Submit To Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship

After your formal education, you enter the most critical phase in your life–a second, practical education known as The Apprenticeship. Every time you change careers or acquire new skills, you reenter this phase of life. The dangers are many. If you are not careful, you will succumb to insecurities, become embroiled in emotional issues and conflicts that will dominate your thoughts; you will develop fears and learning disabilities that you will carry with you throughout your life. Before it is too late you must learn the lessons and follow the path established by the greatest Masters, past and present–a kind of Ideal Apprenticeship that transcends all fields. In the process you will master the necessary skills, discipline your mind, and transform yourself into an independent thinker, prepared for the creative challenges on the way to mastery.

Keys to Mastery

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. –Leonardo da Vinci

The Apprenticeship Phase — The Three Steps or Modes

Step One: Deep Observation — The Passive Mode
Step Two: Skills Acquisition — The Practice Mode
Step Three: Experimentation — The Active Mode

In general, no matter your field, you must think of yourself as a builder, using actual materials and ideas. You are producing something tangible in your work, something that affects people in some direct, concrete way. To build anything well–a house, a political organization, a business, or a film–you must understand the building process and possess the necessary skills. You are a craftsman learning to adhere to the highest standards. For all of this, you must go through a careful apprenticeship. You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.

Strategies for Completing the Ideal Apprenticeship

Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; and if it is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach. –Marcus Aurelius

1.  Value learning over money   [here]
2.  Keep expanding your horizons   [here]
3.  Revert to a feeling of inferiority   [here]
4.  Trust the process   [here]
5.  Move toward resistance and pain   [here]
6.  Apprentice yourself in failure   [here]
7.  Combine the “how” and the “what”   [here]
8.  Advance through trial and error   [here]

Reversal

There are no shortcuts or ways to bypass the Apprenticeship Phase. It is the nature of the human brain to require such lengthy exposure to a field, which allows for complex skills to become deeply embedded and frees the mind up for real creative activity. The very desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery. There is no possible reversal to this process.

* Source: Mastery by Robert Greene