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    “The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas.  It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent.  To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it is the source of our misery.  What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude.  We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships.  We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires.  To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed.  We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

      “Masters manage to blend the two—discipline and a childlike spirit—together into what we shall call the Dimensional Mind.  Such a mind is not constricted by limited experience or habits.  It can branch out into all directions and make deep contact with reality.  It can explore more dimensions of the world.  The Conventional Mind is passive—it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms.  The Dimensional Mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

        “You must avoid the common mistake of making judgments based on your initial impressions of people.  Such impressions can sometimes tell you something, but more often they are misleading.  There are several reasons for this.  In our initial encounter you tend to be nervous, less open, and more inward.  You are not really paying attention.  Furthermore, people have trained themselves to appear a certain way; they have a persona they use in public that acts like a second skin to protect them.  Unless you are incredibly perceptive, you will tend to mistake the mask for the reality.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

          “People will say all kinds of things about their motives and intentions; they are used to dressing things up with words.  Their actions, however, say much more about their character, about what is going on underneath the surface.  If they present a harmless front but have acted aggressively on several occasions, give the knowledge of that aggression much greater weight than the surface they present.  In a similar vein, you should take special note of how people respond to stressful situations—often the mask they wear in public falls off in the heat of the moment.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery

            “Pay less attention to the words that people say and greater attention to their tone of voice, the look in their eye, their body language—all signals that might reveal a nervousness or excitement that is not expressed verbally.  If you can get people to become emotional, they will reveal a lot more.  Cutting off your interior monologue and paying deep attention, you will pick up cues from them that will register with you as feelings or sensations.  Trust these sensations—they are telling you something that you will often tend to ignore because it is not easy to verbalize.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery