Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: The Zen of Achieving True Mastery

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural fat loss supplement, Phoenix. It has sold over 100,000 bottles in the last several years, and it helps you lose fat faster in three ways. One, it increases your metabolic rate. Two, it amplifies the power of fat-burning chemicals produced by your body. And three, it increases the feeling of fullness from food. In short, it speeds up your metabolism,

it helps your body burn fat more efficiently, and it helps you control hunger and cravings and maintain high energy levels. Phoenix also contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four star average and another 250 reviews on my website with a four and a four star average and another 250 reviews on my website with a four

and a half star average. So if you want to burn more fat every day and have an easier time sticking to your diet without having to pump yourself full of harsh stimulants or potentially harmful chemicals, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Phoenix today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout, and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to

www.legionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, dot com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Welcome, welcome. Let's start this week's Motivation Monday with a quote, of course. This one comes from the professor and author Dan Ariely, and he said that giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination. In this episode, I want to talk about one of the least common denominators of successful people. I want to talk about one of the fundamental things that they all do that enables them to rise above the rest of the crowd.

pretty hard and so forth, but I don't think that those are the fundamental reasons for their success. I don't think that that's why they can charge their customers as much money as they can, or they can earn as much money as they do or achieve as much recognition as they do. You can't charge people for your intelligence or your energy levels or your work ethic, right? people for your intelligence or your energy levels or your work ethic, right? People don't pay you for that. But what people will pay you outrageous sums for and what people do pay outrageous sums for every day and what serves really as the foundation of every wildly successful business venture out there is mastery, is the ability to do something that other people find valuable and do it extraordinarily well. I think that that is really what striking it big boils down to. You have to master something that other people find valuable. You have to be so good that people can't ignore

you, that anyone can look at your work and say, wow, you're really good at that. When you can do that, then people talk about you. They talk about your work. You acquire fans. You get sought out for advice and people will pay you a premium for your work. And that doesn't mean you have to be the best in the world. Of course, mastering something doesn't mean you're absolutely the best, but it's nothing wrong with striving for that, of course. It simply means that you are highly skilled in something and it's a technical skill. It takes a lot of time. It's not easy. Not very many people can do this thing and you can do it very, very well. You have acquired a very deep understanding of it and a very high level of competence in doing it. And I think

that this principle applies to any undertaking in life and business. I think it applies whether you work for someone else or whether you work for yourself. If you haven't mastered something that your customers or your employer finds very valuable, then you really can't expect much success. If you settle for mediocrity, then you are going to be rewarded in kind. You are going to get mediocre pay. You're going to receive mediocre acknowledgement for your work. You're going to achieve mediocre status. Mastery, on the other hand, it shines like a lighthouse in our society. Mastery attracts attention. It attracts business. Mastery is just instinctively

respected and admired by other people. The bottom line is most everyone in the world who has achieved real honest success has mastered something. So if we look at a professional sports player, of course, they've mastered the sport to a point where you have a business person willing to pay him or her millions of dollars per year to play on the team and entertain the fans. If you have a very successful writer, that person has mastered the art of, let's say it's a fiction writer, so they've mastered the art of storytelling sufficiently to be able to entertain hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who are willing to pay a little bit of money for

their ideas. If you have a person who runs a successful company selling, who cares, selling widgets, that person has mastered how to market and sell his products to people that need and want them. And as a little aside there, pretty much every self-made millionaire that I know who made their money in business and that I have known were very good at sales and marketing in particular. They had really mastered certain elements, enough of sales and marketing to really make it big. So if mastery is the key, what does it take to really achieve mastery? And there have been many books written on the subject. One that I highly recommend is

called, of course, Mastery, and it's by Robert Greene. But I think it boils down to a handful of simple steps, and I want to go through them here. So the first one is you have to make a decision. Now, when you watch an interview with a brilliant and successful person, something might happen deep down inside, something deep down in your gut from somewhere down there. There might be the feeling that makes you think some people are just chosen, I guess, to do brilliant things and to do brilliant work and the rest of us are just kind of screwed. Lucky him, lucky her. And while you can find some examples of that throughout history, that's more often not the case, actually.

