Mastery by George Leonard

This week I read George Leonard’s ‘Mastery’.

There are important messages in this book and I’ll summarize for you here what stood out to me the most and how I have applied, and will apply it in my own life and business.

One of the main focuses of this book that really hit home with me is that our Western culture sabotages us from achieving mastery. In most of our media (TV shows, movies, music) success is portrayed as being stumbled upon overnight, almost without much thought and effort.

An example of this is a movie I saw recently, Murder Mystery 2. The movie portrays a faithful couple who are struggling to make money with their own private detective agency. The make a series of comedy of errors (bad business card idea, fumbling a job). They then receive a phone call from a ultra-rich friend who invites them to a lavish wedding getaway weekend. They are given new iphones each, eat in luxury and after a series of adventures over the period of a weekend they solve a crime and are awarded 10 million dollars.

What’s the message the audience gets? You can not take life seriously and its okay, somehow, somewhere you will have everything you want and be successful.

This message cheats people out of real success and mastery, because mastery is achieved only upon careful planning and diligent execution.

Maybe this is why we see today so many people switching careers so often. Maybe they are dissatisfied with what they are doing because they are not receiving great rewards for their mediocre efforts?

Maybe they expect that their occupation should be an exciting adventure, but have found instead that it is quite repetitive and uneventful?

This is another important theme of this book, i.e. that the road to success and mastery is a road of many plateaus. The times of ups (learning and excitement) are short in nature.

This doesn’t mean that the plateaus have to be boring. No! But if we do recognize and understand that there will be many plateaus in our lives, then we can learn to enjoy them, and maybe eventually welcome them.

I often describe myself to people as someone who is ‘boring’. My wife and I get along well because she likes being boring too.

What do I mean by that?

What I mean is that we are happy to just enjoy the simple, everyday things about life. We enjoy to spend our time at home cooking, eating, being parents, studying, spending family time together, etc.  So much so that we are now moving to a new property away from the busyness of the city and where we can spend more time alone with each other and working on being self-reliant.

In this book, George Leonard talks about the path of Mastery that is required for someone to achieve the highest ranks in martial arts. He gives us an insight into the process that involves being taught a technique and then having to spend days, weeks, months, and even years mastering that technique.

During the time of learning, you might feel that you are just repeating the same things over and over again and not making any progress. However, as you continually repeat a process you do actually get better and better and it incrementally and imperceptibly until one day you have mastered that technique and can move on to the next stage.

And maybe you will never really master a technique, and that’s okay too.

One of the ways this book really helped me was to help me realize that the path I have been taking in my business journey has been the right one for me. I have wondered many times if I have been building my business correctly. I see colleagues of mine who build businesses much faster than I do and it has made me wonder if I am doing something wrong?

After reading this book, however, it has made me realize that what I’m doing is allowing for the time that is required between growth. The long (and sometimes short) plateaus.

Those who do rush their businesses, trying to push past the plateaus for constant growth, usually do so at some expense. That expense could be the long-term health of the business, their own health, or their family relationships.

I highly recommend George Leonard’s book ‘Mastery‘. It will give you a good grounding in what to expect in life and in business.

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