Michael Gervais: Finding Mastery

Michael Gervais (0:05)

Hi, everyone, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am Michael Gervais. 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, what I want to do today is see if we could just get some ideas out of my head and just share some of the learnings that I've been trying to make sense of so far to date. So first of, I think I just want to come back to the title. The title is Finding Mastery, which by the simplicity of the title, you know, these conversations, if you will, mastery is a journey. And I'm becoming more and more clear of that. And at one point, 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 path that we're going to be able to do together. And it's curious and it's wonderful. It's a wonderful trail. And I think it has few, if any, guides. It's much more than a pursuit of expert performance. It's just far deeper than that. It's far deeper than high performance and the achievement of success. The journey here is it's not reserved for those who are number one, number one best in the world, the Leonardo da Vinci's of modern time. We'll learn from the best in class through these conversations. And the conversations hopefully will also illuminate the counterintuitive and the not known voices that are working to stay connected to this path. And it's a path not reserved for many as we'll come to appreciate and understand. I hope there's so many trappings along the way, the process of exploring a deep understanding. And it's a deep understanding of the expression of the understandings that require risk, require vulnerability, require strength and commitment and deep awareness.

The distractions that come with it are just the riddles with the need for recognition or criticism, the having and not having that people go through and the trying to fit in or ascribing to social norms, both the internal obstacles and the external setbacks. You know, there's a trapping of knowing as well. And it's like as soon as people, I'm not excluding me from this, as soon as we acquire knowing, we tend to change and think that we have it covered, which is just the first mark and trap. It's the furthest thing that I think that anyone on these conversations has shared with us. There's also trappings of being, quote unquote, an expert, and there's a trappings of success and achievement. And each of these will test the commitment to the path. And so if mastery is a path, let's learn from as many voices as we can. I mean, the best in the world from those who just happen to have cameras pointed at them. That doesn't mean that they're the only teachers. They just happen to be observed by many. Let's also see if we can learn from people in the worlds which no camera is present. And that might be either by design or because culturally we might have forgotten to be curious about their path and their insights. So the folks that we're going to be hopefully spending time with and learning from will have both cameras on them and some that don't. And some might be early in their path and some might be very far along the path. And that's actually what excites me most about what we're doing here is spending time to learn, to understand, to be curious. And it's like this is hopefully a sharpening of the sword, but also something that energizes us to change and impact our lives and more importantly, the lives of people around us.

So I think the idea is let's see if we can learn from those who have a deep regard for the mystery and the wonderment of life and who are deeply curious about what it means to explore their potential or the commitment they have to explore the potential of others. And the potential here is the potential we hold within ourselves and possibly more importantly, the potential that we hold between us.

And so here's just a statement. Our capacity as people is it's limited. It's limited by thought and fatigue, but that capacity doesn't have to be so in our modern times we're moving at such a fast pace. We're on such a clip to be experts and to do it all, if you will. There's nothing wrong with doing it all, but the fatigue that we have is noticeable. And I believe our capacity as humans, it's limited by our ability to think big and think clearly and to be present. And we're also obviously burdened by the fatigue that we're bombarded with stress and we're bombarded with what there's nothing wrong with stress, but we're bombarded with it in such a way that we're not recovering properly, mentally, physically, spiritually, you know, finding the time to rest and to deeply recover. And so it's just like as a species of people, we have far greater potential than we're expressing. And you know, we're walking around half alive, focusing on being busy and being relevant rather than focusing on being efficient and being purposeful or having optimal ways to to leverage our internal resources, that internal capacity that we can't even begin to understand yet. The greatest scientists in the world and the greatest theologians and the greatest philosophers and political thinkers, they haven't been, we haven't been able to capture any of us, you know, the capacity of our internal resources. And certainly we haven't tapped fully into our external connections and the connectivity that comes when we're deeply attuned to ourselves and to people and to nature. So the capacity that we're expressing so far, there's so much further to go.