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welcome so I guess now we've played around with this camera seems to be pretty good as long as there is light not really good for shooting outdoors if I want to shoot outside at night I need a much better camera but this will do for indoors as long as they're well lit anyhow what's the idea here I'm just going to be practicing right now doing public speaking talking about self development topics getting comfortable in front of the camera just doing stream of thought three of consciousness just making it look at sound professional or at least somewhat decent without being too a mature about it getting the angles right getting the lighting ray getting the mic the audio right because right now I am knew this and this would be an interesting experience from a vocal tonality that's something I definitely have to work on his voice a I'm talking to you so I just need to be more comfortable in front of the camera and then and then I'll be able to integrate all the self development stuff that I'm doing and make some cool video blogs and we'll see where it goes life coaching and seminars and all that good stuff but just yeah getting comfortable talking to myself to the camera to you guys out there will be listening to this hopefully maybe yeah that is that so self development what can we talk about in self development we talking about the idea of mastery there's a great book by George Leonard mastery kind of a self-development classic and it's a shuttle tome just knit 150 pages or something like that quick little read but it's a general book the basic idea there is that our culture has saturated us with this concept of the magic pill or the get-rich-quick scheme or the fast short-term results rather than long-term effort people no longer really care about investing in there in a career in the future it's all about quick results and if you look at media for example advertising just perpetuates this you know get your car fast low monthly payments free financing available low interest rates so that you can get your gratification now and not really have to work for it you know get your degree as fast as possible get it online etc etc so what is the problem with this well the problem is really that in America now there's no longer a culture of of mastery like you know in other cultures mastery was highly regarded as something beautiful something that people would take a lot of time into to really hone their skills so for example in Japan a lot of a lot of traditional a lot of traditional career paths you know traditional professions like martial arts sushi making things like that really a craft I heard I heard what once on the Discovery Channel there was documentary about about sushi chefs and they said that for the first two years the first two years of a sushi sushi chefs career what he does is he just learns to properly rinse the rice rinse and prepare the rice just regular steamed rice but apparently there's so much nuance there so much to be learned that this worthwhile for that was spent two years really mastering it and what George lender talks about in this book is that there's really a universal process of mastery and that process of mastery really involves a certain growth curve and it's an exponential growth curve that starts out very shallow and then then rises up but the trick is that it's not just what a night person would expect like for example let's say you take off a new a new hobby you take up or a new sport let's say you take up tennis George Leonard uses as an example so when you start tennis if you're kind of a newbie and you come in there with IEP expectations you expect it your progress your skills are going to develop in a linear fashion so the more time you put in the better your skills are going to be you expect this linear curve but then you're kind of disappointed when you're on that field and maybe at first you're doing pretty good job you're you're learning to hit your basic swings and things are going fine but then all of a sudden you your first plateau and that's really what Leonard talks about in this book is the idea that the learning curve is is just full of plateaus in fact most of the time when you're mastering a new skill whether it's a sport hobby something like chess tennis martial arts a new career whatever it would be dancing singing all of these things as you're mastering the most of the time is spent in the plateaus not progressing or advancing upward so really what the curve looks like is it moves forward and upward but like a stair step and the stairs are long see that's the plateau part and this is really what discourages most people from success and mastery at almost any skill set is the idea that once they hit those first few plateaus they stop seeing progress and they lose faith lose confidence they realize this as much a much harder thing to master than they originally expected the problem with this is that they quit and if you quit one thing soon enough you're gonna quit the next thing especially when it comes to mastering skills or you know achieving some something really meaningful in your life so adding added a new set of skills to to your repertoire and still a lot of people stagnate as a result and a lot of people dabble which is they start on that curve they progress a little bit they hit those first few plateaus and then it's like well it's too hard I'm not advancing as fast as I wanted to I thought I was going to master this in a couple of weeks turns out that it's going to take me years people don't realize the curve the mastery curve is what it is and really the solution is to understand the level of commitment that you're making when you're starting up developing a new skill set but also developing a love for being on the plateau because that's where going to spend most of your time you're not going to spend most of your time advancing it's not going to be easy you're going to be on those plateaus and what does that mean that means you can't be after it for the instant gratification you can't be after it for that that rush when you get from from progress you have to just develop a love for the practice for the day-to-day the minute to minute grind if you will of whatever it is you're doing