Thank you for the warm introduction. It is awesome to be with you today.

Congratulations before we get started on your body of work and what you have built and the community that you have supported, it is really inspiring. I hope you feel that from the outside. It is amazing, and I am really honored to be part of it today.

I was, yes. First of all, Paris is infinitely beautiful. Around every corner you turn, there is a marketplace or a structure that is just gorgeous. The people were absolutely electric in the city, supporting the games. You have got about 10,000 athletes who are the best athletes on the planet, gathering in one of the most competitive environments. They have been training for 16, 20 years, sometimes just a handful of years, but that is really the outlier, to test themselves amongst the best. It is a place for big emotions. If you are afraid of big emotions, the world stage of athletics in this way is not going to be enjoyable. So, it was big emotions, big ambitions. The hallmark of the whole thing is how well can you be connected to your first principles? How well can you execute the craft that you have dedicated your life to being great at? And how well can you stay connected to your people, your team? All three of those are on full display.

Yes, of course. This is officially my fourth Olympic Games, and I was included with a women's beach volleyball team this year. What was exciting about it was they had never reached the podium. The coach that I worked with, Misty May and Kerri Walsh, are considered two of the best to ever play the game in beach volleyball, and I was able to work with them for about 12 years with coach Marcio. So we did the London Olympics, we did the Rio Olympics, and in Tokyo, I worked with surfing. I got another opportunity with beach volleyball this time. This was the first time it was not with Team USA. I supported Team Canada.

So, there was an interesting internal experience for me about supporting a different country, which was great. The narrative was that they had never reached the podium. On the outside looking in, they are a really good team but just short of what it would take to podium. We took a silver. They completely did it. It was just magical for them to deliver when the stakes were incredibly high.

So usually you work with a team for a full quad, for four years. However, I was introduced to the team two years ago, so the bulk of the work happens in the two years leading up. There are two ways that we went about it. We did full team meetings with the two coaches, myself, and the two athletes, and we had those on a semi-regular basis. I am just giving you the structure, and I can get into what we actually did as well. We had a mindset camp where I would meet with the athlete twice a day for a week straight. We did two of those, for a total of four weeks. We did some international trips together, so we knew how to work together in an international setting. Then there was one-on-one time with the athletes, and then just the athletes and myself. That is the basic structure to give you what a two-year arc would look like. It is probably 80-20. 80% of my time with the team and the athletes is in an office setting, and 20% happens---maybe 25%---on the beach.

While we are in the office setting, the less noisy environment, if you will, the early part of the work is deep work to really know and better understand who each of us are, to share our first principles, to share our dreams, our hopes, and our ambitions, and why those matter. We share our tripwires for anxiety and frustration. We share our fears. So we do the deeper work.

The more ancient work is: who are you? The more modern work is: how are we going to work together in a modern setting? At some level, sport is this made-up thing. Listen, it is my community, the one that I love. But if the world were coming to an end, we probably would not need sports other than for what it is, entertainment for most people. We need to put it in the context of the larger picture of life while also honoring how much time they have dedicated their life to it. We do the deep work.

It really is. It will test you, and it will expose the links in your philosophical chain, the weak links in your first principles, and in your mental, physical, and technical practices. It will test you, and when you come up against that test, it exposes where the weaknesses and strengths are. Crucible is a good word because, again, it is for big emotions. There is a lot that happens when it is you, with yourself, with another competitor, or with Mother Nature. You learn a lot about yourself, and that is what I love about it. What I am most interested in is mastery of self through mastery of craft. It is the intersection of the two that feels so tangible.

Let me just stop on the tangible, because the world you and I spend so much time appreciating is invisible. The world of the mind is invisible. Feelings are invisible. Emotions are observable, but the world of thoughts is completely invisible. When you have a tangible craft like sport, it is just a great way to reveal your inner world.

Amazing. And that is so when we see one. Apolo is a friend, and I have such regard for what he has done and how he has organized his life, and most notably, how he changed himself, really, fundamentally changed his approach to life, both from a technical, physical and mental standpoint to pursue his best. He was already a gold medalist. And then he thought, forward four years, what do I need to---who do I need to become in the next four years to give myself a chance of being the best in the world and to be my very best? And he abandoned his entire approach to being the best in the world because he understood fundamentally what got me here will not get me there, and that takes radical risk to do. And so when we see Olympians or whatever champions that are---the national anthem is being played and they have got a medal around their neck and we say to ourselves, oh man, they are so special. And they are! It must be nice to be born with such physical gifts. And they do have many physical gifts. But what we are missing is something far deeper, which is the fundamental commitments they have made in their life to pursue in an honest way their very best. And it comes at a high tax.