What you usually miss from those interviews are the stories of just the hours and days and weeks and months and years of dedicated, grueling work, deliberate practice, perseverance, grit, conscientiousness, however you want to phrase it, what it really took for that person to get there and get to the point where they're worthy of being interviewed. You probably won't hear about the beginning when that person was just another face in the crowd, another person with a dream. And when they made a decision on a particular day, with a dream and when they made a decision on a particular day at a particular hour in a particular moment, that person said, this is what I am going to dedicate my working life to. This is what I am going to master no matter what it takes. And that is the first step on the road to mastery. You have

to make a conscious decision about what you will decide to master and what you are willing to go all the way for. So don't wait for that. Find it, decide. That's the first step. For me, it's writing. That's what I have decided to master. And I've put in a lot of time now over the last five years or so of writing anywhere from let's say six to 12,000 words per week. Writing is the thing that I want to get as good as I can at. And it's probably going to be something that I will be doing for the rest of my life. I may not always be writing about health and fitness because eventually maybe I'll run out of things to say, but there are plenty of other things that I can write about. And so I decided years ago that that's what I was

going to really dedicate myself to. That's what I was going to try to master is communicating in the written form. And all the time and work that I've put in has paid off in many ways. It's paid off first and foremost in personal satisfaction. I am very happy with the progress that I've made as a writer. I'm very happy with the books that I've written, the articles that I've written, the things that I've produced, and it also has paid off financially. I've sold over a million books now as a self-published author. My websites, my blogs over at Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics receive about two and a half million visits per month and they're growing. And those were built solely on my writing. And that content on those websites,

of course, serves as a pillar for those businesses, which generate eight figures in revenue every year. My writing is why I have a readership, of course, why I have a following, why I have people like you that are even willing to listen to what I have to say. And so, yeah, I'm pretty happy with how things are going, but I know that I can always get better. That as a writer, I consider myself pretty good at this point. I'd say I'm competent. I'm not great, but I'm pretty good. I would like to be great, but I just know that's going to take several more thousands of hours of work to get there. And I'm cool with that. That sounds like fun. Sounds like

a good challenge. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay. So the next point after you've made your decision is focus, focus, focus. So society in general, they kind of tell us from a young age that we should become a well-rounded individual.

You know, I get asked fairly often about work-life balance and how to keep everything in balance. And while that sounds great, it sounds like something worth aspiring to. I think it's a myth. I really don't think that you can achieve extraordinary success in any endeavor while keeping your life in perfect balance. And if you want to master something, you really should just probably ignore this advice. The master has focused intensely on a very narrow set of skills to the exclusion of everything else. And that is what ultimately produced the mastery. Now, that may have entailed studying other subjects and other disciplines, but really only to the point that they served the immediate needs of what the person was trying to master.

The master has spent time to become competent in other fields, mostly to help develop and further his chosen skill, the primary skill. So think deeply about the core demands of your craft. What is really needed to advance in mastery of it? What can be ignored as just a mere distraction? If you want to master something, the bottom line is you have to practice brutal focus. You have to emphasize what is needed and you really have to shun what can be ignored. So in my case with writing, for example, I put a lot of time into reading. I put a lot of time into growing my vocabulary. So I have a whole flashcard thing that I do with words that I come across in stuff that I read that I like. And then I load them into an

SRS flashcard system and do that every day to just further build my vocabulary. I also write every day. So I'm spending time writing something, whether it's an article or whether it's working on, I have a couple of new books that I'm working on, or sometimes it's copywriting, but I'm writing every single day. I also regularly do something called copybooking, which is where you copy word for word, the writing of someone who you wish you could write like. And I got this from, I think it was Jack London. There are a couple notable writers that would do this regularly to improve their writing. And it makes sense that just by doing that, by copying word for word sentences and phrases and passages and whatever from people that you would like to be able to write like,

that you would kind of maybe learn a bit through osmosis. And so for example, I am copybooking Ron Chernow right now. So I'm going through all of my takeaways, all the stuff that I liked in his biography of John Rockefeller called Titan. And I put some time every week into retyping it word for word. I was doing it by hand for a bit, which takes longer. And that's of course what people did. The few examples I ran into of copy booking were from decades ago. So it was by hand then, but I didn't feel like it was necessarily better doing it by hand. It does force you to slow down and focus a little then, but I didn't feel like it was necessarily better doing it by hand. It does force you to slow down and focus a little bit, but I felt like I could do that

just as easily typing as long as I'm paying attention and I'm not just kind of rotely zoning out and just retyping words, but really paying attention to how the sentences are being formed and how things are being phrased and communicated. And so that's another thing that I do to advance my mastery of writing. I also spend a little bit of time every week working on coming up with metaphors and similes and analogies because the better you can create metaphors and similes and analogies, the better you can communicate things. People think metaphorically naturally. So they respond obviously well to good metaphors. It's a way to not only spice up your writing, but also to make it more relatable.

Now, when you consider all those things in terms of time, as you can tell, they add up to quite a bit of time every week. That means that there's a lot less time for other things. And if I didn't have businesses to run and if I didn't have other things that I just have to do, I would be putting even more time into advancing my skill as a writer and into further mastering writing. And what that would come down to is I'd probably just read and write a bit more. I'd spend a bit more time reading. I just enjoy reading, but it's also a very productive way to improve your writing is

to read good writing. So I would do more reading and I also would just do more writing. Okay. So moving on to the next point here, and that is you have to become an idiot to become a master. You have to become an idiot. Idiocy, I think is the other side of the coin of mastery, but you really can't have one without the other. And yeah, that might sound a bit contradictory. It might sound like an oxymoron almost, but the reason why is in order to focus your working life, which is obviously the majority of your time on mastering a craft. And that's what it takes. I mean, if you look at the research, right on a deliberate practice, the 10,000 hour rule, right? As Malcolm Gladwell popularized. Further research shows that that's not quite the case. It doesn't actually really take 10,000 hours of

deliberate practice to achieve, let's say professional level skill at something. It could be as few as 3,000 hours or as many as 30,000 hours really kind of depends on the person. It depends on many things, depends on many circumstances, but a fair estimate is probably, let's say five to 6,000 hours of deliberate practice. And by deliberate practice, I mean practice with a goal where you are receiving feedback, where you are stretching yourself beyond your limits. And it's not just going through motions, right? So it's a much more structured, deeply focused type of practice. Think of it almost like apprenticeship work, regardless of whether someone else is involved or not, regardless of whether you have a mentor or a teacher or not. So anyways, a fair estimate is probably five or 6,000 hours of deliberate

practice to start approaching mastery. And so when you look at it that way, you're just going to have to rule out a lot of the other trivia that takes up most people's time. Many masters have achieved their amazing abilities by just becoming idiots. And what I mean by that is it's really striking to see not just what they know and what they can do, but what they don't know to reach that exalted state of mastery. Most of these people, they had one kind of all-consuming overarching goal and they really shut out everything else. They put all of their mental energy and all of their focus and all of their attention into this small set of practices and disciplines that supported this drive to master something. And that means ignoring distractions because

distractions pull us in all directions. That also means learning to overcome the boredom of repetition because yeah, doing the same types of things over and over and over does tend to get boring and it does tend to drive us to other interests, does tend to drive us toward the many shiny objects that are vying for our attention all around us at any time of any day. There's also, you know, the pressures of culture and pressures of people around us that make us worry that we're missing out on something important by really just dedicating ourselves to a singular pursuit of mastery. And that's just a sacrifice that has to be made. So if you want to master writing, for example, if you're like me and you want to master writing, then you're going to have to also give up on the fantasy of running the 800 meters in the Olympic games. It's just, you can't have

it both ways. Maybe if you didn't have to sleep, maybe if we didn't have to sleep, we may be able to master, let's say two things in our lifetimes. It may be feasible while also not just going insane while also having at least some semblance of a life. So if you want to master the cello, then you're probably going to have to give up trying to follow all of the best TV shows. You're just not going to have the time. If you want to master anything, the reality is you're probably going to have to become an idiot in most everything else. So the last tip here, the last key is then you got to continue to obsess. So when you're going for mastery, you have to realize you are playing a long game. Again, it takes thousands of hours to get there.

And that's why I really don't think that, you know, you want to make a decision to achieve mastery in something lightly. You have to really understand what you're getting into, how much effort lies ahead of you and what you're really committing yourself how much effort lies ahead of you and what you're really committing yourself to. There's going to be pain. There's going to be discomfort. There are going to be many days where you just don't want to do it. Many days where you just want to give up. It's really not for everyone. But I do also think that the journey to mastery is probably one of the most satisfying journeys that you can embark on. And getting there, I think, is probably one of the greatest joys that life has to offer.

And again, I don't think I'm there yet. I think I'm on my way. And it's been very satisfying so far. It's had its ups and downs. And it hasn't been easy, but it has been very satisfying. And I'm not sure I will ever get there in my own estimation if I'll ever reach the point where I can truly say that I am a master of writing or of anything. And that's okay though, because that's exactly how many people who have reached the highest levels of business, science and art and so forth have felt. Fortunately, the meaning comes from the making. It's the striving to arrive that really matters and that is truly satisfying and fulfilling, not the arriving or the having arrived. It's the game of it. It's the knowledge that you are spending your time, or at least the majority

of your time, in the pursuit of greatness. You're working toward it. Whether you're going to get there or not doesn't really matter. Even if you are striving for something that you feel is unattainable, there's more nobility and there's more joy there than simply going through the motions every day, just getting by. So again, in my case, as far as writing goes, the ideals that I'm striving toward are probably best embodied in Ron Chernow, the biographer, and Will Durant, the historian and philosopher. If I can reach their level, I don't know if I can ever be as good as they are at writing and just at communicating as clearly and powerfully and beautifully as they can. But if I can at least in my own estimation become

comparable to them, if I can at least play in the same league, then I will be happy. I will say I achieved my goal and I achieved a certain level of mastery in my craft. And so that's the game that I'm playing. And it's really just a game that I chose to play. If it weren't writing, I could find something else. There are many other things that I'm interested in, and I'm sure I could cultivate some of those interests into true passions. And from there, be willing to dedicate myself to do what it would take to achieve mastery. And if any of this has resonated with you, then it probably means that you should be on a similar journey yourself. You have to then really look at what is it that you would want to master. And don't think about the financial side of things. That can always be figured out later. If you can master something, you can probably figure out how to make money with it. There are

very few things that you can't make money with when you are very, very good at them, especially if you're willing to put a little bit of time into just learning marketing and sales. For example, you don't have to be a master of marketing and sales to do well. If you are very, very good, if you're approaching mastery in something else, you just got to figure out how do you take what you're very, very good at and communicate it to people in such a way that they will want to pay you money for it. And that in the end really is just showing how it is going to benefit them. If you can show how your skill and what you can produce with your skill is going to make their lives easier, is going to help them solve their problems, is going to help them

alleviate pains, is going to help them alleviate pains, is going to help them achieve their goals better, then you've got it made. So again, if something in you really feels drawn toward that quest, toward mastery, and if it's something that just appeals to you, then reflect on it. What would you like to master? Where do your natural interests lie? Where do your natural talents lie? What types of things are naturally suited to your personality? And really, I mean, you just start with a curiosity. And that curiosity, though, can be cultivated into a burning desire. It doesn't need to be something that you just feel strongly drawn to in the beginning. For me, again, with writing, it started just as a, well, I mean, my original, I remember when I was, when I had the thought, I was thinking, you know, I like to read and I always have liked to read. I've always been a good student. Writing seems like it would be cool and that's it. And now years and years later, I make my living as a writer and I make a good living as a writer.

It's funny when I meet people randomly and they kind of ask what I do. I don't really go into it. I was like, Oh, you know, I do health and fitness things. Primarily I'm a writer and I have some books that are popular and some websites and stuff. And they're like, Oh, okay. And they figured they're thinking like, Oh, so this dude's unemployed and you know, broke. Okay. Um, but no, no, no, no. And I don't, I don't care, but the reality is like, you can do very well. That's a writing well. Writing is an example of something that most people think, oh yeah, sure, you can master writing and you're not going to do well for yourself. I mean, everybody knows that writers are starving artists, right? Yeah, not so much, not these days, especially not people that have a sense for business and a sense for marketing

and who can make it as a self-published author. I mean, I've met just along the way in my travels, some self-published authors. I mean, I do well for myself, but I've met some people in the fiction space who write fiction and they're self-published who blow my numbers out of the water. I mean, I'm talking eight figures in book royalties per year. Yes, like a million dollars a month plus in book royalties, self-published. And you never know if you met that person. There is cool people. They'd just be like, oh yeah, I write science fiction stories. And then, oh, that's cool. Yeah. Good for you. All right, man. Like, yeah, no, no. This dude makes more money than Wall

Street bankers writing fiction stories because he got very, very good at it. So anyways, the point is find out what that is for you. What is that thing? And then just really go at it. And there will be a point if you can get good enough where people really start recognizing, wow, you're really good at that. Opportunities will come. You can monetize it, but first you have to get very, very good. You don't have to be a master, but you have to be well on your way toward mastery. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick

review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural fat loss supplement, Phoenix. It has sold over a hundred thousand bottles in the last several years, and it helps you lose fat faster in three ways. One, it increases your metabolic rate. Two, it amplifies the power of fat burning chemicals produced by your body. And three, it increases the feeling of fullness from food. In short, it speeds up your metabolism. It helps your body. And three, it increases the feeling of fullness from food. In short, it speeds up your metabolism. It helps your body burn fat more efficiently, and it helps you

control hunger and cravings and maintain high energy levels. Phoenix also contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four star average and another 250 reviews on my website with a four and a half star average. So if you want to burn more fat every day and have an easier time sticking to your diet without having to pump yourself full of harsh stimulants or potentially harmful chemicals, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Phoenix today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either

love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com now, here, head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot.