What does it take to become a master? There’s no one way to the top of Mount Mastery, but there are general trail markers that can let you know you are ascending, regardless of the field you’re pursuing. Robert Greene’s writing is backed by a slew of life experiences spanning numerous careers and odd jobs on multiple continents—as well as the lives of luminaries who give us glimpses into greatness. Taken together, these experiences have made him a keen observer of human nature, and he unpacks the keys to mastery in his book titled Mastery.

Deep within each of us is our truest calling, our Life’s Task. It’s deep and primal and has been with us since we were very young. It fades as we get older, and then flashes in and out throughout our lives. For those who pursue it, it becomes increasingly clearer. For those who ignore it or suppress it, it grows fainter. Your Life’s Task is a call to some kind of action. There’s something that each of us has to do and only we can do it. Discovering that “something” is not an optional extracurricular. It’s the central preoccupation in life.

This is the true self: the deepest part of us begging for expression in the world around us. It’s not something that is arrived at through rational speculation. It’s a gut level urge beyond words.

One of history’s many greats who spent his life cooperating with his inner voice, was Leonardo da Vinci. Because he was born out of wedlock, Leonardo was not able to attend schools or university as other “legitimate children” could. But this turned out to be the making of Leonardo. He was a lonely child who loved to wander through the dense forests in the countryside surrounding Vinci, the tiny town where he grew up outside of Florence. He would wander through the woods and marvel at the trees, the wild animals, the rivers, and waterfalls.

His father was a notary, so even though paper was extremely rare and expensive at that time, Leonardo took reams and reams of it out to the woods to practice sketching the scenes of nature around him. Not only did he appreciate the gorgeous landscapes, he also loved nature’s more minute details: the textures of the bark, the veins in a leaf, a bird’s feather, and so on.

Leonardo studied under artists and learned everything from painting to chemistry, from metallurgy to physics. But he also saw the value of doing things his own way and pursuing his own inclinations. He continued to be drawn to the details of his subjects, whether it was white irises in the woods of Vinci or the wrinkles in a face that he wanted to sketch. Following his love of detail led him to be the man we know today. He could have followed a conventional path through university, but he listened to an inner voice that helped him towards certain subjects and ways of approaching problems that were unknown in his day.

On one project he did with his master and mentor, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo leaned into his love for detail. Breaking with the conventional style of his day, he was the first to paint realistic wings on angels. He added an otherworldly expression to the angels' faces, inspired by parishioners he’d observed praying at church. He also painted plants around the angels, but not just generic plants as his contemporaries did: He painted plants in scientific detail that had never been seen before, drawing from his years of experience observing the flora in the woods. This painting Leonardo created with his mentor is just one small example from an illustrious and variegated career, but it was this inclination that made him a standout, and endeared him to his masters and the masses alike. 

We have these reflections thanks to conversations Leonardo had while on his deathbed in France. His friends and even the king of France himself would gather to hear his rare intimations of childhood. Leonardo talked about a life force that he had been pursuing all his life. This force that opened the white irises he sketched as a boy was the same force that allowed all life to be transformed. According to Leonardo, this inner force guides us intuitively toward our true calling, which we must learn to harness.

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The life force that Leonardo da Vinci spoke of and obsessively pursued throughout his life shows up throughout human history in the lives of the greats we can’t stop talking about. Socrates, Napoleon Bonaparte, Goethe, and many others all make reference to an inner voice or guiding light that seems to speak to them and directs them towards certain activities and pursuits.

Discovering your Life’s Task happens over the course of three stages. The first stage involves you listening to your own inner voice, your own inclinations. What are the things that make you come alive? Along your life story are instances where you saw that spark, that intimated some kind of primal desire deep within you. Your task is to clear away the noise of other voices, even the voices of well-intended friends and mentors. Sometimes we’re so afraid of the inner voice and what it might say to us that we clam up and create noise for ourselves. But finding your calling, your vocation, that thing you just have to do comes from listening to that voice deep within you and understanding it well.

The second phase of this journey involves taking stock of your position in life. What is your career? Is the path you are on aligned with the deep inner voice or is it time to alter your course? This phase is crucial. It’s also important to clarify what we mean by career and work. Culturally, we default to an artificial divide between work and “real life,” as if real life only begins after five o’clock or at the start of the weekend. This is a dismal outlook considering how much of our lives we spend working.

