Olympian Swimmer Anthony Ervin - Finding His Authentic Self

Michael Gervais (0:09)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations, well, I mean, I've said it enough, you know what it is. It's to look and understand and learn from the best in the world on how they're doing what they do. Particularly, we wanna understand what are the psychological skills and the framework that they use, and to understand what is driving them, what is underneath their pursuit.

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Now this conversation is with Anthony Ervin, who is extremely nuanced as a human being. He's created a, I mean, just a unique path towards discovery. I mean, it seems like that's really what he's about. And I'm not sure how well we and he and me in particular, I mean, captured who he really is. There's a beautiful, there's just beautiful layers about him. And so I just flat out love to sit down with him again. So hopefully we can make that happen. But on the achievement side of what he's done, it's phenomenal. He's won an Olympic gold medal. He's the former world record holder in the 50 freestyle and swimming. And he's also the former world champion in the 50 and 100 freestyle. Yep, all of those.

I mean, those are all significant and serious in a sport that is like very sophisticated. Swimming is a very sophisticated sport where people are very skilled at it.

So he's known in the swimming community as having one of the most pure strokes. He's just flat out raw talent. And when he swims, people pay attention. It's beautiful.

And when he was in his prime, this is the part that's particularly interesting. He walked away from his sport to explore himself and to explore the world, which just like you'd imagine from those who really go for it, he threw himself into discovery as well.