

In essence, what I took out is these masters, the common things within

them is how I try to read that book.

Common things I felt is they have very deep observational skills.

That's the number one.

One thing that again, he mentions is.

Like they do not let go of their childhood, whatever, that

childhood, whatever that interested them, they don't let go of that.

They build on that.

Third, that close relationship with nature, which was in the case of,

your value system and everything.

If it is very closely related to nature, that helps you in, looking at

those fine things within everything and able to refine their observation.

So that's like these two, three points I found common among the masters.

And that's the way I tried to read this book is trying to find the

commonalities among, all of them.

Rather than, looking at just what he's telling, because I

know he's very commercial kind of a writer, Robert Greene.

He just churns out books year after year.

He's very good at researching Michael, we were having that conversation.

Like he has a plethora of research assistants.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Ryan Holiday who's written a lot of books and is now quite famous

was his research assistant during this time while writing mastery.

And he has a plethora of such research assistants.

And what they do is they try to find out stories and do

deep research on these stories.

Their only task is to find such stories, which can be somehow fitted in the book.

So he's a very commercial writer in that sense.

So my approach was just to look at those commonalities.

And I, like I mentioned, these two, three points like really stood out for me.

I think the point about childhood is incredibly interesting.

There's a French writer, Gustave Flaubert, and he said la genie c'est

l'enfance retrouvée, genius is childhood.

It's not revisited.

It's rediscovered.

It's hard to get an exact, I think what he's really saying was, very

often people have themes that begin very early on in their lives.

We all do.

The writer Yeats said, perfection of the life or of the work, the

mind of man is forced to choose.

You can't have it both ways.

If you're going to be really good at something, it's going

to take a long, long long time.

It's going to take 10, 20, 30, 40, maybe more years.

You're in it for the long haul.

You've got to make a huge commitment.

I would actually say, It's bad career advice telling people

to go out and be a master.

I'd say that's very dodgy thing to do.

It's number I think it's number three in the job search category on Amazon.

I think you don't get down to like number 12 before there's actually a

practical book which is about, Dealing with tricky interview questions.

What all these job seekers are doing, getting books on Amazon, I've no idea.

But I digress.

If you're going to be really good at something.

Now forget maths, just say really, it's going to take a long time.

I think some of these people, the themes develop in their childhood.

However their lives develop, and often I think they go round in circles.

They take wrong turnings, they go off at tangents, they get it wrong.

But I think they're driven to come back to those childhood themes as adults.

20, 30, 40, 50, 60, maybe 70 years later and almost lay these things to rest.

I couldn't prove it, I couldn't.

But I've got a gut feel it's the case, forget masters, for most of us

our childhood is it's really important our first few years, I'm starting to

hackneyed now, all those things that we felt, how we got on with people,

how we didn't, it's in us, it's in us.

I think a lot of these people go back and almost try and realize something

that other people don't really.

I'm talking too much.

I'm losing the thread.

There's something about childhood, something really important.

You should continue, Michael.

I think you're touching such a great point.

I have twins, they are 11 years old and what I'm noticing is

that exactly what you're talking about is so self evident on them.

It's easy to observe.

I could tell them, and we know that this doesn't work unfortunately, I

could tell them what their life task is It's exploding in their behavior, in

their preferences, in their selections, in their choices, but then something

happens, and it's usually what we call growing up that pushes us somewhat away

from that and into the I guess what Rob was talking about before that is

success as defined in society, find a job do a certain craft follow your peers

achieve certain material things in lives.

And that's when it's derailed.

The question I would have for you though, is how much do you think that's

the only way getting back to that?

Or how much you believe that there can be still more than that, that we can be

different things and not only one thing.

If I could make it simpler, I've always felt, I've never met

anybody in my life that didn't have what I would call a gift.

I've never met anybody at all.

You can get the most prosaic, dull person.

There's something they're good at.

I know I'm almost sounding mystical here.

There's something they're good at, but often they take it for granted.

They don't use it.

It's just like a dormant gift, really.

Now, when we go to school we're heavily socially conditioned.

I got all the things that Rob said, do this, do that, do the other.

And I rejected them all.

I threw them out.

That went the wrong way.

But it seems to me, if there's a valid point to education, it should

be giving people the basic knowledge and the basic skills to navigate

in the world, which we've all got to do, really, just all got to do.

How do we earn money?

Basic finance?

How do we understand budgets?

Just basic stuff, really, but also trying to zero in on What

are people actually good at?

What are your children good at?

Where do their directions go?

And then saying if those are the things that, if these are their gifts and

these are the directions, then trying to work with them to work out and say

how can we make careers out of this?

Is that too much to ask for from education, seemingly' cause

otherwise we say, oh, we're all gonna be lawyers for the money.

And then AI takes us all out.

Yes.

Where's that got us.

I think a very interesting point that Michael you touched upon on

the education system, like in the book he touches upon the apprenticeship,

the whole thing about apprenticeship.

This was seen even in India, the previous system before the Britishers came to

India, the system was, it was called Gurukul wherein there were teachers.

And all the kids they used to stay in the forest and along with the

master and the schools were like built like that around temples and all.

So they used to stay there.

No family no, nothing.

They just used to stay with the teacher and the teacher taught them everything.