It is difficult to do because in the spiritual world and the physical world of sport, the seed of the whole thing is awareness, and it is becoming more aware of your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your physicality and the world around you. And so that awareness, whatever the human endeavor is, is kind of ground zero. And then to make fundamental commitments with that information, to pursue it in a---let us call it a world-class way, is very hard to do. It is incredibly hard to do. Nobody does it alone. Even the individual contributors, like Apolo, had a full team to support and challenge him, to support and challenge. So we need our teachers. We need our people that conditionally respect us and unconditionally respect us. And that might be confusing for the spiritual world, but I am happy to open that up as well.

Of course. So, the beginning of the work is the deep work, which you would be very familiar with. You would actually add quite a bit to the sports world of your depth and what you have to offer. And so it is that deep, rich work about who you are commingled in this world of elite athletics that you are in. And if you can go deeper, who are you without sport? And so that takes time. There are no shortcuts here. That just takes time.

For the most part, it is an ongoing life quest to better understand. It is not like we say, right, you did the work. Tick the box. You know your purpose. Your philosophy is clear. You have a clear vision. And that box is ticked. It is not that simple, of course.

Yeah. But at some point in time, we try to shift gears to principles and then we try to shift gears to skills. If you go deep work, then principles, then skills, and the principles flow out of the deep work and then the skills flow out of the principles.

What do I mean by that? A fundamental principle could be---I am committing to be a great teammate, or I am committing to be my best, or I am committing to be the best. From that we would design a mental skills training program. The athlete tells us their first principles. And then my job is to question it from a bunch of different angles, better understand it, enrich it, make it clearer, make it almost like so tangible that when somebody talks about their vision in life, they are using their imagination to see a compelling future. We want to make sure that it is so tangible that it is like we could feel the fabric of it, and both people can understand exactly what it is.

Then we agree to support and challenge each other to see if that thing can come true. This is what is unique in sport that maybe does not show up in other supportive relationships, is that I want to understand the athletes, and the athletes want to understand mine when you do it right. So, we are in it together and it is bidirectional as opposed to the traditional model in psychology, where it is all about the athlete that actually feeds narcissism, that feeds a self-obsession as opposed to feeding the collective, which is understanding my ambitions and goals. And this is now me breaking the mold. I am classically trained as a psychologist. This is now me breaking the mold with what traditional theory and science would suggest. Like if you go back to psychoanalysis, it was like the therapist had zero place in it. And then in cognitive behavioral theory, it is like self-disclosure, maybe sometimes, but kind of not really condoned.

Yeah. So this is the first principle of mine, which is that we are all interconnected. I know you would recognize that as a first principle, probably for yours. And so, if I am cold and unknown and I am asking an athlete to be vulnerable and expressive, it does not quite work in an honest way.

So, I want the focus to be on interconnectedness, not just on celebrating individual achievements. We are stronger when we're together. The therapeutic alliance is just that---you're not alone. We're in it together, and I'm not the wise sage coldly removed. I'm a contributor to the whole, and there might be times when I fall short of being stoic or poised, so we need to prepare for that too.

Thank you. A foundational approach for me personally is that I don't want to be the sage who pretends to have it all figured out. I'm just trying to figure it out too, and I think that gives permission for others to do the same. Athletes look to coaches for guidance, and part of the guidance I offer is, "Hey, I'm just figuring it out too." Maybe I've read one more book or done one more meditation, but I'm not some all-knowing figure.

That honesty creates a real approach where I can constantly ask athletes for their own solutions. My basic assumption is a high regard for the person. They've faced challenges before, and I want to understand how they've navigated those. What answers already lie within them? It's not about giving them my answer. Right now, the coach is often on a pedestal, while the athlete or patient is at a different level, but that's a mistake. We both have answers, and it's important to tap into that collective wisdom.

There are some real gems in this approach, and the most concrete part is the mental skills we help them practice.

