The one-sentence summary
Everyone has the potential to master something if they identify their true calling, serve their apprenticeship patiently, and put in enough effort.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS 
• Mastery of a subject or skill is not down to luck or having innate skill. Anyone can achieve it with the right approach.
• It is attained through three stages: apprenticeship, the creative-active phase, and then mastery.
• It begins by discovering your calling – your life’s task. This could involve any or all of returning to your origins, occupying a particular niche, letting go the past and avoiding false paths.
• The apprenticeship phase involves deep observation, skills acquisition, and lots of experimentation – moving from passive to practice to active mode.
• True apprentices value learning over money, keep expanding their horizons, revert to a feeling of inferiority, move towards resistance and pain, and advance through trial and error.
• The Mentor Dynamic is important – masters choose their mentors according to needs and inclinations, transfigure their ideas, and create a back-and-forth dynamic that inspires them.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
• Masters can see people as they are – they have true social intelligence.
• Seven Deadly Realities are the enemy of mastery: envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsession, laziness, flightiness, and passive aggression. These can be offset by speaking through your work, crafting the appropriate persona, seeing yourself as others see you, and suffering fools gladly.
• Your original mind is open and inquisitive, like a child. As we grow, this becomes conventional. Masters open their dimensional mind through creative-active approaches and negative capability – the art of not judging outcomes in advance, and removing ego from the task.
• Neoteny is the retention of childish traits in adulthood – this is vital to non-judgemental learning.
• Masters connect to their environment with supreme focus and play to their strengths. It takes over 10,000 hours of practice to master something, but the best masters devote over 20,000 to their task. At this point they transform themselves through practice, emerging with ‘The Fingertip Feel’ that seems to others like pure intuition.
• Masters have a simultaneous grip on the tiniest details and a wide synthesising perspective that enables them to make apparently serendipitous connections – what most of us then think is some divine genius, but of course it isn’t.
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
• There are over 50 case histories of masters woven into the narrative, not all of which will appeal in their intense level of detail. Concentrating on the ones most relevant to your circumstances is recommended.