And these were again, as you mentioned, like the life skills.

All the skills that are required to live a good life.

That was taught and this was a period of apprenticeship, so

that's the controversial part.

They were taught based on the caste system, which was our social engineering

experiment in India that went on for thousands and thousands of years.

So what they did was this master, suppose he's very good at archery.

So that person will just teach all the kids apart from the basic education.

We'll teach him archery.

So they had seven years with the guru for say archery.

Okay.

So that is how the system was and what this did for the society was everyone was

bred for a specific goal in that sense.

So the level of mastery and the level of skill was really high.

So yeah, it has positive as well as negative, I feel because then the

holistic development of a person, which comes probably from the kind of

education system that we have, wherein we are given a holistic idea about

everything that the world has to offer.

Then when we go for the higher degrees, we have the option to choose

whatever we want to do with our lines.

That is missing in that system because they are trained from the very

beginning for a very specific kind of role they have to play in the society.

Even though I understand the present education system is flawed but still

you at least have the freedom to choose.

What do you want to do even later in life?

Even if you lose 10 years, those 10 years are not really wasted because you

are still getting, social intelligence.

You are interacting with different kinds of people from different walks of life.

I think that creates probably much more harmony in the world.

I'm not very sure.

I would like to know your thoughts.

How did you get on at school, Rob, if you're the guy

that wasn't going to accept stuff?

I was lucky in that I was quite academic and naturally

maths and English were easy.

I taught myself to read, I could understand, I could work out maths myself

just from logic and that and while I was in primary school, I came top of

the class, but I spent most of the, most of my time outside the class, standing

outside, sent out in the corridor.

It was because you making me learn this, like I, I felt I could have done quicker.

I felt I could have moved through it much quicker and they make me

spend 12 years learning their thing.

I'd finished the work, as they were setting the homework, I'd do the homework.

I made no effort.

But.

I had this rebellious thing of you're making me.

Someone tries to hold my attention.

That's what makes me angry.

It's you feel like you're being manipulated or that.

And yeah so I struggled with that.

I've worked in a school as well.

And I just despair of education because working in a school,

most teachers want to do well.

Most teachers care.

But there's a system where you're being taught according to what the politician

sets, like at the time it was Gove.

Yeah.

And for Saurabh and, Eduardo we had a minister for education, Michael Gove, was

very controversial and changed everything.

So basically he loved love poetry in general.

when he was learning and he decided that everyone was going to be more

academic and so if you're doing cooking or woodwork or something of that

nature it would become more academic and you'd write about how you would

do it rather than actually do it.

He shaped the education but there's a system where headteachers

are trying to please Ofsted.

For example there was this It wasn't true, but there was this rumor that

Ofsted would come and check all the books and they were looking for doodling.

Doodling was a sign that students weren't engaged and the teacher would be

marked down, even though that's natural.

The curriculum of schools, I completely disagree with.

I think there should be more emotional, more financial, more

relationships, all of that stuff.

Teaching people how to think, But that's not the premise of school.

And the premise of school is Politicians are going to be judged by education.

Teachers are an easy target to say, Oh, it's lazy teachers.

And so headteachers put a lot of pressure on teachers to conform to

Ofsted who then put a lot of pressure on children and you're putting

enormous amounts of pressure on children to get exam results for the

schools and the headteacher's career.

And there's nothing really about education.

Don't really care about students and some schools they put in so much

pressure without giving any support.

What I noticed because it happened in our school is what

I noticed is so much pressure.

The kids switch off.

They take six months of it and then they blow up and get all of these kids

being kicked out of school because you're putting pressure on them.

But you're drilling people in an exam

. Also in working with, in coaching people and talking to people, so many people

have hangups about feeling I'm not good enough because I wasn't at school.

And it's irrelevant.

It doesn't appreciate social intelligence or any of those aspects

that are more connected with your life's task back to the

book and to whatever, or whatever you could develop your mastery.

Yeah, definitely.

I think it's a really important book, though.

I really do.

I really do.

Even if he is after the money I don't care.

I think there's real nuggets in there.

I think there's real nuggets.

And looking at the reviews it's so well appreciated.

I'm the lone voice.

I never looked at the reviews.

You, come on, you get five stars on Amazon for having a pulse, rob.

Fuck.

Okay, now I know what I have to do.

Rubbish.

One part that the book touches upon and that really struck a chord with

me was about, which is connected in the way, like we are going in the conversation

about surrendering our ego, that part in the apprenticeship, wherein you really

have to let go of whatever you think that you are good at or whatever you

have and surrender it all to the master.

Or to, whoever is your mentor.

That's the thing that I feel most of us at least in my case, I can say even when

I was, say, playing cricket or later in my career, just like you, Rob, I was

rebellious in that sense, that whenever I was told you have to do it this way.

I never followed that and never surrendered my ego.

From the book, what I understood or what I feel that I can take away is I have to

if I want to really progress in my life, that's something that I have to do at

least surrender that surrendering of ego part is something that I'm really deeply

contemplating in general in my life.

He

goes even beyond that he's without writing it, he is basically

saying subscribe, even to tyranny, if you have to accept anything any

behavior any circumstance to be with that and learn and take everything.

That you should be taking from this apprenticeship before giving a kick in

the butt back into the master because that's the path for everybody, right?

And it's a little tough.

But I guess what we are saying is we can see where he's coming from.

And, for example, like if I give a sort of football example say

a manager, like a successful manager, like so Alex Ferguson, this was when

all these young kids were coming up, the class of 92 of United was coming on.

Yeah.

All these young kids like Gary Neville and the like select four, five kids,

they were all like, they were scared of Ferguson and they did each and everything

that he said they were like pushed down.

Their ego was completely, mold in that sense.

And that helped them in the long run is even in life we see, we think of, such

behavior, extreme discipline and all.

I'm reading about the history of the Roman history and all these gladiators

and all the kind of training that they go through to reach that levels of

mastery it's extremely tough when you are young, that's the time when your brain

needs to be really molded in that sense.

It has to be like molded into a sort of way of being resilient,

facing those hardships.

And that's something that our education system, it's very easy

to say a lot of people feel a lot of emotional pain because they

have to go through hard things.

But do we really want to give away, grades for everyone?

Like everyone is a winner, that kind of mentality.

I'm not sure whether even that going to that extreme is that right.

In that sense, that competitiveness is also how we are able

to survive in this world.

If survival is the goal, in that sense.

Yeah.

If flourishing is the goal, that makes sense that yes, everyone is a winner, but

I don't think our world is ready for that.

That everyone is flourishing like in a country like India, where 40, 50 percent

of the people don't have anything to eat.

I don't think that's going to work.

So I think even,

Even in one of the examples of the book he substantiates exactly

what you're talking about, right?

So when he talks about temple, because it was not, it Talking

about neurodiversity in the sense of poor thing, look at what happened.

It was more on the sense of, okay, and then you get past that and you

even use that to build something that, that is much bigger than life.

In that sense, I completely agree with you.

I would even say, no, it, it doesn't lead to flourish to just Treat everybody

comfy and nice and with smiles.

We learn through struggle.

We learn through difficulties.

That's when it seems our brains get most tuned and most focused and sharp and

if we try to remove that from people, I feel like we are designing the WALL

E kind of future where everybody's doing nothing other than talking on

the phone, sitting on the couch, that floats while drinking sugar, right?

I don't want that!

Is that the figure in India, Saurabh?

42%?

Is that the figure in India for starvation, 42%?

Yeah.

Oh my

God.

Unfortunately, that's the kind of world disparity

within the world we have, right?

So until and unless there is a sort of something like a universal basic income or

universal basic, something of that sort.

What we say in India is like the situation in obviously the first

world countries where you are very comfortable in that sense, that at

least you don't have a problem of that.

You will not get anything to eat, but in India as I mentioned, like 40%, if

40 percent people don't have anything to it, just imagine like we are the

people who like, People from education and everything is done and all these

things, like we would be the top 1%, 2 percent earners in India in that sense.

So we are the privileged class in India and like our privileged class, like the

normal working class, in other countries, that would be like, we like, that would be

in other countries, that would be 60, 70 percent of the population who are earning

that much or something of that sort.

So the disparity is huge is what I'm trying to say.

In a country like India.

You will have to go through that survival issue.

And that's the overall culture in a country where we are at present,

probably 20 years, 30 years down the line, we will get to that place

where everyone can pursue mastery and flourishing and all these things.

But right now it's about survival.

Probably a couple of generations will have to devote themselves in that sense

to, bring the country up to that place.

There's a quote from the French writer, I think it's, I always

misquote people but I'm pretty sure it's the French writer Voltaire,

pardon me, and he said, liberty has no relevance in a city under siege.

So the place is going to be overrun, everything else just goes out the window.

Yeah, sure, the concept matters, but if you're going to get overrun,

it's what you do now that matters.

It's what you do now.

There's no point, discussing it and philosophizing, you have

got to act now, immediately.

Oh, so true.

So true.

Ah.

Yes.

What's it like in Brazil, Eduardo?

it's very similar.

I think when someone describes the differences that of course, India has

10 times the population of Brazil.

So you have the problem is just so much bigger because it's so many people.

And if you get to, Delhi or Sao Paulo, you can see visually the

difference that's the impact, but fundamentally it's the very same thing.

You have people in the northeast of Brazil, for example, in areas that they

haven't had water for the last 20 years.

And to get that on a monthly basis is a struggle.

Just that.

I'm not talking even food.

I'm not talking sanitary conditions, education and so on.

So you really have to overcome a lot to survive and then pass that you

see, because just like in India as well maybe you can help me out here.

You also have a rich class or a high middle class that is living

a completely different reality.

And then you can see these buckets of mastery of pursuing something

else in life, which in a way is inspiring and makes me very happy.

Is also part of the problem, because then you create this disconnection in

the population that leads to political arrest to incongruence violence and so on.

Absolutely.

And that's exactly the case.

So there are like, say 2%, 3 percent would be like really rich class.

Around 15, 16 percent is the middle class and rest is like lower middle

class is equivalent to poor in most of the first world countries in that sense.

So that constitutes nearly 75 percent of the population, nearly

70 to 75 percent of the population.

But as a very different context in my mind, I remember one of the places

I lived in the first world country, they would say, Oh, this is a poor country.

