How To Set a Vision & Live With Passion | AMA Vol. 9 with Dr. Michael Gervais

Michael Gervais (0:00)

So think about how dangerous it is if you can only find that buoyancy and that excitement in the one thing or two things that you do, that you need to have that thing to be alive. That's a very dangerous way to go through life. It's limiting. But what if you could bring passion into every environment that you're in? That is possible.

Living with passion is a psychological skill. It's not a dependency.

Welcome back, or welcome to another Ask Me Anything on Finding Mastery. And I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And the purpose behind these conversations, behind these AMAs, is to hear from you, to explore the topics and questions that you've been wrestling with on your path to becoming. Now, the goal is to expand on the themes and lessons and best practices that we've discussed on the Finding Mastery podcast in order to make them even more applicable to your own life. Now, this time around, co-host O'Neill Sespedes, we cover some really interesting, insightful territory. We discuss what makes a psychologically healthy human, how to engage in open, curious conversations in a polarized world, and whether it's better to be a generalist or specialist. Keys to parenting in modern times, a best practice you can try out that's called the miracle question, and of course so much more. So with that, let's jump right into Vol. 9 of Finding Mastery's Ask Me Anything.

We're back, O'Neill, AMA number nine.

O'Neil Cespedes (1:45)

We're back.

Michael Gervais (1:45)

How are you doing? I love doing this with you.

O'Neil Cespedes (1:48)

I love doing this with you too.

Michael Gervais (1:49)

Yeah, I look forward to it.

I've had a heavy kind of dose of travel lately, so it feels really good to be in the studio right now. Our community is sophisticated, and I can't wait. Every time I'm kind of on pins and needles to see where this conversation goes, because I know that they're thinking deeply about you and your thoughts and your insights.

O'Neil Cespedes (2:10)

Questions are amazing. This is the best batch so far. They just keep getting better. So, Brian. What's up, Brian? Brian's question is, do you think it's a worthwhile pursuit to spend the majority of our lives trying to be great at doing one thing, whether it's seeing how fast you can run the 100 meters or building a robot?

Is focusing on one thing a limited experience or an expansive one?

Michael Gervais (2:32)

Okay, so that is a rich question because it's squaring up directly with mastery of craft and self. This question is, for me, is really about the mystery of going deep. Let me use it in this language, like a love affair of going deep into one thing.

So, it could be problematic if a person only knows one thing and cares nothing about anything else. They only know one thing, and then they're limited in every other part of their life. That would be a problem.

But if you think about it and frame it, like mastery of craft, like you are great at one thing, but you frame it as a love affair, then of trying to uncover or unlock or understand or make sense of something that's very complicated, and you're diving into that with a love affair, what you end up doing is just like in a relationship with my wife, it's like the deeper I go, the more I learn. It's not the longer we go together, the less I learn. I keep learning more about me, about her, and then about humans, about relationships with the planet even through the relationship that we have with each other. So the love affair, what ends up taking place, this is a mystery, there's an unfolding, there's like, I can't wait to see how A and B and C connect together, and A, B, C, and F connect together, and then what ends up happening, let's say it's violin-ing, and so if that's the one thing, that what ends up happening is when you get to a certain point, you start becoming more interested in things that relate to the violin, but are orthogonal, they're different, like maybe rolling, or jujitsu, or maybe something else. And I'm not suggesting that the path forward is to go deep into jujitsu, but enough that you can say, wow, there's a dexterity, there's a posture that's different, there's a breathing difference, and all of those can fold back in. So now it's like, how do my hands work in relationship, and my posture work in relationship to violin, as I've just taken X number 100 years of insights from jujitsu and folded it into violinning. So there's a love affair is a framing, and I think you can't really understand the depth of the human experience without going all in. And so mastery of craft is really about mastery of self, and mastery of self for me is much about being in a harmonious relationship, embracing all the discord that comes with getting to harmony, a harmonious relationship with, and that's with self, others, the planet, and now possibly the machines.