Mastery - Part Three
In a world overflowing with distraction and external validation, many people drift through life disconnected from their deeper sense of purpose. Part 3 of this series builds upon Robert Greene’s philosophy by presenting six strategic pathways for discovering, pursuing and fulfilling your purpose. Whether you’ve lost touch with your childhood passions, veered off course for financial security, or feel your challenges define you, this section offers practical strategies to help you reorient your life toward meaning. Through compelling examples and timeless wisdom, this guide invites you to remember what you are here to do—and to begin doing it. If you want more knowledge on these strategies, please buy and read Mastery. It’s life changing.
Strategies for Finding your Life’s Task
Greene states that “what we lack most in the modern world is a sense of a larger purpose to our lives.” Without a purpose we tend to stagger and don’t know how to meaningfully fill up our time. Even though you may not be fully conscious of this emptiness of purpose, it infects you in all kinds of ways. Although you may dream of a life where you don’t have to work and all we get to do is relax, travel, play, party, eat, sleep, etc., eventually you will end up feeling like something is missing. Humans crave something deeper and more meaningful to our existence. We see this happening all the time in pop culture, people get rich and famous and seemingly enjoy the “good life” but end up struggling with addiction, partying too much, spending all of their money frivolously, engaging in illegal activities, desperately trying to retain their youth, the list goes on. Eventually the bill is due, the lack of meaningful purpose catches up to us, and the price is steep.
Discovering your purpose is essential towards living a profound and meaningful life. Without a meaningful purpose that is aligned with your inclinations, life may never feel fulfilling or entirely worthwhile. Greene has provided a fantastic road map supported by real life examples to help us get started in discovering and pursuing our life’s purpose.
1.Return to Your Origins
Essentially, we all have unique inclinations that draw us toward certain subjects and activities as children, a “reflection of your unique chemistry.” These inclinations cannot be explained, they are provided to us through a seemingly hidden force. They can be identified through sensations such as “deep wonder, sensual pleasure, power, and heightened awareness.” It is absolutely important to recognize these inclinations as they are an indication of an authentic attraction to something that is not “infected by the desires of other people.” In other words, they are signs of the direction of your unique purpose, not the product of your social conditioning and influences.
Greene provides a number of examples, from Albert Einstein an his fascination with the compass as a young boy (which translates to his fascination with the hidden forces in physics) to John Coltrane and his infatuation with the saxophone (a medium of authentic expression). The individuals he discusses all had this primal attraction to something in childhood that bordered on a religious awakening and provided the foundation for their life’s work.
We all, in some form, have had deep connections in childhood towards certain objects, subjects, and activities. For some they are obvious, for others (like myself) they are more subtle, but they are there. As adults we lose touch with our inclinations, they become buried beneath life experiences and other subjects we have studied. The work then is about returning to your origins and reconnecting with your inclinations. There is nothing new to create, you must only dig and reflect on your life to rediscover what it is you are inclined towards.
As you investigate yourself and your past, look for moments when you had “visceral reactions to something simple, a desire to repeat an activity that you never tired of, a subject that stimulated an unusual degree of curiosity, feelings of power attached to particular actions.” You can reconnect with your inclinations at any age, you will know when you discover them by feeling a spark of life in your heart, you will feel a deep tinge of excitement, which will indicate the path that can move you towards fulfilling on your life’s purpose.
2.Occupy the Perfect Niche
Greene shares that when you have some sense of your inclinations, but aren’t sure on how to materialize them or enact them into reality, finding a perfect niche will provide you with the ability to fully embrace and thrive in life. As the career world is “like an ecological system where people occupy particular fields within which they must compete for resources and survival,” finding an unoccupied niche is essential to prosper in the ecosystem. Although it may appear impossible in our already niche dominated world, you would be surprised as to how many opportunities exist. Simply based on the fact that no one else is you, and you alone can create and occupy an abundant niche.