So don't go there.

And obviously I went there.

That's me.

And what I realized was, Hey, all these people have houses and they have cars.

And what are we talking about here?

And that's not what I known what I have known to be poor.

It's so far away, or you cannot finance your new freezer that's sad.

And there are many problems with that,

apples and bananas.

Yes.

So in India, the definition of poor is $1 a day.

For a family, not for individual.

Just think, so that's the kind of poor we are talking about.

It's a bit like pockets of time because when you go back, So that's

about $365 a year, which was about the income before the Industrial Revolution.

We had that three, 400 years ago.

And it's different stages of economic development, isn't it?

And with that comes the opportunities.

Yeah.

And because we are globalized, we can actually move

way faster than 400 years, right?

Because we can exchange technologies, insights, knowledge, people and

that brings a completely different base to this whole transformation,

but I feel it, it also puts a lot more pressure in the system, right?

Because then you create expectations, then you create more significant differences.

And this is normally not good for the community.

Yeah,

Have you heard of Band Aid?

It's so Bob Geldof was A pop star what 25 30 years ago?

He got a load of pop stars together and they sang do they know it's christmas

and all the proceeds went to africa and america did a similar version they're

getting michael jackson and lots of Together and they keep redoing this and

the money is to help starving in africa.

Yet all the aid goes out to Africa because, they don't

have water and whatever.

And yet nothing seems to change.

This is decades.

I remember 20 years ago reading that there's enough for everyone to be a

millionaire if money was equally spread, but there is this sense, which is one

of the antagonists for me in that book is that achieving, becoming a master.

Puts you at a different cost or level and when you look at people like elon

musk has what 300 billion Dollars or something and he's never going to spend

that and yes most of it's going to be given away and most of those billionaires

are giving away their money, but there's something wrong with Our values.

Our sense of that.

We all give money to charity.

We give money that doesn't really matter.

It doesn't really cost us we give to that level.

But there's when you have people who have so little there's a like a lack of

recognition that is part of the whole.

And the whole is only as strong as its weakest part and when you don't you

know that there's always going to be uprisings and terrorists and discord

until we find a way of living together.

And that sounds idealistic but I think that at the heart of many

problems are the sense that money is more important than people.

And it affects how we treat our people in organizations and in society.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Absolutely.

Like again, probably it's become a theme today, but in India, like there are no

laws for protecting the employees as such.

Even if you like.

Now the thing is going on in UK mo in most of the MNCs, even in India, there like

this 40 hour rule that 40 hours a week.

Most of the people in India, they work nearly 70 hours.

That's a norm more or less 70 hours.

So just think a person who's working 70 hours, that's nearly 13, 14 hours a day.

What kind, any kind of life can such a person imagine, in terms of flourishing,

where can there be work life integration?

So a person gets up.

It gets ready.

The travel time, say in some certain cities, say even in Delhi or Mumbai,

the travel time would be nearly one hour, one and a half hour to reach

office, come back nearly two hours.

The traffic is so much in the evening.

So you hardly have any kind of life.

So people live from weekend to weekend.

So Saturday, Sunday, you have some respite.

One day goes just for, the normal cold chores and all, and one day is

for taking rest because such is the mental pressure of, again, breading

the Monday, that kind of thing.

And then that's a cycle pressure,

right?

That, that the adults are going to put on their children because

yes, they're trying to avoid that back to your points on survival.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that's the reason you would see that most of the Asian kids, which we touched

upon in the previous books as well.

They are so good at studies and academics because they have gone through

that pressure mill of surviving in a country like, say, India or China or,

the other Southeast Asian countries.

So that the importance of culture comes out so differently in, while reading

this book again, I just was thinking that what is the population in India

who's really striving for say, mastery in that sense, maybe it's around 2%.

And wherein in say some, most of the other countries say first world

countries, it would be touching 40%.

Do you have that choice?

Yeah.

People do not have that choice.

So that's a huge take away for me in that sense that how much cultural aspects

and where different people in the world they are, in that sense, how it deemed

they can be to attain such levels.

But I think what Rob and Michael were saying, and I, guys correct me.

No, I'm just putting words in your mouth.

Is that though you're right that people have the choice?

They are not doing it.

No.

And therefore completely different reasons.

And that includes again, how the school system has been designed in

most of the countries and all the social pressures that are being put.

And I absolutely love that.

Rob added the example of Elon Musk, right?

because Is probably the antithesis of a master, in so many ways and a role

model when it comes to success financial success, to say and then What is that

people are going to be role model for?

What is that they are going to follow?

I think that's a really good point is that with the growth of social media

And people like elon musk that we hold up these people . People want the results.

Michael, you know this because writing books is there is the like the poster

child for this idea that everyone wants a book without having written it.

There's so much on social media.

And like we glorify people who've attained mastery, but we don't glorify mastery.

And I think that this book and others like it, that's the strength of it, is that,

we have to learn to love the process.

And I think that one of my frustrations with this is it wasn't about the

process as much as it was, or to me, it seemed more about the outcome.

And I think the process of mastery is whether you're successful or not.

It's attaining the proficiency and the love of the subject.

That's what leads to mastery.

But oh, but so many people are looking at, okay, what does Elon Musk do?

