Basically writing the kind of books that I write I get to to meet and hang out with a very diverse group of people. So, for instance, on my first book, The 48 Laws of Power, I had, I got to have dinner with the ex-president of Italy, the Senor Andreotti, who who's perhaps the most one of the most Machiavellian politicians of our era. And then I got to have lunch with leading members of the Russian Duma like Zhirinovsky.

And then for the art of seduction, I got to give a talk or address excuse me, a conference, a worldwide conference of pickup artists.

And then I got to lecture a group of the leading figures in the erotica business on the art of seduction. And then for the three strategies of war, I got to address the counterterrorism school at West Point Academy and then later the elites of the Singapore military at the Singapore Military Command College.

And then for a fiftieth law, of course, I got to hang out with 50, set himself for several months. But I also got to do a Sunday talk at the largest black church in Baltimore, Maryland, which was one of the highlights of my life.

And now for this book, I get to meet and hang out with you, the future masters of your field and England and Europe and the world. You're going to be the Masters. You're going to be ruling this planet in the next 10, 20 years. And quite frankly, I'm from someone who came comes from the the city, which is probably has the lowest IQ per capita of any place in the universe. I'm talking about Los Angeles. It's it's quite an honor for me.

I'm really quite almost intimidated, but I'm quite humbled to be here. So thank you very much for inviting me.

Now, I know I called you Future Masters, but for the purposes of my talk tonight, I want to pretend for the moment that you are my apprentices and that I am your master and that I'm going to indoctrinate you in sort of the main ideas in the Book of Mastery. But before I get to the meat of that, I wanted to first sort of tell you a little bit about where this book came from.

So sometime back in the year 2009, this interesting thought began to stir in my brain.

For the previous 16 years, I had been researching and immersing myself in the stories of the greatest power figures who ever lived.

And I had begun to notice certain patterns and a common trait that they all shared after years of practice and and experience and study in their field the minds of these various figures, they had reached a superior level of intelligence.

They could discover things about the world that were simply invisible to everyone else. They had a sixth sense for trends and opportunities. They could make the most surprising and creative connections between ideas. And I decided I would call these people masters. They had essentially mastered their field.

And in order to sort of explain this phenomenon of mastery to myself in the early days of thinking about it, I came up with the following metaphor.

I'm going to share that metaphor with you.

And basically it goes like this when you first enter your career or the field that you're going to be pursuing, it is as if you were looking up at a mountain and the top of that mountain represents the knowledge and experience you need in order to be successful or to achieve something in your field.

When you first begin or look up, it seems rather far away and quite intimidating. But you begin to learn the rules and the practices and develop the skills that are necessary for you, for your field. And you make your way up this mountain.

Your progress might be slow, but as you get higher, you have this sort of better perspective of what your field represents.

You have a firmer grasp on reality. But what often happens to people somewhat at some point in their career is that the more they know about their field, the more complicated it becomes. All of a sudden, new, unforeseen problems arise. They have to keep up with all kinds of new trends and changes in their field.

There's more and more and more information to absorb the further you rise up.

And often you have the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by this glut of information and the complexity of your field to the point where you don't really even feel like you're getting this better perspective.

Well, masters are people who, because of their intense connection to what they're studying, because of their love for it, they actually learn.

Faster, they learn more intensely than other people and they generate this kind of momentum where they push past all of those obstacles and they reach the top of this mountain. It could take 10, it could take 20 years. But at the top of that mountain, they have perfect perspective. They can see in all directions they have a real solid grasp on their field.

They can they can make connections between an idea over here and an idea over there that you can't see when you're partway down the mountain because you don't have that kind of perspective.

This command of their field is immensely satisfying and is even godlike. And I am saying that this is the highest form of intelligence we humans can achieve, whether it's Napoleon Bonaparte, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, it doesn't matter.

Now, as I was thinking about this, it's kind of struck me as odd because this is such an important idea to have this kind of if this is the highest level that the human brain can reach, why aren't there really any books written about this? There are books, but the books tend to be of one of two types.

They're either heavy academic books on neuroscience and how the brain works and how we learn filled with statistics.

And they could be interesting, but it would take you years to figure out how you could possibly apply that to your up to your own life.

On the other hand, you have these kind of cheap, superficial self-help books like Think like Leonardo da Vinci or all this other crap, and you're kind of seduced and you buy the book and there's like half of an idea in there.

And then you throw it away and it's on your bookshelf. It doesn't there's a lot of meat there.

You know, then there can be a book maybe like Malcolm Gladwell Outliers, which is an excellent book, and he talks about the whole ten thousand hour idea. But it's also very hard to figure out how to apply it. He's got all these things about if you're going to be a great hockey player, your parents have to been born in this decade and parts of Canada and all this other stuff, you know, so and then the other thing about this subject is that our culture has all of these myths and myths, misconceptions about this form of power.

We we think of it's a function of genetics or high IQ or a larger brain or going to a great university like Oxford.

So I decided I was going to write the book. I was going to write a book that was going to connect everything, connect all of the research. And I was going to debunk all of these. But I think are silly ideas that people have about genius and talent.

And the method I was going to use to write this book was the following. I was going to read all of the books that are very academic about the science of learning and creativity and about how the brain works and the evolution of the brain.

Then I was going to read the biographies of the greatest masters in history, and they were quite a few of them. And then I was also going to interview nine contemporary masters from all different fields, take all of that large amount of research and somehow figure out how to make a book.

Now, as I started to write this book, I became more and more excited because everything was sort of falling into place.

And I made what I consider three important discoveries, radical discoveries about the nature of mastery, discovery of where it comes from, the source of it, how you get there, the process that leads to it, and the nature of creative energy and math or high level intuition, which is sort of the end game of mastery itself.

So tonight, as I treating you or pretending that you're my apprentices, I'm going to apprentice you in these three key ideas that I discovered.

And I'm going to do that through telling you the stories, through taking you inside the brain of three of the I consider the greatest masters that I profiled in this book. So I hope you're ready. So all of my books have kind of iconic figures like For Power, it was Machiavelli for war.

It was Napoleon, the icon of this book. And to me, the greatest master who ever lived is Leonardo da Vinci.

And the thing about Leonardo da Vinci is he's sort of associated with this almost superhuman power. I mean, how else can you explain his achievements except for the fact that he was gifted with some kind of freakish talent? Well, in my research and going deeply into him, I found that actually it's not the case at all. He's an extremely human person. His his power is very explicable. And not only that, I believe the story of Leonardo da Vinci is insanely relevant to the year 2012 and to the future that we're all facing.