Michael Gervais: Finding Mastery
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2015
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the fable goes — there are three paths for each us, to become: The Old Fool: the person who chased external rewards and pleasures. The Bitter Old Fool: the person who chased external rewards, but didn’t get enough. The Wise: the person who searched for insight and wisdom. Likewise, the path of mastery captures deep understanding and insight -- it's not a path that is laying a bet now, by investing in a craft, for payment or recognition at some later time. The spoils of victory might just happen, but the orientation of the intent is paramount. Today we are becoming overwhelmed with the need for instant reward, immediate verification that we are significant -- as a misguided attempt to satiate our thirst for meaning and belonging -- rather, we are propelling ourselves toward an emptiness that can only be filled by temporary pleasures. Our need to belong, to understand, to explore, to connect to others and the world around us, to know safety and to know risk, to express and create are foundational to the human experience. Mastery is a journey — It's a curious and wonderful trail -- that has few, if any, guides. It's much more than the pursuit of expert performance. It's far deeper than high performance and the achievement of success. If Mastery is a path, let's learn from as many voices as we can. The best in the world, from worlds who happen to have camera's pointed at them -- AND -- from the worlds in which no camera is present -- either by design -- or because culturally we might have forgotten to be curious about their path and insights. Simple Joys. Mike
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am Michael Jervay and today in lieu of conversations that we've been so fortunate to have with people that are just deeply invested and curious and interested in the path to mastery. |
| 0:26.8 | What I want to do today is see if we could just get some ideas out of my head and just share |
| 0:32.4 | some of the learnings that I've been trying to make sense |
| 0:36.2 | of so far to date. |
| 0:38.8 | So first I think I just want to come back to the title. |
| 0:42.8 | The title is Finding Mastery, which by the simplicity of the title, |
| 0:48.0 | you know, these conversations, if you will. |
| 0:50.6 | Mastery is a journey. And I'm becoming more and more clear of that and at one point |
| 0:55.8 | like I had a sense of that but I'm becoming more and more attuned to the path and the journey part of it. And hopefully this is a journey and a |
| 1:06.0 | path that we're going to be able to do together. And it's curious and it's wonderful. |
| 1:10.6 | It's a wonderful trail and I think it has few, if any, guides. It's much more than a pursuit of expert performance. |
| 1:20.0 | It's just far deeper than that. It's far deeper than high performance and the achievement of success. |
| 1:27.0 | The journey here is it's not reserved for those who are number one, |
| 1:32.0 | number one best in the world, the Leonardo da Vinci's of modern time. |
| 1:35.9 | We'll learn from the best in class through these conversations and the conversations |
| 1:41.6 | hopefully will also illuminate the counterintuitive and the conversations hopefully will also illuminate the counterintuitive and the not known voices that are working to stay connected to this path. |
| 1:49.0 | And it's a path not reserved for many as we'll come to appreciate and understand I hope |
| 1:56.4 | there's so many trappings along the way the process of exploring a deep understanding and it's a deep understanding of the |
| 2:06.2 | expression of the understandings that require risk, require vulnerability, |
| 2:13.4 | require strength and commitment and deep awareness. |
| 2:18.2 | The distractions that come with it |
| 2:20.3 | are just riddled with the need for recognition or criticism. |
... |
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