How do I do be like Elon Musk?

And you've got all these reality shows and everyone wants to be an overnight

star But no one wants to do the work.

No one wants to be up 5 a.

m to be the olympic athlete.

And I think While you were talking it comes to my mind that I think

that there's a certain mentality and when you reach that there's only

so far, so much potential that you have with that mentality and then

you have to break the mentality.

And I think our system is the whole economic driver.

I can completely understand why so many people in India or wherever

are in that survival mindset.

But luckily for us, we've moved out of that survival mindset and we have to

change because still our organizations and our economy and our politics

are all driven on that basis of that industrial revolution model of keeping

the factory going and what it's going to take in educationally, financially,

organizationally, all of those, and politically, all of those things is going

to take a different qualitative mindset.

Of how we approach it.

And I think that is the limit for most of first world organizations now.

I can feel Neil here together with us right now.

And adding AI to the mix that you just described Rob.

Yeah.

I can literally see him starting to say, yeah.

And then that is ai, and this is going to accelerate this process and the

challenges, and he will be so right.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what he does is changing organizations to adapt AI.

And I think all of us, I think we all in our way, find what isn't

working is what came from the past.

And it's knowing when to break, good for great.

But Rob, we, we made a choice and sorry to sound a bit political now,

but we made a choice in 1979 with Margaret Hilda Thatcher, we basically abandoned

Keynesian economics for neoliberalism.

That has become like a virus in the UK now, which just simply says

it's just all about the money.

So if it's all about the money, then of course you're going to get

league tables in schools, which everybody knows are massaged to death.

And it just trickles all the way down society.

You can buy your degree, you can buy your master's, you can buy your

PhD effectively, you can buy your black belt in judo, you can buy it

in karate, and the whole thing's just a load of bollocks, basically.

Sorry, folks.

And we are the privileged first world, so we're setting a horrific

example to everybody else.

We're just putting up a shrine to greed, and saying, with Elon Musk at

the top, and saying, these other places.

India, whatever, Brazil, tough guys, you're dragging behind and even

in the UK it's getting worse, Rob.

Okay, I know poverty's relative, but it is getting worse in the uk.

It's getting worse and worse as all this scramble to the few at the top.

Ultimately we're gonna end up with a couple of hundred billionaire

in the world and everybody else.

Where I live, there's a place, it's about five miles away, and there was supposed to

be 25 Russian billionaires hiding up that hill from Putin a couple of years ago.

I wouldn't have gone up there.

There's only one road in and one road out.

And it's shit, there's 25 all together.

I don't want to be there.

But supposedly they were all hiding there.

And he was going past in his helicopter, probably, waving at them.

You guys are scared of me.

But that's where we're ending up, with craziness.

And I look at Mosk and I think, he's crazy.

He may be talented, but he's crazy.

Telling the chief executive of Disney to fuck off, that wasn't a smart thing to do.

He may not have liked the guy, may not have wanted to do business, but he could

have behaved a bit better than that.

It's a winner take all mentality.

Elon Musk is a great example because I think what made him who he is has now,

although like the adulation and all of the acclaim has led like the Kings of

old is it enables their madness because they believe that they are invincible.

Going back to the mastery, it's the key is the work that you do, not who you are.

And I think someone like Elon Musk then thinks, anything I touch turns to gold.

And so he's destroyed Twitter.

And now he's about to revolutionize the United States.

But Rob, I would be scared to death if I would be him or this

Russian billionaires, Michael.

And I think these Russian billionaires were scared.

That, that's the point.

We have studied the French Revolution.

We have studied the Roman Empire.

We know what happens when it gets too far.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's not a good deal for them.

You would hope that because these are very intelligent, smart experienced

people, they would read a little bit about it and make different decisions.

But yeah.

It's ego basically.

That, that's what clicks in.

That's what ruins it.

Oddly enough where I live in the UK, we lived about a mile and a half

from a guy who did a huge amount of business with the Russian mafia.

He was a lawyer and an accountant and he was super bright and he thought

he was so bright, he was brighter than them, he could control them.

Didn't end well.

His helicopter just flew out of the sky.

So what he didn't realize was that they were just savages.

If they took against them, they weren't going to argue it.

They weren't going to say, oh, he's the smartest guy in the room.

They didn't even hide that they would do it.

It was a public demonstration.

This is what you get.

It was, came out of Bournemouth airport 20 minutes later, boom, side of the scum.

It wasn't like, Oh, a bit of the helicopter didn't work.

It was like, boom.

I grew up in the era of Thatcher.

And I remember them saying, okay we've solved the boom and the bust

and we're not going to have inflation.

We can manage it all now.

And then witnessed the biggest.

It was one of the biggest, wasn't it?

Black Friday or something in the 80s or 90s.

Nigel Lawson yeah, and she's gone.

So the brightest guy in the room in any room.

And then I saw every politician after that say it's OK because we've

managed out to manage the economy and we're not going to have this.

And I saw it fell time and time again.

And that brings to mind that it's You know, when you were talking about Robert

Greene talks about the childhood, and I think it's about the spiral of life.

I think that we continually revisit the same challenges.

When someone reaches a level of mastery, then their ego becomes challenged

again, their willingness to believe themselves becomes challenged again.