The practices are simple. Humans are the most complex ecosystem on the planet, but their mental skills are incredibly simple. What bridges the complexity of people with the simplicity of the skills is the complicated part. The mental skills are breathing training, self-talk training, mental imagery, pre-performance routines, ways to let go of mistakes, and using imagination to create clarity of vision. These skills aren't new, and they're simple, but figuring out how to uniquely apply them to each person is where it gets complex.

Over the last 4 Olympic games I've worked at, the first one in London, I was a bit of an outlier. I didn't know another sports psychologist working with a team on the ground, except for the three hired by the U.S. Olympic Committee, two of whom were there for around 600 athletes. I was there for two. At the time, the world didn't yet value sports psychology, even though athletes would say the mental part was 75-90% of their game. When I asked how much time they spent on mental training, they'd say, "What do you mean?" That was 20 years ago.

Fast forward to the most recent Olympics in Paris. In the Olympic Village, there's a gym for all the athletes, and in the same building, there was a mindset room---about a third the size of the gym---for meditation, mindfulness, VR work for imagination, and even areas to write postcards home, engage in art like watercolor painting, or just have quiet reflection. It was the first time there was a dedicated space for mindfulness and meditation at the Olympics, and it showed the commitment to mental health. There were more sports psychologists than ever before. It was really refreshing.

Okay, I will start in reverse order. First of all, the way that I think about it---and I love your question---is that what is unique about the mind is that we cannot see it. It is completely invisible, but we see the artifacts of the mind. We see the artifacts of thoughts. Just like with gravity, we cannot see gravity, but we can see the artifact of gravity. We can see how it works. And the way we see how the mind works is through behaviors.

The second unique thing about the mind is that we take it everywhere we go. Some philosophical positions might say you do not take your mind anywhere. But for concreteness, as a lack of language here to capture the mind, it goes with you---it is you in some respects, and maybe there is a deeper part of you. But this mental world that we have is part of the fabric of your existence. Whether you are on a playing field, in a living room, or in a boardroom, you still have the psychological components that are part of that experience. As a matter of fact, it might be the single filter that shapes your experience. So, it completely carries over.

That is why I use the concrete, tangible world of sport in high-pressure, high-stakes environments to better understand how the mind works. I found myself in American football, in the NFL, during my second year there, and Coach Carroll was the head coach of the team. He came flying out of his office---we did not know it at the time, but we were heading into our first Super Bowl together. He came flying out, music was blaring, and there was a great energy in the coaches' hallways. He said, "Mike, can you feel what is happening here?" I was nodding and trying to calculate what he was pointing to. He said, "It is amazing. You can feel it." He was talking about 63 athletes and about 25 alpha coaches, if you will. So in total, about 100 plus alpha competitors with their noses pointed in the same direction together. He said, "We need to write it down." What he meant was his genius in creating a culture where people could point their noses in the same direction and have a rich feeling about working well together. My contribution was to train psychological skills so that we could push the ceiling of anxiety higher, to be our very best together. Together, we were doing something that felt very magical. So we wrote it down---literally. On a Word document, we wrote it down. Then we turned it into a three-page deck. About six weeks later, Satya Nadella called and said, "I have been watching and I would love to learn what you are doing. Congratulations on winning the Super Bowl."

Actually, it was six weeks after we won the Super Bowl. He called, and he was just a few weeks into his job as CEO. He put all of this in his book, so I am not sharing anything out of turn here. We met, and he said, "I would love to start working with you on building your culture. I want to build a culture as well, and I would love your support." We said, "Great, we know how to do it for 63 athletes and 25 coaches. We are not sure how to do it for 200,000." He said, "Right, we will take our time." So it forced us to figure out the real system and how to scale it. The simplicity of the model is that we have five factors we work from. I am happy to share those, and it is really about helping people work from those five factors to train their minds to be their very best.

When you have a bunch of people in an organization with shared language around how their minds operate and shared practices on how to train their minds to be just a little bit better, you start to get a critical mass of change. People start focusing as much on the process of becoming their very best as they do on the noise of the outcome---the necessary noise of the outcome. Prior to that, most people focused on the outcome and did not spend enough time on their inner life. This is just a counter-rotation from the real pressure to perform---the external pressures---counterbalanced with a process to train your mind to be your very best. If you think that your community is interested in the five factors, I am happy to share what those are.

