“Mastery is the Commitment to the Path “
Michael Gervais
I assume you are reading this because you are into personal growth and development as a daily practice. This is what most if not all the High Achievers and Performers are signed up for. The daily commitment to getting to great and the pursuit of Mastery.
Mastery is the path mostly walked in the shadows of our own minds and the limitations of our external capabilities.
Knowing this will put us on a lifelong path of growth and learning. The journey that keeps on giving more as we progress through the peaks and valleys and our own understanding of life at large.
What we do daily, weekly, and monthly towards becoming better at being a human will also make us better at experiencing life to its fullest.
Work daily towards self-Mastery and your future self will appreciate you in return.
As a Principle of Performance, Mastery is one of the hardest ones to understand yet possibly the most powerful driver when it comes to the lifelong journey of growth.
Here are eleven truths about Mastery.
1. Mastery is about Simplicity and beauty over complexity & chaos.
2. Mastery is in subtraction, not add-ons.
3. Mastery is about discipline and structure.
4. Mastery is about never arriving yet having destinations along the journey.
5. Mastery is about Falling deeply and unconditionally in love with the process and progress over outcomes.
6. Mastery is in your craft.
7. Mastery is the commitment to the path of Growth. (-Michael Gervais)
8. Mastery is about continuous growth, learning, and development.
9. Mastery is about loving the comfort of Solitude.
10. Mastery can be found in Practice, perseverance, and precision.
11. Mastery has no finish line.
Somehow, we all gravitate towards the people who are committed and show prominent levels of Resiliency, mental fortitude, and physical ability.
I always remember as a young boy watching those discovery channel programs about the craftsmen who devoted their lives to making swords, building beautiful cars, or martial artists.
People who were and are on the path towards Mastery are aesthetic, pleasing, and admirable to watch.
One of the interesting and beneficial byproducts of the Pursuit of Mastery is the state of Flow.
Flow is the state when we Feel our Best and Perform our Best. This analogy was coined by the grandfather of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
It can be a jazz musician playing in the “pocket,” an artist painting endlessly when the time disappears, or a surfer gliding down the Oceanic mountains.
The Flow is also one of the High-Performance Principles in which we will dive deeper into our next edition of this newsletter, so stay tuned for that in July! 😉
But for now, there is a tremendous amount of Beauty associated with Mastery and Flow. We can look at the Japanese Gardens and how detailed and groomed they are. Taking pride in one’s work towards Mastery is one of such internal traits of people we look up to and call Masters of their craft.
The interesting thing about Mastery is that when a person reaches the state where the path is what matters the most, the others start to admire what you have accomplished.
Because the ones who truly embody this understanding and show the levels of Mastery with their craft are often called Masters, yet they don’t see themselves as one.
So today I wanted to leave you with two internal inquiries about Mastery:
In which areas of your personal or Professional life can you start moving more towards Mastery today?
Where can you start taking more ownership, and pride and adding more beauty to your work?
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PS. If this writing resonated with you today and please consider sending and sharing it with someone who can benefit from it too!