The problem is that We humans are so needing to feel that we're special, that

we're something different, that that there is this great, and again, like you

say, Saurabh, it all comes down to ego.

I can remember like I'd never had a mentorship and I think it

was because part of not trusting and part of not surrendering.

When I look for someone to learn from it was probably why I react

so much to this book as I look for.

Can I trust them?

Are they real master?

Because you can't come across a lot of people that have very thin knowledge and

you can tell when someone has mastery and you can also tell when someone is, of good

character, genuinely and you need to feel That you can let go of that ego And then

there becomes a point when you reach that mastery and can you let go of it again?

And to learn the next level and so it all comes down to the individual doesn't it?

However much we Talk about societal problems.

They're all individual problems that and societal is the mass

of our Individualities combined.

I'm going to shut down.

It was such a pleasure to discuss this with you again today and go

through so many different places.

Something that I felt like once this apprenticeship and once

you have found yourself, how you are able to synthesize those different

ideas, that's something like.

Even in that book that Michael, you love so much the art of

thinking clearly like that's when that intuition develops, right?

That's the part that really interests me that a lot goes inside

and sits in your subconscious.

And it comes from there.

So most of, and this is talked about a lot in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book as

well, Flow, that it's like an unconscious know how of what you are going to do,

and it comes from a different place.

It doesn't even seem that, you are the one who's doing it.

And that's where I feel is the, the pinnacle of mastery is where, what you

are trying to do that comes naturally and you have an identity, you have established

a, very different kind of an identity and everything comes very naturally flows

out naturally out of you, like a lot of painters, especially like who do painting,

like my wife, she does a lot of painting.

So she was saying that.

Like there are certain mornings where the brush strokes just happen.

Like she's not thinking and she's one with the painting.

And similarly, when I play table tennis, that's the feeling of flow

when you are in complete control, everything happens in slow motion.

You are not even consciously trying to do anything.

So these are the times when I feel that, you get glimpses of mastery and these

like the great masters, they have that intuitive know how of what's going to

happen next, which is seen like examples have also been given in the book as well.

Especially in sports and all you tend to know what next is going to happen.

Most of the great managers, they have a, Idea that now the change needs to happen.

A very small thing might happen and they know five minutes down the

line, something's going to happen.

So that kind of thing, like they're able to read those intuitive signs, very

small signs, which lead to something greater, they're able to see that keen

observation is something that I talked about initially in the very beginning.

That's something I feel these masters have in common with all of them.

Yeah, you have to accumulate so much awareness.

It's Richard Feynman's problem solving.

The technique where he holds 12 questions in his head and he said, Hey, whatever

I read, I apply to these and which is a different way of looking at that.

I've always appreciated people who who I feel have mastery.

And I think the first one that I found as a teenager, I used to read Peter Drucker.

And I love the way that he would.

he would talk about management, but he would bring in, I can remember

something he said right from and that actually it was about mastery.

And this was something I read in my teenage years and I've never, I've looked

for someone who's, who said something similar or to find what he said, but

basically he said, and I can't remember which way around it was that Greek,

I think it's Greek art and culture was so much more refined than Romans.

It was because the Greeks had the marketplace so they could focus on

mastery, whereas the Romans had to focus on selling and so spent less

time on developing their craft.

When you read someone like Peter Drucker or someone who you feel they

will pull from so many different fields and it's because they've taken

in everything but they've had that kind of Feynman focus of this is what

it is and I think that's the core.

That's something that Robert Green was talking about is it's a focus

and I don't think it's so what I react to is the you mustn't do that

and I think That's already there.

It's the passion.

And when you have that passion, you revisit it so many times and it

becomes a spiral that you observe more because you have more interest

and then you have more awareness.

And so a football manager watching football watches it differently

from someone like myself.

Exactly.

You play football and you're running around chasing the ball.

Whereas they have that awareness of where you need to be and

where the ball's going to break.

And it's, you just have to ingrain it so that you have that pattern

recognition and then it seems automatic.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's surely that ingraining is a learned skill.

The more you do it, the more you're going to get better at doing it.

I went down, what is it, Monday today, on Saturday, I went out on my own

and I climbed, it was a bit harder than I've been on for about a year.

And since Saturday, I've probably redone it, I don't know how many

times, it's certainly more than 20.

It's a sequence of about 40 moves.

And they're all in here.

I haven't got them all quite right.

But it's a gymnastic sequence.

And I go through it again in my mind again.

Now, most climbers don't do that.

They won't be doing it 30, 40, 50 times.

And I routinely do it.

It's just ingrained.

This is what I need to do.

What you need to do, kid.

So when I go back to that, I'm going back with, obviously I need to recheck

things and recalibrate, but I've basically got a neural map that says,

and in the end, if you've got it right, you don't even have to look at the

holes, you know what you're going to do.

You know how you're going to feel as you, it's not just doing it, it's what

you're going to feel when you're doing it.

This is the point where I think I could give in now.

This is when you've got to pull harder.

There's all this stuff and other people just don't do it.

If you do it, you're just light years ahead of other people.

So they say, how come this silly old whatever can do this stuff I can't?

Because I'm younger and stronger.

Because I'm just doing this.