Occupying a niche requires patience and persistence, you much choose a field that roughly corresponds to your inclinations and from there Greene suggests 2 strategies for fulfilment. Greene shares the stories of V.S. Ramachandran and his specialization in Phantom Limbs as well as Yoky Matsuoka and her development of the Neurobotics field. Each occupy a niche, and each did it in a different way.
Ramachandran’s path was rooted in his experience of being different than other boys in school and was often lonely and an outcast. He would spend his time combing the beaches in India for unique and abnormal seashells as opposed to playing sports and engaging in other typical activities. As a result of his odd interests, he chose to learn about human anatomical abnormalities, pursue medical research and eventually landed on the Phantom Limb experience in humans. Ramachandran’s odd and unique interests set him apart from others and set him on a path towards studying anomalous neurological disorders and becoming the sole expert in his field for decades.
For Ramachandran, Green says “from within your chosen field you look for side paths that particularly attract you, when it’s possible you make a move to this narrower field. You continue this process until you eventually hit upon a totally unoccupied niche, the narrower the better.” The niche eventually corresponds to your uniqueness as a human. Who you are becomes the core reason for the existence of the niche and your competitive advantage in the ecology.
Matsuoka’s path was different but similar. She grew up in Japan in the 1970’s where the typical experience was to have your life laid out for you by the school system into gender appropriate roles in society. For Matsuoka, this was suffocating as she was really interested in math and science, and through the support of her parents sports as well, namely tennis. She became a very competent tennis player and moved to the US to train but due to injury she had to focus on academics. She concentrated on electrical engineering, and found herself in a robotics lab developing a robotic hand which overtime led her to study neurosciences and eventually create the Neurobotics field, the “design of robots that possessed simulated versions of human neurology.” She would engage with her subjects of interest with depth and a tremendous work ethic, and combine seemingly unrelated fields of interest to found a whole new area of science.
For Matsuoka, Green says “once you have mastered your first field, you look for other subjects or skills that you can conquer on your own time if necessary. You can now combine this added field of knowledge to the original one, perhaps creating a new field or at least making novel connections between them. You continue this process as long as you wish.” As the strategy for much innovation in our modern world, it fits well with a culture where information is widely available. Connecting different ideas is a form of power and authority in the world.
Whether you see your interests as being too niche and weird, or having a wide array of interests, it is possible to enact them in such a way that you live your life in alignment with your inclinations. Narrowing your scope of interest or connecting differing interests in new ways are both strategies that can support you powerfully.
3.Avoid the False Path
This approach is related to realizing you are on the wrong path in life. Generally, being on the false path occurs because of a desire for money, fame, attention, or simply influences from counterforces. Greene uses the example of Mozart breaking away from his father’s influence and control to pursue his authentic path in life and in music. His father had molded him to be a performer for the elite, and Mozart authentically wanted to write and compose operas on his own.
Greene shares that first you must realize as early as possible (right now is perfect) that you have chosen your career or life path for the wrong reasons. Be it because your parents, friends, school system wanted you to pursue this path, or it may have been the only viable option at the time. Regardless of why you chose this path, it is time to accept and stand against these choices and begin to move into what is right for you.
Second, you must start actively rebelling against the counterforces that have pushed you away from your true path. “Scoff at the need for attention, approval [or money] – they will lead you astray. Feel some anger and resentment at the parental forces that want to foist upon you an alien vocation. It is a healthy part of your development to follow a path independent of your parents and to establish your own identity.” You must generate this sense of rebellion and let it fuel your desire for purpose and meaning. This energy will build over time and provide you with empowerment and the required self-esteem to make responsible and bold choices to move into your life purpose.
4.Let Go of the Past
Greene emphasizes that “you are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or company. You are committed to your Life’s Task, to give it full expression.” As such, the key of this strategy is to let go of past ways of doing things and the you see yourself and your life, they will ensure that you fall behind and suffer for it. Just because you are where you are, because of what you have done in life, does not mean that you are stuck here. Let go of what has happened (and not happened). “Your Life’s Task is a living, breathing organism. The moment you rigidly follow a plan set in your youth, you lock yourself into a position, and the times will ruthlessly pass you by.”
