Many of you have heard me say that success in life is all about continuous improvement and being the best you can be. This includes our health & fitness, our personal and professional development, our mental and spiritual development, our finances, and then the coaching, mentoring, or sharing with others. Success is not a destination, it’s a process.
Another term for being the best you can be is mastery. Mastery is a process or journey that anyone can be on. You simply have to make a decision to get on the path and stay on it. It has nothing to do with age, gender, or experience. The problem is that our modern world works against mastery. We live in a society that promises immediate gratification and instant success and lead us in the wrong direction.
George Leonard, author of Education and Ecstasy and The Way of Aikido, mastery is the act of setting you foot on the path. He says that there are no shortcuts, no special tickets needed, and no exceptional abilities to enter into mastery. You don’t even need to have gotten an early start. All that is needed is to take the first step.
Think about how a baby first learns to walk. At first, they crawl and then one day they are able to pick themselves up by grabbing a chair or coffee table. At some point, they take there first step, then fall. Very soon afterwards they try again. Maybe they get one step or two and then they fall again. This process continues until they are able to walk without holding on to something. It’s a natural process. It’s the process of mastery.
The process of life is just the same. We fail and then we get back up and try again. The problem arises when we start to let go of this natural pull towards success, this mastery over the course of the 40,000 no’s that everyone has been telling us by the time we reach adulthood.
Have you ever decided to keep crawling rather than to go for what you really wanted and truly deserve? Do you feel that you have lost the ability to set a goal and go accomplish it? Why don’t we just do it like we did when we were 1 year old and learning to walk?
Somewhere along the way, we lost faith. We became too grown-up to take baby steps and fail a few times first. We stepped off the path of mastery. Here’s the good news. It’s just as easy to step back on the path of mastery, as it is to step off of it.
I pray this “Daily Thought” inspires you to work everyday on becoming the best person you can be and stay on the path of mastery. Then share it with someone else. Go make a difference for you and your family. God Bless.
Have an awesome day.
Sam
