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  • 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.

The idea is -- is mastery appropriate to a totally modern world which isn't the world

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