We would do better to think of work as a vocation, a pursuit that consumes us, something we simply have to do. The word “vocation” originally had to do with the call of God that people felt to be part of his church. With the passage of time, the word is no longer limited to clergy, but we would do well to recover this deeply-felt religious sense of the word when we think about our work. We won’t find true mastery apart from a sense of connection to what we’re doing.

What you do has to interest you, to electrify you, or at least leave you a trail of tantalizing crumbs. “Will this make me lots of money?” is the wrong question to ask. “Does this work or aspect of work naturally erupt from who I am?” is closer to it.

Thirdly and lastly is the phase of adventure, where you start a career or a job that roughly aligns with what you could see yourself doing. Through the unavoidable process of trial and error, you gradually become acquainted with the aspects of work that ignite something in you, and the others that don’t generate any sparks. Lean into the aspects of work that are exciting. Take this data for your consideration. As time goes on, you’ll gradually develop a clearer picture of a niche you could carve out where things just “click.” This is where everything starts to find its place and you excel beyond what you expected you were even capable of. This is not a niche you shoehorn yourself into, but something that suits your unique Life Task.

Where do you begin finding your Life’s Task?

Start by reflecting on your life and thinking back to moments of excitement, where you felt a very primal sense of “aliveness.” These moments are typically related to your story in a way that’s very specific to you. Albert Einstein remembers the moment when he was five years old when his father gave him a compass. He couldn’t believe there was some kind of invisible force that moved the needle around, and it left him to wonder what other forces might be operating in the universe. For the rest of his life, he’d come back to that moment as the starting point of his curiosity and obsession with understanding invisible forces.

Another approach to discovering your Life’s Task could be rebellion. By the time Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was four, his parents could not keep him away from the piano—even when it was time for bed. His father Leopold—an accomplished musician and composer in his own rite—could see his son had tremendous talent. By the time Mozart was five, he was composing his own music, and his father began shuttling him around Europe.

Young Mozart captivated royalty across Europe, and throughout his childhood he was essentially the breadwinner for his family, as his father set up more and more opportunities to showcase this prodigy. But Mozart became increasingly restless and in conflict with his father during his adolescence and young adulthood. Torn between supporting his family and avoiding his father’s anger on one hand, and pursuing that voice from his depths telling him he was meant for more, on the other, Mozart eventually heeded the voice and parted ways with his father. He played a show in Vienna, and refused to return home to his native Salzburg.

Mozart would remain estranged from his father for the rest of his life, but this was necessary for him to discover his passion for composing operas. His father’s jealousy toward Mozart had been festering and led to the father stifling his son’s talents to save his flagging ego. Mozart was never going to discover what was within himself under his father’s roof. It was a painful but crucial choice that he made to tap into the genius that lay in his depths. Mozart could have stayed trapped in the false self that his father had consigned him to, as a local organist in Salzburg, but the call of Mozart’s true self was too strong for him to ignore.

Yet another strategy for finding your voice is the adaptation approach. This is the understanding that your number one task is your Life’s Task. At the end of the day, you are not tied down to a career or to any company or to any particular way of doing things. Freddie Roach was a skilled boxer, but he struggled to clinch titles at a professional level, despite being trained as a fighter since he was a kid and getting coached by a towering personality within the boxing community. After drowning his sorrows in booze for not winning in the big leagues like he always wanted, Roach began coaching younger boxers and integrated new coaching techniques that revitalized a sport that seemed to be dying in the United States. Eventually he left his coach’s gym and started his own, where he became one of the most sought-after coaches. He never became a boxing legend himself, but he let go of the past failures, pivoted, adapted, and went on to train the boxing legends of tomorrow, like Miguel Cotto and Manny Pacquiao.

To master anything, you must start as an apprentice. Once you have a sense of what your Life’s Task might be or a general direction in which to head, it’s important to find an apprenticeship after you’ve had a formal education. We can think of the apprenticeship in three phases: deep observation, skills acquisition, and experimentation.

It starts off with simply observing and absorbing as much as you can of the world you are trying to enter and the masters who most profoundly influenced that world. Link yourself to one of them. Become familiar with that environment. This is the phase where you follow the rules, you don’t try to stand out, you remain sensitive and respectful of the hierarchies that are in place, and you absorb, absorb, absorb.