Thank you. I think I captured that there are two books. I have an audiobook that I did with Coach Carroll called "Compete to Create", which captures the best practices that we found valuable, as well as in my newest book.

Yes, it is very hard to do. We went back the next year and made it to the Super Bowl again, which is incredibly difficult. We lost that one in a very dramatic fashion, but yes, thank you for that.

There is an audiobook, and you can find everything on our website, FindingMastery.com. It has a bunch of resources, including the five-factor model. But really, the way the structure works is that the coaches of a sports team---the head coach and the assistant coaches---are not different from the CEO and senior leadership team. They need to be on the same page with their language, with their approach to helping people be their best---not strategy, not tactics, but how they are deploying good old simple psychology. Not psychotherapy in the hallways, not endorsing coaching and therapy, which is good to endorse. But how are they practicing and committing to working from the inside out in a way that has alignment across the team?

What does that mean? It means we agree on the cultural attributes that we have hired a big firm to clarify, and the nice collateral we have put on the walls---how do we make those come to life? We all agree that culture eats strategy for lunch, as Drucker pointed out. We all agree that when people are humming, thriving, and really working well together, the outcomes will be extraordinary because it is rare and special when people work from the inside out and are thriving in life. Of course, the intelligence of strategy and the way people produce will be exponentially better. But we have not properly invested in those practices at scale.

20 years ago, when I asked the head coach of a team how much of the game was mental, they would say 90%. Then I asked how they trained mentally, and they would say, "I think there's a good psychologist across town that we refer to for those who are struggling." That was not good enough. That is not how it works. 15 years ago, they started bringing someone in-house once a week to walk the hallways or have an office, like the therapist is in. Nobody would go there because there was too much taboo.

Fast forward to now, and there is a sports psychologist in the hallways, part of the bus rides, on the sidelines, in team meetings. It is the water we swim in and the air we breathe. It is not just down the hall in a poorly lit room with a comfortable couch talking about childhood trauma---though there is a place for that. But it is not just that. This same evolution is happening in business. What I do with head coaches and assistant coaches is the same for senior leadership and CEOs. It is about how you practice your psychology and how your words capture the culture you are trying to build, and how these practices support that culture.

The unique point here is that mindset skills support the culture. Culture eats strategy for lunch. When the culture is right, any word someone chooses for culture is likely vibrant and well-considered. But when people are anxious, tired, or overwhelmed, culture becomes just words on a wall. When we work from the inside out, we give ourselves a chance to be true to that culture and bring our best to it.

So, it starts with alignment at the senior leadership team level. Then we ask them to practice mindfulness, meditation, self-talk, imagery---whatever fits them. Next, we teach their direct reports the same language and practices, and then we scale it across the organization using video, training materials, and classic scaling mechanisms.

The 5 factors are quite simple. The first is a self-discovery process. The second is mental skills that can be trained every day---like optimism, which is a trainable skill, and imagery, which is also trainable. The third factor is training our psychological framework---our outlook on the world and our place in it. The fourth is mindfulness practices, which are the golden thread tying everything together. The fifth factor is best practices for recovery, which is relatively new to the business world.

When I first looked into enterprise companies 10 years ago, I wondered how they were working at such a pace without proper recovery---without enough sleep, good nutrition, or physical movement. They could not be thriving. I found out that engagement was around 30%, and many people felt dissatisfied with their jobs. So, there is a low bar but a high standard for using the business world as a place for people to thrive. I think modern leadership is about the basic application of good psychology---understanding what makes people thrive from the inside out. It is not just external conditions that matter. It is about how you work with your own psychology and purpose within a collective that supports and challenges each other. That is where the magic happens, helping teams win, organizations succeed, and individuals thrive.

Yes, I am so pleased to hear that because this came out of a lot of pain for me. Early on in my life, I was incredibly anxious. I did not know what anxiety was when I was younger, and I would wake up in the morning with my hands shaking as I brushed my teeth. I did not realize that my mind was out of control, worrying about the future. I channeled that energy into work, obsessively so, because when I buried myself in research, there was no room for anxiety. But it was like a snake eating its tail---I was not living a good life; I was just becoming more knowledgeable in my craft. That did provide a competitive advantage over my peers, but it did not create the kind of life I wanted to live.

