The Mastery Formula (How To Regain Control Of Your Life)
The Mastery Letter #18
I’m convinced the biggest problem of our times is lack of mastery.
Most people are sedated by distractions and short-term pleasure.
Their fate was set by society, a massive wheel that won’t stop on its own.
Here’s how you break the wheel and take back control:
The Mastery Formula:
The key to life is to have a mission.
A purpose.
Your purpose will come from repeating the boring fundamentals.
Yeah, I said it.
There is no magic formula or way to cut corners.
Here’s why:
Samurai’s trained daily starting at childhood with a sword. They practiced for hours a day, for decades.
Chess Grandmasters practice hours a day, for decades.
Mozart didn’t jump around to different hobbies or interests.
Einstein hyper focused on physics for decades.
Mundane tasks. Repeated over and over.
It becomes routine, and it becomes fulfilling over time as you gain mastery.
Take one step at a time, and the next step illuminates as you go through trial and error.
Dopamine will release during effort and focus on your goals.
This will not happen at first. It takes time.
You purpose will fade as you unlock your next one, like chapters in a book.
It is like layers of an onion as you find your final life’s task.
You must find the lever moving tasks for the stage you are at in your journey and focus on that.
You must take your goals, break them down into daily behaviors and use the 15 tenants of Mastery to create the life you want.
Here are the 15 key tenants:
🔹 Focus
You can only focus on 2-3 things in life at a time.
Every time I’ve had 5-6 things, I’m working on I feel scatter brained, stressed, and don’t see progress.
You will begin to feel the dopamine from your focus and efforts over time.
Double down and use this to your advantage.
Pick a couple of goals and work towards them 90m a day with no distractions.
Put your phone in airplane mode until 9am to get maximum work done.
White noise also helps to drown out any other sounds to keep you focused.
Put whatever you’re focusing on in google calendar as a daily block.
This will help cement it into your routine.
🔹 Stoicism
The main lesson is to accept logos.
Logos is nature and the outcomes of it:
Do not stress about the randomness and chaos of the world but accept it as is.
Do not stress of your suffering, because that is a byproduct of serving others. All organisms serve others.
All organisms, including us are connected.
Plants and animals serve us while we are alive and eventually, we serve them in death.
Life would not exist without suffering and peace wouldn’t exist without it.
Stoicism is a useful tool to accept death and not fear it.
Treat every lost friend or family member as if you were lucky to have that time with them.
Feel emotions but manage them. Think rationally before acting.
Observe events for what they are, rather than trying to figure out the why.
The former brings peace, the latter brings suffering. Things just are.
You can be immune to others from hurting you, if you understand it’s only your perceptions of what others do that upsets you.
Anger and grief are worse than what provoked them and can be avoided.
Avoid blaming others, you make mistakes too.
Instead, practice patience. No one can take away your patience.
Use it as a tool in situations when someone is angry, you always win.
Lastly, help others without validation or reward, the same way a bee stores honey or ants contribute to their hive.
We are only a brief second in time, a small piece to a whole part.
A speck in infinity.
If you help others, you help yourself. Are you not going to help yourself?
🔹 Meditation
You must train your mind to focus.
Every breath you pay attention to is training the mind to better focus on your goal tasks.
Every breath trains you to stay present and not get lost in your thoughts.
It will increase your:
Focus
Patience
and Reduce your:
Anxiety
Stress
Anger
Sam Harris has a great app called “Waking Up” that has guided lessons and meditations that I like.
Start 1 minute a day and slowly build up to 10-15 min.
🔹 Mentors
You cannot do it alone.
Especially if you don't have a father figure.
Read to find out what values you stand for and mimic the people who are currently living the life you want to live.
Surround yourself with winners.
Hire coach’s when learning new skills. It will introduce you to new ideas, networks, communities.
They will remove roadblocks and help distill tons of information into understandable formats and save you time.
🔹 Failure
Failure should be renamed “learning” because this is the only way to learn.
It builds character and is the main component of trial and error.
If you want to master a skill, you must fail repeatedly, and embrace humility.
The biggest mistake people make is spending a year reading books and planning rather than taking the leap of action.
Build a shitty website or product, go to that MMA gym.
Go talk to 10 cute girls and get rejected.
That will teach you more than watching YouTube videos all day and procrastinating.
You learn through experience and reading while you experience it makes 10x more sense.
🔹Systems
Use systems as a tool to counter the ups and downs of emotion.
One day you’ll be motivated, the next you won’t, so you must rely on systems to ensure you do what must be done for the day.
This is where most people fall short, they:
Watch a motivational video on YouTube, get a burst of motivation and quit 3 weeks later
Spend all your time researching and planning and then get bored before action
Problem is, they don’t understand how emotions work, they are fleeting.
They do not prepare for the future when they won’t want to do the thing.
You have to have a fail-safe.
The fail safe is discipline and systems.
Use google calendar to notify you, act like you are a robot following a task scheduler.
