New PN: The First Rule of Mastery

“As a high-performance psychologist, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most extraordinary individuals and teams across the planet. I was on the sidelines when the Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII against the Denver Broncos.

I sat in mission control when Austrian base jumper Felix Baumgartner made his recordbreaking space jump from twenty-four miles above the earth’s surface, free-falling at over eight hundred miles per hour. I was on the beaches of Tokyo when USA Surfing won the first Olympic gold medal in the history of the sport. I was courtside when Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor, arguably the best female beach volleyball team of all time, won three golds in three consecutive Olympics. I was in the room with the CEO of the world’s largest tech company when the company set course to be the first enterprise organization to build a culture based on mindset, empathy, and purpose.

The best performers in the world push past the perceived limits of human potential and expand our notions of what’s possible.

But, in my experience, they aren’t merely exceptional at their craft. Beyond a relentless pursuit of being their best, what drives these high performers is a striving for inner excellence. They’re in constant pursuit of mastery.

Mastery in any area of life—the arts, business, parenting, sports—requires being able to differentiate what is and is not within our control. When we place attention on things outside our control, we take our focus and energy away from what we can control.

Hence, the first rule of mastery requires looking within and fundamentally committing to work on mastering what’s 100 percent under your control. There is nothing else that can be mastered. This is the essence of the path.”