The second phase of the apprenticeship is practice mode. This is where you put in your 10,000 hours, where you start to connect your observational knowledge to action. Over time, it becomes tacit knowledge, a part of you as you begin to act out your skill. This is where discouragement and boredom can set in, even if you’re confident your training aligns with your Life’s Task. The process of hardwiring those skills into your mind and body takes time.

The final phase of a good apprenticeship is the experimentation period. This is the most active mode, where you’re not just practicing, but really doing, where you gradually step out of your master’s shadow and face down all the fears that process brings. Now that you have the skill, you make it your own and outshine your master.

One of the many admirable themes that runs through the life of Benjamin Franklin is his social intelligence. But this wasn’t some innate gift that he possessed. Only through a number of disappointments early in his life and discovering the depths of his naïveté was he able to alter his course.

One early incident came when young Franklin was apprenticed to his older brother James in a printing shop in Boston. When James refused Franklin an opportunity to write for The New-England Courant, Franklin wrote letters to the paper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood, a feisty elderly widow with opinions on just about everything. The Dogood letters became the most popular section of the Courant and James loved the write-ins—until Franklin revealed that he was Silence Dogood. The playful Franklin had expected his brother to laugh and applaud, but James was livid and considered it a deception and betrayal. An undercurrent of hostility began fomenting from that point and became severe enough that Benjamin Franklin had to leave the Courant. He’d horribly misread the situation, and lost a job over it.

Franklin left Boston for Philadelphia, and quickly established a reputation as a man of letters. The governor at the time was thrilled to have such an excellent writer, and promised him funds if he’d set-up a printing house. He agreed to fund Franklin’s voyage to London where Franklin could acquire the printing materials himself. Franklin was informed that he could go to London and the credit he would need would be waiting for him on the other side of the pond. But when Franklin got to London, the funds were not waiting for him, and he had to scramble to make a living for himself. He came across a businessman from Philadelphia who informed him that Philadelpiha’s governor was given to grandiose visions without actionable follow-through. He would be excited about a plan one week and forget about it the next. In Franklin’s naïve excitement, he had misjudged his unreliable commissioner.

Franklin managed to find work in a printing house in London, where he established himself as a fine, dependable editor. But when Franklin refused to chip in money for the local tradition of pausing from work five times a day for a pint with the guys, little mistakes he could have sworn he had exercised in the proofreading process were showing up in final printings. When he inquired, his colleagues shrugged and said there must be some ghost in the place mucking things up.

First he’d wrongly anticipated his brother’s response to Silence Dogood. Then he misjudged the Philadelphia governor’s character and got himself stranded in London. Now, his reputation was suffering sabotage because he had misread his colleague’s “acceptance” of his refusal to join their revelry. 

Franklin had to level with himself and admit that he was struggling to read people well, and it was landing him in trouble. He made a decision in that moment to operate differently, to approach each and every human interaction with enough distance to make sense of what was motivating others. This meant a radical acceptance of human nature, and of people as they are. Instead of trying to judge them or change them, Franklin wanted to understand them. This ongoing study of human nature allowed him to not only to develop a lifetime supply of witty homespun quips, it also made him a fantastic politician and diplomat. Franklin was noted for his uncanny ability to turn people intent on becoming his enemies into staunch allies and friends.

When we operate from our own deprivations and our own neediness, true mastery is not possible. Without social intelligence, we may learn things, but the lessons won’t stick. Social intelligence allows us to learn and grow in a way that the needed skills and qualities become part of us. It allows us to master our craft.

A word of warning as you pursue this adventure: There are counter forces that will thwart your effort to explore your inner voice, because that quest will inevitably bring you into conflict with the expectations of people who are closest to you. Your parents and your peers will have ideas of what you should be doing, but if you listen to them at the expense of your own voice, you will lose touch with your Life’s Task that’s been entrusted to you. You will slowly but surely waste away in the career you chose simply because “it makes sense” or “will make you lots of money.” You’ll wonder why you feel so sapped of any vitality or curiosity.

About 26 centuries ago, the Greek poet Pindar once mused, “Become who you are by learning who you are.” It’s tragic to face that some people never discover who they are. They never go on the journey. They spend their lives hiding behind masks, but they’re never known for who they truly are—to themselves or by others. This doesn’t have to be you if you find your inner voice.

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