This is one of my all-time favorite success/self-development books and one that I regularly gift and recommend to others because I attribute much of my own success in business and other areas of my life to the lessons found in Mastery--lessons that I believe can transform anyone\u2019s life for the better if they\u2019re truly taken to heart.
The premise of the book is simple: any one of us can become an elite performer in a skill or field if we simply embrace and embody established attitudes and behaviors that have produced past and current champions, and more importantly, that every one of us should strive toward greatness if we want to lead fulfilling lives.
I think these messages are sorely needed because they\u2019re in stark contrast to much of our mainstream culture, which is producing more and more people who are less and less interested in self-actualization than worshipping and pursuing meaningless materialism, entertainment, and distractions, and who are then dismayed when they realize that their lives feel hollow and insignificant.
This philosophical argument was explored in another book that I recommend called All Things Shining, wherein philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that throughout history, we\u2019ve placed tremendous importance and value in notions of sacredness and meaning, but since the Enlightenment, we\u2019ve moved away from these concepts as a consequence of the radical political changes that saw individual autonomy rise above the social order imposed by a God or king. In short, when we abandoned religious and royal dogmas, we tasked ourselves to identify what\u2019s meaningful and what isn\u2019t, and quite frankly, we haven\u2019t done a very good job of it. Hence, the creeping nihilism and widespread malaise of modern life.
There\u2019s a pragmatic argument for choosing mastery over mediocrity as well, as our current economy pays a huge premium to people who are willing to do the hard, deep work necessary to demonstrate mastery--if you want to make a lot of money, get so good at something that people can\u2019t ignore you and you\u2019re halfway home--and tomorrow\u2019s economy is going to demand mastery, as more and more simple, shallow, redundant work will be passed off to machines.
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