conversation with the author you can read in a more active way how how should someone go about that process connection with the author from a book if there is one you've talked to mastery about how you can you can learn from a book how you can kind of see a book as as a mentor you can you can have a conversation with the author you can read in a more active way how how should someone go about that process well god that's a good question i talk a little bit about it in in my new book um a lot of the time when you're reading a book it depends on on what the book is about really i mean um you're kind of the the material that you're reading is you tend to make it dead and i'm thinking what you want to do is to make it all come to life so reading a book is like bringing something dead to life it's like taking frankenstein and imbuing it with life now what do i mean by that well you're kind of reading it um mechanically just the words you're not paying great attention you don't realize that the writer if it's a good writer when they had those thoughts that they're writing about it was something very exciting to them at the moment very alive um and they tried to put it on paper and and whenever you write an idea down something is lost in the translation like when it was in your mind it was very exciting and when it came onto paper that's not quite it your process is to kind of get inside the writer and feel that excitement feel it's it's what i call empathy it's partly empathy it's in mastery i call it thinking from the inside out you go inside the book inside the spirit you try and recapture what they were feeling not just what they were writing i know that's abstract and we could talk for three hours about the process but for instance on another level let's say a biography napoleon bonaparte was the hero of of the 33 strategies of war one of my favorite people to study um i call him the mozart of warfare he he went well beyond the 10 000 hours when it came to strategy he was absolutely a genius um i read maybe 4 000 pages worth of material on napoleon to prepare for this book particularly one great book called the campaigns of napoleon by i believe it's david chandler it's about 13 1400 pages and it it's d incredible detail about every battle with great maps i highly books way out of print quite expensive but it's if you love napoleon and you're into battles and maps this is the book for you anyway my goal was i want to bring napoleon to life i want to i want to feel like he's in the room with me here i want to know what how he thought you know what made him a genius so i go into it and i'm trying to dig it up and come to terms with what's alive about napoleon and i found that the books i read were missing his genius they were they were not quite getting at it i'm not saying i'm the only one that did but i felt like at a certain point i understood him i understood how his brain worked and i came to the conclusion that what made napoleon so great was he had a mind for organizing information that was vastly superior to anybody else before the invention of computers and it was his ability to assimilate vast amounts of information and create strategies in the moment that made him feel so superior that's the kind of reading that i'm talking about where you're not just on the surface not just reading the words but you're thinking you're analyzing it you're bringing it to term in relation to your own life your own experiences and you're making frankenstein come to life yeah is there anything i mean it's very abstract i can go into more but that's that's sort of my method yeah i wonder if you have any any specific tactics on that i know like when i read mastery i i held a pen and i was all over it circling dog earring jotting notes in the margins and that helped me to engage with the ideas in a in a deeper way than i would have if i'd been sort of more passive do you have anything specific i mean you just hit on it you're it's versus the passive form of reading so you're active so you're arguing with the with the writer that's one this is one idea yeah um so i always write in the margins some people hate that they feel like writing in a book is sacrilegious like you're you know you're spoiling it or you know yeah but i'm not like that i i write a lot and if i don't like a writer and that happens often and i get angry i start putting giant x's and i say you can i say that i said you yeah i get really angry yeah but otherwise usually i like it and i'm putting exclamation mark great yes and i'm i engage so you're engaging with the material you're not as you say you're not a passive reader you're arguing with it you're thinking so the the problem here is it slows you down you don't you're not unless it's a bad book bad books or mediocre books i kind of can skim but if it's a really good book it engages you you're arguing with it you're writing it it slows you down that's for sure but i i maintain it's better to read one juicy book that grabs you that really engages you that really makes you think than to read 10 you know kind of trivial books that don't have it so writing in the margins arguing with the book trying to think more deeply about what the writer is saying um analyzing uh instead of just reading it and bringing it to your own life so if i'm talking about um like in mastery just to bring in the war aspects cesar rodriguez the the um fighter pilot yes who's the last decorated um what do you call it uh an ace ace in the in air force was in the air force the marines air force air force thank you god um you know you're i'm talking about he was someone who was not your typical ace he wasn't a golden boy he's like five foot five um he didn't look like a fighter pilot and um he felt like he was had three strikes against him the moment he started he was a slow learner he wasn't a natural at it and so he had to learn i call it trusting the process that if he practiced harder than the golden boys if he spent more hours on the simulator than they did if he didn't take for granted his skill he would catch up with them now you're reading that and you're going blah blah blah then you're you know you're not really paying attention but if you're smart you're going all right when did that happen to me you know when have i like in a sport i felt like this wasn't good for me maybe i gave up too early i talk about the frustration and how frustration is a good thing for you if you're frustrated it shows your body is telling your body and your mind is telling you that you can actually overcome something and the moment you're feeling frustration is it actually a turning point a good moment um relate that to yourself don't just don't read about caesar rodriguez and thinking relate that to your own experience when you felt frustration and you either gave up or you pushed through it that's active reading that's making something come to life yeah so frustration as a good thing that's something that we want you are you saying it's it's a it's a trigger it's something to look for definitely um if you don't feel frustrated when you're learning something you're not learning okay and you're you're deluding yourself and you're probably going so they call that practice that i mentioned before where you practice what you're weak at deliberative practice in in the business when people talk about skills you're deliberately working on what you're not good at your tendency is to try and make things easy for you because you don't like pain we humans don't like pain so if you're going through your practice and things wow things are really easy i'm enjoying it's fun you're probably not learning you're probably doing this lopsided practice that we're talking about and you're avoiding your weaknesses and things are going too smoothly it's the frustration isn't just the fact also um that you're not mastering it it's also that it it's kind of um seems like a mystery you don't quite know what you need to do something is eluding you and i maintain and it's a little bit you have to believe me because there's not rigorous science behind this i usually like to have things backed by rigorous science it's based more on things that athletes talk about but that moment of frustration or actually mathematicians have talked about it that moment of deepest frustration is actually a signal from your body physically a signal that you're actually on the way to a breakthrough um that you feel you're you're it's telling you it's a signal um that something is churning up inside inside you and you're not yet aware of it um so a lot of that is based on anecdotal evidence like a great music mathematician like this man jacques adamand that i talk about he would say his greatest breakthroughs or einstein came just at that moment where you were about to give up and um there's a great instance of uh anecdote about the composer brahms and he was so frustrated with this one symphony that he was trying to write that he said i'm giving up i i can't write it that's it and the moment he gave up the next day all this the solution the perfect solution came to him um so there's a lot of and athletes talk about that so i'm basing on anecdotal elements and my own experience when i'm writing a chapter i get so frustrated and so annoyed my girlfriend i'm like driving her up a wall you know i'm just like yelling at the cat i can't take it anymore i'm the worst writer i'm about to give up and like it's almost mechanical the next day or two days later it all comes to you know it all fits so if you go through that enough you know that that frustration is a good thing and once you know that it's very liberating because you're able to wait for them for the breakthrough moment that will come you don't give up you give up maybe but you're kind of kidding yourself knowing that the moment you say i give up tomorrow or the next day the great idea will come to you so it's a little bit of faith but frustration if you don't have the frustration you're not on the right you're not on the right path well it's uh that's a fascinating take on this yeah i wish i had more science but maybe it's another book to write something about maybe yeah but yeah i think i think most of us tend to go with what's comfortable we tend to follow the path in of least resistance and to go where it feels good so amazing robert you talked about says rodriguez and being a