Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport Toto Wolff on Risk, Innovation, and Winning

Toto Wolff (0:00)

My experience with high-performing individuals is that the very last percentage of high-performers is that they either suffered trauma or humiliation, or both. Because what would justify to develop that above-average drive?

Dr. Michael Gervais (0:24)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn. To learn from people who are on the path of mastery, who have dedicated their life efforts to understand the nuances of their craft and the nuances of how the self develops.

And we really want to dig to work to understand their psychological framework, which is a fancy phrase for their worldview and how they understand their craft and how they understand people work.

And then we want to dig under the surface a little further and see if we can understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

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Now, Formula One is known as the tip of the arrow when it comes to motorsports. And their cars are the fastest road course racing cars in the world. And what they're able to do is maintain incredibly high cornering speed. They're able to pull 6 Gs on average in the corners, and probably higher, but what I've come to understand is around 6 Gs, by generating incredible amounts of downforce. It's an aerodynamic ability to keep the car connected to the ground.