Living with Urgency —Why Tomorrow Isn't Promised | Dr. David Fajgenbaum

David Fajgenbaum (0:00)

There was probably a one in a million chance that I was actually gonna make progress against my disease. But I knew there was a zero in a million chance that I was gonna make progress if I didn't do something. And so I think that I learned in such black and white as I laid in that bed that I can't physically do anything right now, so all I can do is hope.

And once I could actually start moving muscles and my brain could start working, all of a sudden I could actually do things about the things I was hoping for. And so now I'm just totally addicted to this concept of turning hope into action, that if we should just reflect on what we're hoping for, what are we hoping for every day? All of us hope for things all the time.

Okay, well, what are we hoping for? What are we praying for? What are we wishing for? All right, well, what can we do today and tomorrow and the next day to get closer to what we're hoping for?

Michael Gervais (0:59)

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create.

And the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations, is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts to the nuances of the thing that they are most fascinated by.

And so what we're finding in this path of mastery, and by the way, the goal is the path, it's not some end game that we're looking for here. But what we're finding is that there's mastery of self and there's mastery of craft. And when there is a convergence or sometimes an explosion between the two, it's really amazing. And that collision or that convergence is something rare. And so what we're trying to understand is, what are the psychological frameworks that people are working from? Like how do they explain who they are, what the future might hold? How do they make sense of events that happen? What is the sturdiness of their frameworks? What are the commonalities amongst people? And that's really where the psychology piece folds in. And then we also wanna understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft.

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