The idea is -- is mastery appropriate to a
totally modern world which isn't the world
of Da Vinci or even Einstein?
-- I find it almost -- it's a good question
but it's almost a silly idea because we humans
have evolved over the course of millions of
years.
The human brain is a masterpiece of design
from our earliest ancestors to the earliest
Homo sapiens to the invention of language
to who we are now.
And to think that in 20 years we have somehow
overthrown five, six million years of evolution,
is just absolutely ridiculous.
The brain is what it is.
It has a certain pattern -- I call it a grain
to it.
It's an instrument that is designed -- if
you focus deeply on a subject, you understand
it better and better and better and more layers
of it are revealed to you.
You can't suddenly rewrite the configuration
of the human brain or imagine that by surfing
quickly from here to there on the Internet
you're somehow gonna become a master of something.
The laws that I'm talking about in the book
-- about focus, about going deeply into a
subject -- they still pertain but we give
it a modern flavor.
So I interviewed nine contemporary masters
to get rid of the notion that these are all
people in powdered wigs -- masters from the
eighteenth century or whatever.
All of them fit the same pattern that I'm
talking about but they've managed to use what's
great about our time period.
The level of distraction is a negative, let's
face it.
It is a negative.
It makes it harder for us to go deeper and
deeper into a subject or to focus deeply.
But the good parts of our era is the incredible
explosion of information, how much is accessible
to us, how, with just a couple of clicks on
the Internet, we can start investigating some
new science or some new discovery just at
our fingertips.
It's incredible.
And so these are all people who are taking
advantage of all of this and are making connections
between ideas, between different fields.
That's where the future of mastery is.
Yoky Matsuoka, she goes into electrical engineering
and then she goes into robotics and now she's
-- and she studied neuroscience.
So she's combined them all into a new field
called neurobotics, where she's trying to
design products that operate like a robot
but are linked to how the human brain works
so that there are things that learn.
She's combined five or six different fields
into this new field that she calls neurobotics.
That's the future of mastery, but you have
to master the basics of the whole thing, which
is building discipline, being able to practice
at something over a long period of time and
being able to focus.
Nothing we ever invent is gonna be able to
change that.
There's no drug in the world or any application
that's gonna alter that.
