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.