It's a learned skill thing.

The

other point that I forgot to make there is When you see someone who has

that mastery and when they, it all of them come to the same like universal

truth that there is that everyone, it doesn't matter what field it is, whether

it's climbing, whether it's football, whether it's a business or whatever.

In the end, everyone comes to the, and that's how I recognize mastery

because you see the same message.

The same overall thing in everyone who's achieved that.

So my stepson has keeps on at me to go climbing somewhere, but I'm going to go.

soon for my first time.

So I'll need that pattern.

No, you don't.

You don't need for a long way.

The only thing I'll say is use your feet.

Actually, I'll just give you a silly little example about

exactly that because it can show the difference a coach can make.

Years ago, there was this guy, Paul Hicksey, and I was trying to teach him

climbing, and he was like a little, he'd been like a second Dan Black Belt

in karate, he was a strong lad, and I kept saying, use your feet, use, because

men, women, beginner, women beginner climbers can have beautiful footwork, but

men tend to think, they all think about pulling, they just don't, they just don't.

And I was saying to Hicksey, use your feet.

In fact, it's not even your feet, it's your toes, it's the feet.

Top bit of your toes.

And he said, Oh, I know that.

I know that.

And I said, you don't really.

Anyway, about five years later, maybe seven or eight, he was with this young

lady and he was saying, use your feet.

And I thought it's gone through a circle.

It's gone through a circle.

But wait, this is the kicker.

There used to be this little guy called Mike Lee.

He coached the English, he coached the England climbing team years ago.

And he used to say to me, he didn't say use your, he said build your feet.

It took me six years to work out what he meant.

Six years.

One day that I said, why does he keep saying this?

And that's all he ever said.

He didn't explain it.

So he wasn't a very good coach in that way.

Build your feet, build.

What he meant was pressing down on your toe.

So it went all the way through your body.

So your whole body pivoted on a tiny little bit of your toe.

That's what he meant.

Six years to work that out.

Six years!

But a coach could have just said it in a minute.

Could have saved me six years.

Coaches can make a huge difference.

I know we're in this world where you've got to get coached to have your breakfast

but coaches can make a big difference.

They really can.

The very last thing I'll say before I shut up for the whole of the day, we keep

having this thing about mastery and ego.

And I think a lot of it is about letting go of your ego, because if you do

something enough, you will reach, the blockages will be in you increasingly.

It'll be where you're from, where you're worried, where you're arrogant, wherever.

There's a concept in Japanese martial arts called Budo.

I don't know if it's a word you've come across.

No, it's probably got a very Japanese, Particular meaning, but basically the

notion of Budo is that if you do Judo or Karate, whatever for 70 years,

in the end, it's not so much about conquering the other person, it's

about conquering your own weaknesses.

It's about you bringing yourself face to face with your own weaknesses.

And in the old days, gradings in karate and stuff, it's big

business in the West, with dojos.

But in the old days, every time you did a grading, you dyed your belt.

So it went from white to yellow to purple to blah, blah, blah, through to black.

And in the end, with repeated dyeing, black belts went back to white.

And that was quite deliberate.

The notion was that your whole life you were a beginner.

And the Japanese notion of black belts wasn't that you were an expert, it was

just you were no longer a beginner.

Anyway.

That's all it was.

You were just no longer a beginner.

That's all, really.

This Japanese notion of Budo and letting go, just facing up to your

ego and facing up to your ego problems and in the end just letting go of it

and just dealing with your own mess.

I think, my gut feeling is there's a lot in it.

It's the way I feel about climbing now.

It's basically me and my weaknesses.

That's what it is.

And now I've shut up.

I think that's beautiful.

profound truth.

And to bring it back round, I struggle with this book because I

struggle with my ego in reading it.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

I just didn't have that problem.

I felt it was all over the place.

I thought, God, I'd never tell a client to write a book.

Like it's too long.

It needs to do that.

But I felt there were nuggets in there that I, there were

nuggets that I could really

get.

When I was looking up, I read I saw that Ryan Holiday.

As it was, as you said, he did a historical research for him.

And I'm amazed because I think Ryan Holiday would have written so

much better that book because I've read a couple of his recently and

I think he's a really good writer.

Again, someone who brings in historical and all of this stuff.

Yeah, so I was surprised in the style cause I read a couple of things that

he was, he did the research, historical research and Robert Green was his mentor.

Ryan Holliday started being his research assistant after having

worked in different, various jobs.

And then he became this Robert Greene's research assistant.

He was his research assistant for six or seven years.

And they did, I think three or four books together.

Once he was went through his apprenticeship then he start wrote

his book, first book, I think courage is calling or something.

That was his first book, I think.

And then he,

yeah he wrote a couple of, he wrote one.

I didn't think it was very good conspiracy.

It was about, he was working at American apparel and there was a big

drama about Basically, the CEO went nuts, was treating people terribly and

all of this stuff and basically blew up the company rather than let go, be

bought out and lost everything himself and Ryan Holiday was his assistant.

Or was marketing specialist and he was right asked to so it's basically like

a kind of revenge porn thing of ryan holliday was asked to plant these pictures

in the media and his struggle and then the board tried to get the ceo out

because he was going it was like nero.