Without discernment, I carried that energy into the early part of my professional life, and I made a mistake. I believed that if someone wanted to be great---and I was close to getting this right because I now believe we all want to have a great life---but I did not have the word 'life' attached to it. I believed that to be great, you had to make great sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices was your well-being. There was a phrase in high-performance sport that 'high performance begins where wellness ends.' I was not alone in this thinking, so I felt at home in this obsessed world.

The painful part is thinking, how many people did I mess up by over-indexing on the standards of excellence instead of focusing on the balance of a great life? I know now it came from an athlete. She sat down and said, "I am the best in the world, but I do not know my kids, and my marriage is falling apart. Can you help?" I said, "I do not know. I would like to think I could, but I do not know." This was before I had a child and my own marriage was falling apart. I said, "I cannot imagine a better mission than to figure this out with you. I would be honored to do this work with you." She fell into pieces because she was not alone. We ended up doing great work together---she won another medal, and now she has a deep, beautiful relationship with her family. So, it was amazing.

Now I understand that the drive for all of us to live a great life involves the same psychological practices for excellence as it does for well-being. They are the same practices. The behavioral aspects support both wellness and high performance. Take posture, for example. It is hard to find an athlete who does not have good posture because having a strong base is part of good posture. Some athletes have terrible posture, but for the most part, they have a strong frame.

For the rest of us---many of us are professional sitters at this point, myself included---it is easy to slouch forward, lose tension in the diaphragm, and fail to hold our spine with dignity. Research shows that when you roll your shoulders forward, tuck your chin down and forward, and raise your hands, you adopt a fighting posture. This posture sends a signal to the ancient brain that there is a threat. Look around at people in an airport---many have their shoulders rolled forward, their chin down and out, and their hands holding a device. Our brain cannot distinguish between this posture and the fighting posture.

A dignified posture, similar to a meditative posture, where the crown of your head is pulled toward the heavens, sends a different signal to your brain. It tells your brain, "We are okay. There is no threat." This reset is essential in our fast-paced, always-on world. It gives us a chance to become more aware of our inner life so we can address the non-conscious habits, behaviors, and thought patterns driving us beneath the surface.

That is why investing in awareness-building and mindfulness meditation is so important---it helps us become aware of poorly programmed ways of thinking and allows us to do something new, fresh, and healthy with them.

Yes. What I really appreciate about where you are taking the conversation is that I have been fortunate to work across most major sports, Olympic events, NBA, NHL, and even the adventure-based activities where people are doing things in highly risky environments. Across big tech, entrepreneurship, and industries like venture capital, the top one percenters across all of these industries are more similar than dissimilar. We end up talking about the same deep things. The language is similar, the questions are similar, and the life commitments have a different contour but are similar. When you look at people who are truly world-changing, they are saying some of the same stuff. Whether it is someone like Steve Jobs, who was wild in one way but deep in another---and I know you studied him well---or someone like Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus, or Mother Teresa. You pick some of the ones who really struggled but still gave us many gifts, like Beethoven.

I did some work on Beethoven. It was the same quest to express one's inner art. What we find is that many of them use the same similar language. Many of them struggle with one of the greatest constrictors for human potential: the fear of other people's opinions. This fear---am I good enough to fit in, do I belong, am I okay for being me---can be very limiting. We had fun naming it 'fear of people's opinions' as one of the great constrictors for human potential. Beethoven richly suffered from it. I highlight in my most recent book how he was so ashamed of losing his hearing that he removed himself from pop culture. He was the best in the world at that time and did not want to tell people that the one thing an artist of his stature relied on---his hearing---was gone. He considered himself a demigod, and to lose that ability was so shameful that he would rather become a recluse. He turned to drugs and solitude as a deep cave of burden, yet he came out the other side and gave us some of the greatest opuses of all time, like Symphony No. 5 and Symphony No. 9. He could not even hear the audience's applause at the end of the celebration. We all go through something. None of us gets through this world without trauma. The investment in the inner life---your work, hopefully my work too---is so valuable. I need it, and I am grateful to have you as a colleague and friend. You hold a space in the world of goodness, honesty, and potential, and it is wonderful.