but obviously you don't want to feel the grind of it because see that's the problem is that if if it feels like a grind to hit the Save tennis serve hundreds of times over and over again then you're never going to be good you're never going to master it in fact is that the master is the one that loves doing the fundamentals over and over again and you know as the classic rule says eighty percent your results come from twenty percent of your effort so the fundamentals are really where where it's at and mastering those is the key to mastery in general so I thought this was a brilliant concept helped me because a lot of times a big problem I notice and self-development is just when you're undertaking a new project or mastering your skill set or some new endeavor that you're doing look one of the biggest problems is just setting setting the right expectations you know having realistic expectations for what your progress is going to be like how much effort you have to put in the the level of commitment that you're going to make one classic kind of classic self-development gym for success is goes like this basically quote you have to know what you want see it vision it and then accept the cost before you can achieve it so the idea behind that is that you need to know what the cost not only do you need to know exactly what it is that you're aiming for that's always the beginning of any of any of any journey is to set those goals to set that vision that inspires you but then to understand that it doesn't just it doesn't come for free so if you want to be a tennis master you want to be a great tennis player maybe not a world ranked player but just you know a really good player a great player not professional but someone that can they can play the game well against you know tough opponents then you have to accept the cost of what it takes to get there and you know for various skills going to be different things but in the case of tennis it's going to be you know hitting hundreds if not thousands of shots forehand shots backhand shots serves volleys lobs all of it practicing it again and again until you develop a mastery for it and the best way to do that is to cultivate a love for the process in just the practice because that's where most your time is going to be spent if you don't enjoy that if you don't love that that is going to feel like a grind and you're not going to take any pleasure in it and you're going to quit so that was the big lesson of mastery is to develop a love for the fundamentals practicing the fundamentals think it's uh it's a really good concept it's simple its traditional but you know what that's exactly what's missing in today's get rich quick quick fix culture that wants magic pill for for every magic pill I'm a quick solution for every problem but you know what the really valuable things the things that are be happening in here the development of your mind that is not going to come quick I'm going to come easy as done through massive repetition that's really what mastery is and that's why you spend so much time in the plateau and that's why you need to love the day-to-day minutes emitting act of what you're doing is because you're repeating the same thing over and over again and developing these slight little distinctions you're seeing the nuances even though even though on to the casual observer to the outside observer what you're doing might seem the same you know hitting the same serve again and again and again while you need to hit that a hundred thousand times well really what's happening behind the scenes is that you're noticing that the little distinctions and you're calibrating and you're adjusting and your hardwiring those motor responses deep into your brain so it's going from from your conscious understanding of how to do it from going from your prefrontal cortex it's going and it's getting hard wired into your motor coordination system which is ultimately the cerebellum the behind brain like the reptilian brain which makes which gives you unconscious mastery so that you automatically instinctually know when to make the right hit I'm going to make the right serve how to adjust to serve how to get the ball to go exactly where you want it to go because all those are little adjustments that you have to make in your swing and and that's really what master knows how to do is make those little adjustments whereas to the to the layman to the newbie those distinctions aren't clear because to him he hasn't practiced enough times to see them it seems like well a service services serve a shot as the shot as a shot or as for the master there's so much more depth there and once you start seeing that depth that's really where you develop a love for that process is in doing it over and over again and seeing the nuances so I think an eye for detail a love with the detail for kind of perfecting perfecting everything every every move every part of your skill set is is important although it's also important not to start off as a perfectionist because that's actually one of the common pitfalls to mastery is is getting in there and expecting to not screw up which is exactly the opposite you have to not worry about that in fact you can't become a master without screwing up hundreds thousands of times because each other you fail you learn something new that's valuable reference experiences that you're accumulating and then you will be using that to become more perfect or better than you were previously you will never become perfect and you certainly cannot expect to do a perfect serve the first time you do it or the perfect shot that's just that's just recipe for failure because if you go in with that mindset then again your expectations are out of whack with with just how reality works the fact is that the best way to master skill set is to go with their humble and willing to learn and willing to look ridiculous and do whatever it takes it's not about being a perfectionist that comes automatically with loving the process putting it over and over again and learning and not being afraid to look stupid once in a while or in the case of newbie that's our starting off most of the time so those are some of the lessons from mastery and I think I'll wrap it up there but that was a pretty good blog