He wrote a few marketing books and then he got into Stoicism and that's, yeah,

I think that might be the first of his books, Stoicism books, he found his feet.

And I love his even his talks and all on Stoicism and

Marcus Aurelius and all that.

Yeah.

I really enjoy reading about them and listening to his YouTube videos

as well, at times, Ryan Holiday.

Yeah.

Yeah I've recently read a couple of his books and I found all the things

that people thought I was odd for saying is actually part of Stoic philosophy.

So yes, quite interested in that.

Yes.

It's

very interesting that, Stoicism.

The Japanese concepts, even, most of them, like even Hinduism, Buddhism,

a lot of these concepts all surround around ultimately what, actually

Michael was talking about mastery.

At the end of the day, it's a very difficult journey because I try to be

what I can say, it's been five, six years that I've been in this, a journey with a

master in that sense, a guru I'm trying to imbibe a lot of things from him.

It's very difficult to let go of the ego as we were talking about at the end of

the day, it's mainly to do with that.

I feel like I'm learning so much, so fast.

I can feel that.

Yeah.

Each year of my life, it's like that spiral each year, there is a spiral

that is taking me slightly higher.

I can feel that for the past six years, seven years, nearly, but still the main

struggle for me as Michael, you were saying that it's the inner struggle.

It's that at all points of time, you want to be something as an individual rather

than, just letting go of everything.

And that dualism in that sense.

Of wanting you to be something and not believing that you already are, is where

the struggle, you can intellectualize it and say it in different words, but

at the end of the day, it's just about, as Michael was saying, it's about.

Just being nothing.

Being like water or whatever you like, like you are nothing that coming

to that realization deep within, not in words, but in realization

that's the whole journey I feel.

It is perfectly summed up by another Ryan holiday book in that

series of the obstacle is the way.

And yeah I feel so much, but I think Robert Green really

missed out on, martial arts is a perfect metaphor for mastery.

And I think there is so much that he could have got from using that as a basis.

For so long tried to think of in, in what I'm teaching and training

people in is like, how do you bring the martial arts belt system, that

clarity of where you are to the world?

Because I think, like the, it's not an actual part of martial arts,

but it was brought in by, from my understanding, it was brought in by the

Navy SEALs, so that they could shortcut.

what it took to be to get to the level of proficiency of black belt.

And it was that they, who invented it for an American style of mind and they

were able to shortcut the process and get to a similar level of proficiency

in months that took years in the older style and being able to break up the

comp, the levels of competence and that, which kind of goes into what

you were talking about in climbing.

Michael in that if you can break down the individual tasks, and reach a level of

You know So you can get to yellow belt in this and then you can get to green belt in

this and then when you can do that, then you get to black belt, which as you say

is the beginning of black belt is when you can start to develop your own style and

and Again, I think probably that was my struggle in Variety is I didn't respect.

I didn't like the whole belt system.

I didn't think and when people came down, like to grade and I thought it was just

a performance and a money making scam.

And because of that, I couldn't let go of my ego to And I was like, we're

learning this and it doesn't make sense.

So again yeah I think the ego, which is another book that

comes to mind from the series

of

Ryan holidays is courage is calling.

Discipline is destiny, the obstacle is the way, and the ego is the enemy.

Ego

is

the,

yeah,

the

enemy.

Maybe we need to do another one of these, a bite of book about

ego, because I, when I was a little kid I wanted to be a brilliant climber.

I had all these things and things went wrong, and in the end I lost it

very quickly indeed, I wasn't happy.

And then I went back to it and I've done it for nearly 60 years.

But in those 60 years, I've known about 60 peak climbers who've died.

Now ten of them, roughly about ten have died from just old age or infirmity,

but the other fifty got killed climbing.

So if you do something and it's a big part of your life and you see a dozen,

ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty people killed at it, it really slams your ego.

Your ego becomes a commodity, a luxury you can no longer afford.

You just can't.

You're just broken.

Because you're broken again and again and again.

And in the end, you just have to accept that here you are, fallible,

friable, human, all too human, good in some ways, bad in others,

and that's just the way it is, and that's what you've got to deal with.

So I think that's what, If climbing taught me anything, it was probably

compassion initially for other people and ultimately harder for myself, really.

But I can't get away from those deaths.

They're in me.

I have to live with them.

I have to live with them.

And I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

But, in the West, we've got weak, we've got lazy, we've got sloppy.

But if you go through that life experience don't know, it does things to you.

But what I'm saying is your ego, you can't lead with your ego

becomes just starts to fall away.

It's still there, but it's, it falls away.

It's not huge.

It just falls away.

I think that also speaks to pattern recognition.

In that what I learned about relationships, from probably from

the other side is because most people have on average about five

or six deep root personal, romantic relationships through their life.

And what I was seeing was time after time, hundreds of people and to them,

because it was, they were so emotionally caught up in it, it was the situation,

it was the content of the thing.

Whereas for me, I was looking at the context and abstracting the

principles and I was saying it's the same thing, it's the same thing,

even though it looks very different.

So I think that the balance between being involved enough to see it or

focusing on it and not being so lost in the situation that you lose sight of the

situation from the abstract principles.

And seeing enough cases over and over again is where we

can learn learn the dynamics.