Thank you so much for the compliment. I do not know if there is a secret. There are a handful of things I will point to---but one is that I have a great life partner. My wife provides stability. She is a fire-breather and a truth-teller. She sees me, supports me, and challenges me. We made a promise to each other under our vows, and when our marriage was falling apart, we figured it out together. I feel honored that she did the work with me. I needed to do the work, of course. We both needed to, but we recommitted to being unconditional in the way we support and challenge each other. I am not me without her.

Well, there are two things I will pull on because I think this is available to all of us. One is that I had to earn that because I was so anxious as a young person. I had to earn the set of principles and practices to live in the present moment, as anxiety is the exact opposite. Life happens in the present, as you know better than almost anyone, and your community would deeply respect that statement. High performance happens in the present moment. All things true, beautiful, good, and amazing happen in the present. Honesty happens in the present moment. The hard parts of life also happen in the present. So, a fundamental commitment to spend as much time as I can in the present moment gives me access to what is honest. What is true, maybe is another way of saying it. What I bring, hopefully to the best of my ability, is being present. People feel that.

I am very good at working with people who have made a similar commitment to get to the honest truth of something. If they are committed in a world-class way to their physical skills and committed in a world-class way to the truth of how they are going about their life, that is pretty magical. I select my business partners based on that: are you really going to do the work? Really, are you going to do the work? I think it is important to tune in to that. Are you living in the present moment? Are you working with people committed to the honest truth, which the present moment forces?

The second is seeing the divine spark. Most people do not do the work to know how special they are. When someone like yourself sees someone and says, 'Hey, this part of you is amazing, it leaps out,' it makes a difference. Imagine a life where you did that more often. What would that be like for you? That framing, catching the thing, recognizing it, and then asking, 'What would life be like if you had more of that?' Most people respond with, 'Oh, wow, you see that? Thank you.' Let me imagine that. Life would be pretty awesome. Then you can ask, 'What would it take?' That is how we start our agreement with each other.

I feel humbled by you asking because your life is deeply committed to the practice of wisdom. The way I think about it is just as you said: you cannot read about it or just be around it. You have to earn it. That means spending time with the essence of something, whatever it is you are attending to. The classic idea is that wisdom can be found in attending to a flower, getting down to the deepest, truest nature of the thing, where wisdom is revealed. The way I humbly think about it is that when we spend time in the present moment, we start to get to the true nature of things. We start to have insights into how things work. Insights are like 'oh,' 'ah,' 'hey, this and that.' You draw connections, and with enough insights, you get down to universal wisdom, the simplest way of understanding the true nature of something. From the present moment to insights to wisdom---there is no shortcut I know of, except speeding up the practice of being in the present moment more often. In my concrete world of high performance, I use an ancient wisdom practice to help people live in the present moment so they can perform better. Just beneath the surface, I am always building the narrative that this is also the stuff of wisdom. So, there is an 'above the line' performance piece and a 'below the line' deep part of the human experience. Some people are like, 'Yes, I get that wisdom thing,' and some are like, 'I feel so much clearer. I am not defined by what I do. My identity is not wrapped in my performance, and I feel freer.' There is just so much in the combination of the two that I am inspired by.

Yes, I do. Josh and I know each other. He is a great student of mastery. I am curious about your thoughts. If you were to think about an executive or an athlete who is honestly pursuing their best, committed to self-mastery and mastery of craft, how many minutes a day would you dedicate to training the inner life, building psychological skills, and deepening awareness? How many minutes a day would you suggest as a range?

I love it. I want to answer, but first, let me ask a follow-up. If you had an hour for people to do internal work, how much of that would you dedicate to a mindfulness practice? And how much would go to other skills or practices, and what would those be?

Yes, I completely support that. Completely. So, would you start with meditation, mindfulness, or contemplative practices at, say, 5 minutes and then work your way up to 60 minutes? Or would you take the opposite approach and sit someone down for 60 minutes of meditation from the start? As I ask it, that does sound a bit ridiculous, even in my mind.

It is so painful.

More effective.

When I was younger, I made the classic mistake of saying, 'This is what it takes. I don't know what to tell you. Either you're going to make the commitment or not.' For example, 20 minutes of meditation or two 20-minute sessions if that's your training. There is some research now suggesting that around 12 minutes, you start to see benefits and brain structure changes, but that's not for the practice of wisdom. I had this posture of, 'Here's what the best do, here's what the research says. If you can't find 20 minutes to an hour a day, I wish you the best.' That was a bit of a jerk mentality.