No emotions involved, just an ant contributing to the colony.
🔹 Courage
You will face many hardships in life, but never give up.
It’s typical that to grow to your potential you’ll be faced with panic and anxiety in certain situations.
You must stay calm, use your training and get it done.
I’ve:
Climbed mountains and had to face all kinds of panic.
Done 200+ person presentations and demos at work.
Had dozens of panic attacks in my youth but I’ve trained myself to attack them with extreme speed as a challenge.
The harder the better.
Challenge = growth
No excuses.
🔹 Strength
Leaders have always been strong.
The first habit you should ever make is lifting weights.
It teaches you consistency at an early age.
It teaches the benefits of delayed results. Being strong helps with almost every other domain in life.
An impressive physique is one of the most sought-after things that most don’t have.
You’ve got one vehicle to work with in this life, treat it well.
Start with:
1 push-up
1 sit up
1 squat
1 pull up.
Then do 2.
After a few months go to a gym and start lifting weights.
It’s non-negotiable.
🔹 Minimalism
Gathering materials does not bring long-term fulfillment.
Chasing mastery, purpose, self-reflection & contemplation, building relationships, an impressive physique, and helping others will.
They found in a study that a lottery winner and a someone recently paralyzed both came back to their baseline happiness levels after a few months.
We are extremely adaptive creatures; we don’t need materials.
We need:
Fulfilling relationships
Effort and focus on a purpose
Self-reflection
Keep your home and wardrobe lean.
Invest your money in assets that will pay you later.
You have the choice of a nice car that you won’t care about a few months later or an asset that buys back one less day you have to work in the future.
Choose wisely.
🔹 Consistency
This is the foundation of everything.
The key to mastery is doing the boring thing over and over until you enjoy it.
Modern billionaires and ancient masters focused on 1-2 things for decades.
Most people have shiny object syndrome and can’t stick to one thing for longer than 2-4 weeks.
The second they hit a roadblock they go to something else for a hit of dopamine.
You have to:
Stay focused
Use trial and error
Get mentors to help to remove blockers
Come back strong
Your focus and efforts will give you dopamine along the way.
Bouts of discouragement and lack of progress is usually followed by huge peak in progress.
All the best things in life are mundane daily activities that eventually bring immense long-term fulfillment and purpose.
🔹 Discipline
You must be able to push yourself on days you have no motivation.
You must learn to wake up, and not want to do things, but override that and do them anyway as that is your duty. Systems help with this.
Discipline = freedom
Embrace mundane routines, they require less decisions and help push you towards your goals.
The things that move the needle are always the things you don’t want to do that day, but you must do it anyway.
Find clever ways to do things, use your environment and apps to leverage your current behaviors.
E.g if you goal is to run in the morning, make it easy, put your clothes out the night before while you’re motivated, so when you aren’t, you just have to go autopilot.
🔹 Assertiveness
Many are too passive and live on autopilot their entire life.
They don't earn respect.
They never say what they want to.
It is cathartic to not care and be honest about what you want.
Others will overcorrect this after watching too many videos on YouTube and be rude to others and think that will gain respect.
It will earn you contempt from others and they will not network with you.
You can be kind to others and not be a door mat.
You must strike a balance between compassion and being direct.
🔹 Extreme speed
To be honest, I only put this here because it sounds badass, and it was my favorite move from Arcanine in Pokémon Blue.
Do minimal research, then move with extreme speed toward executing the thing.
Remove all expectations besides the fact you aim to fail.
Then you have no choice but to succeed.
You will learn most of the skills through trial & error.
Get the first iteration out.
Too much research is procrastination.
Do things you know you need to do.
🔹 Simplicity
Masters simplify, and amateurs overcomplicate.
After consulting over 200 clients and 2200 hours, I’ve learned that breaking things down in simple terms is beneficial even in the most technical fields.
People are still people, and it always comes back to relationships.
Let people rely on you to distill complex data into easy metaphors and explanations.
Mastery is taking a complex subject and breaking it down into layman's terms so a 10-year-old could understand.
"Simplicity is brilliance" -Bruce Lee
🔹 Financial prowess
Wealth is a by-product of giving the world your gift of mastery and pushing yourself to your limit.
Anyone that says money doesn’t bring happiness is wrong.
Money brings FREEDOM.
Freedom to:
Not have financial stress
To be creative
To retire your parents
To not be a slave to your boss, building some other fuckers dream
To build YOUR dream
To travel the world
Wealth is a tool to reach freedom and peace.
Plain and simple.
Stressing about money kills relationships and creativity.
Your character will be built on the journey toward freedom.
TL;DR
The Mastery Formula:
Focus
Stoicism
Meditation
Mentors
Failure
Systems
Courage
Strength
Minimalism
Consistency
Discipline
Assertiveness
Extreme Speed
Simplicity
Financial prowess
That’s all folks.
Thanks for reading.
(Cover photo Art by Anato Finnstark)