Greene uses the example of Freddie Roach and how he went from being a competitive boxer, to leaving the sport and falling into addiction and meaningless jobs, to finding his way again through becoming an elite boxing coach. Through his journey, Roach had it that his best days were behind him, but by progressively reconnecting to the sport he loved through helping out at a boxing gym and training young athletes, he rediscovered his love of the sport. Through his work as a coach, he discovered training techniques not being used in boxing and implemented them with his athletes. The result: Freddie Roach became a world renowned boxing coach who worked with the likes of Manny Pacquiao and Mike Tyson amongst many others. Here’s the thing though, his love and inclination was not boxing necessarily, it was competitive sports and strategizing which he merged with boxing. But first, he had to let go of the past and start anew.
5.Find Your Way Back
Greene calls this the “Life or Death Strategy” because of his example of Buckminster Fuller and how he ended up inventing the Dymaxion Car and House. Fuller had experienced many different careers and life experiences, and was at a point of complete despair, on the verge of making a drastic choice of ending his own life. He was lost, in debt and feeling completely helpless – he asked himself, what was the point of going on?
Fuller was foundationally motivated by the pursuit of money and material wealth. Although he had high paying jobs and lived a lavish lifestyle, eventually the funds ran out, he and his family could not continue their lifestyle. Fuller chose to pursue money, as opposed to following his inclinations. Greene shares that “most often you deviate because of the lure of money, of more immediate prospects of prosperity. Because this does not comply with something deep within you, your interest will lag and eventually the money will not come so easily. You will search for other easy sources of money, moving further and further away from your path.” Sounds familiar? Greene essentially described my 20s in that statement.
In a dark and desperate moment of his life, Fuller heard what he claimed was the voice of God, who said: “From now on you need never await attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
Wherever this voice came from, it awoke him to his own potential and how he should live his life. He understood that he must take the frustration and pain and let it guide him, it was a matter of life and death. As is the pursuit of our life’s purpose. Our lives depend on us discovering, pursuing and fulfilling on our life’s purpose. The important aspect is to forget about immediate pleasures and maintain a high degree of patience, keeping your eyes to 5-10 years into the future. In the end “the money and success that truly last come not to those who focus on such things as goals, but rather to those who focus on mastery and fulfilling their Life’s Task.”
6.Reversal
Greene uses the example of Temple Grandin who, born in 1947 and diagnosed with autism at a very young age, was faced with enormous social and behavioral challenges in life. She is a perfect example of someone who had perceived deficiencies and was undeterred to pursue a powerful life for herself and the world. Grandin’s experience in life as a person with autism provided her with experiences and perspectives to become an advocate for people with autism. It also provided her with an ability to connect with animals in such a unique way that she had a massive impact on how we humanely handle livestock and in understanding animal behavior in general.
Greene shares that “your Life’s Task does not always appear to you through some grand or promising inclination. It can appear in the guise of your deficiencies, making you focus on the one or two things that you are inevitably good at.” Perhaps it is through our perceived deficiencies that we can discover our purpose in life. “Do not enby those who seem to be naturally gifted; it is often a curse, as such types rarely learn the value of diligence and focus, and they pay for this later in life. “
As we learn to grow through our own personal struggles, we can then turn around and provide the experiences and wisdom to others who deal with the same things we do. Our personal struggles provide us with unique opportunities to develop skills in adaptability, resiliency, work ethic and a unique perspective in life. The key is to discover what it is you know and do well, anchor yourself in them and reestablish your confidence. Don’t think you need a grandiose inclination or purpose, perhaps it is precisely what you are struggling with that is your answer to your purpose in life.
Discovering your Life’s Task is not a luxury—it is a necessity for living a fulfilling and empowered life. The six strategies explored in this section serve as both compass and fuel for your journey back to purpose. Whether through rediscovery of childhood passions, embracing unique interests, or transforming adversity into strength, the path to mastery requires inner alignment and bold self-honesty. Ultimately, the call to purpose is universal, but the route is individual. By courageously answering that call, you not only elevate your own life—you become a force for change, creativity, and contribution in the world.