Ryan Holiday x Dr. Michael Gervais: The First Rule of Mastery, Stoicism, and Identity (from The Daily Stoic)

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And today, I'm really excited to share something just a little different.

A couple months back, I was in Austin doing some promos for the first Rule of Mastery, and I had the opportunity to be a guest on Ryan Holiday's incredible podcast, The Daily Stoic.

It's always such a joy to connect and flow with Ryan. And we had a fantastic conversation that I really wanted to just share that here with you today. So this time around was especially fun. Not only was the conversation great, but we also got to record it in Ryan's epic bookstore, The Painted Porch. If you're in or near Austin, you've got to check it out. It is awesome. And you might even find a couple signed copies of the first Rule of Mastery lying around. So with that, please enjoy this conversation with me and the ever insightful Ryan Holiday on The Daily Stoic.

Ryan Holiday (1:06)

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. So the story of my books and professional sports is that the Patriots read The Ops Goes Away in like 2014 That was that famous game, the one yard line, the interception against the Seahawks. The Patriots end up winning the Super Bowl. The Seahawks heartbreakingly lose the Super Bowl.

And I remember I watched that game getting off of a plane and watching it standing in airport. Cause you couldn't, it wasn't, the plane I was on didn't have much streaming back then. And so anyways, I remember watching that game thinking, this is unreal. How could my book, this book about ancient philosophy be in any way connected to that game? And then, you know, several months later, I get this sort of ping and then there's an email and it's a link to a Sports Illustrated article about how now the Seahawks were reading that book. And so I reached out to the person that I knew at the Patriots, said, how could they have possibly heard about it? And he said, I told them, I was there. I told them, this is Michael Lombardi. He had passed the book along.

And so now these two great NFL teams are reading the books and I was like, is this real life? And the Seahawks invited me out. And while I was there, I got to meet today's guest, Dr. Michael Gervais, who was not just an integral part of that incredible franchise and all the things they did, both as a team, but then also as a culture, as an organization, which I think has had an enormous impact both in sports and in business. But he's also one of the world's top high performance psychologists, period. He's worked with NFL teams, Olympic gold medalists, top CEOs in the world, huge musicians.

And in fact, I've had a number of guests on the show who ask me, how did you hear about this stuff? And they go, oh, Michael Gervais is my performance coach and he passed it along. So Michael and I go way back. I did his podcast many, many years ago. His podcast is called Finding Mastery. And he's just been a great dude, a great friend. He's pointed me to a bunch of stuff over the years. And as I said, been a big fan of the work. And just got a fascinating perspective on how one sort of becomes great at what they do. It's also got a very calming voice and calming personality, which I'm sure he's cultivated in his thousands and thousands of hours sitting across from otherwise very anxious, ambitious, driven, intense people. And I remember when I did his podcast, like it was a couple hours. And I just was like, when I left, I was like, that was the most draining, therapeutic show I've ever done. So you can listen to that episode and you can also check out Michael's amazing book, The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying What Other People Think of You. He signed some copies at The Painted Porch. You can follow him on Instagram, at Michael Gervais, follow him on YouTube, at Finding Mastery. And this was an awesome interview. I'm really glad he came all the way out to The Painted Porch to do it. I hadn't seen him in several years. And so it was great that he did that. And I think you're really gonna like this interview.

Well, books are different than movies or something, where most people see it when it comes out.

So like a movie, it has a several month run in a theater or opening weekend matters, but books take a long time. People, most of the books that I read are not new.