Now, I have embraced the idea of meeting people where they are, and what I was always pushing against early on was, 'I'm too tired, I'm too busy, I'm too overwhelmed.' People would say, 'That's nice for your athletes or the best in the world, but I'm just a regular person struggling. I can't do what they do.' There was all this negative language around it. So now, when I meet people where they are, I slightly challenge them. Maybe it's just one minute a day, as ridiculous as that seems, but then we build on it. If you can do one minute, you can do two. Let's do two minutes a day and build from there. What I would say is that the optimal minimum is 20 minutes, and optimal is 1 hour. I had John Donovan, who was on the Finding Mastery podcast, say to me, 'Mike, I started with 15 minutes before I started my day.' This was probably 20 years ago for him. He was one of the CEOs of AT&T, with about 120,000 people under his leadership. He said, 'I started with 15 minutes, and I realized I was so much better in conversations, emails, and just the way I felt in life that I doubled it. I did 30 minutes before I started my day, and I was even better. I felt like I was on a glide path. I still had stresses and pressures, of course, but I was better. Then, I doubled it again.'

He went to four hours. I said, 'Before you went to work?' He said, 'Yes, I did.' He said some of that time was reading, as he's a Christian, so he would read the Bible and passages of wisdom from other texts. He was meditating, journaling, and writing. He was also doing mindful movement. So, part of those four hours was what some people might see as fitness, but he was practicing being attuned to his body while moving---not listening to music or solving work problems, but feeling his muscles move while he moved. That was really inspiring for me. What I know from elite athletics is that the upper limit for physical training is four hours a day for the best in the world, and the upper limit for mental training is around 90 minutes. The average is about ten minutes a day. So, that's a reflection.

Yes.

What is it called?

Are you going to sing it?

Good. Beautiful! Yes, cool.

I would add that he had the craft to be able to either remember it or put the words to it. There was a craft that he had invested in, and he was open, feeling all that, and ready to receive it. I love that so much. I'm going to re-listen to that song. I love it because some of the best in the world talk about flow state, and there's a science around flow and what leads us to experience it more often. One of the core characteristics of reaching that flow state, where it feels fluid and you're open, is deep focus. When you have the ability to focus deeply and string together a couple of present moments, you can extend it longer, and you can slip into that flow state. Most of us, after 3 or 8 seconds, pop out of it. This is where the practice of starting over a thousand times in a meditative practice can help us stay more connected to the present moment. Sometimes rich emotions will get you there, and sometimes it's the practice. I want to share one more story with you.

The coach I just finished working with, who was part of the team that won the Olympic silver medal, is Marcio Sokol. He's Brazilian, with all the flair and emotion you might expect from a vibrant Brazilian coach. Before every game, during the warm-up, he would say, 'Okay, now in the warm-up, just get loose, get ready.' And it was a pretty intense hour-long warm-up. Then, we would all circle up for final touches and the final message he would give. He would consistently say, 'Okay, remember, go out there and open up your senses.' You could just see the athletes going, 'Oh, I know how to do that.' "Go, get in touch with that sensory part of yourself." He didn't even realize the depth of that statement. It's worth noting, for all of us, to open up our senses a bit more. It's such an animalistic---in the most vibrant way---like, physical thing. Our senses teach us that being available to them is really rich. I wanted to share that note because it was so present.

Wait, hold on. I've forgotten the story. Tell me the story.

Yes, Thank you. I was thinking, 'Where is he going with this?' Of all the stories, of course, you would latch onto this one. It's so good.

You are only the second person in all the interviews I've done about the book to bring that one up. Most people go to the Olympians, Beethoven.

Okay, as a shorthand, I would love to hear your takeaway from the story, and then I can go back and share why I was inspired to include it.

Let's go in reverse order on this.

Right. The reason I wanted to write that was almost exactly for what you just said. The second piece is, I started my career as a gas attendant, pumping gas. None of my family went to college, so my path was pretty clear. Blue collar, maybe a white-collar sales job. And there's nothing wrong with that. My dad was a very successful salesperson, but there was no college. It was the school of hard knocks. I wanted to share the origin story to highlight that we all come from somewhere. To make it more contemporary, I was watching the Democratic National Convention last night, and both the vice president and her husband talked about working at McDonald's. One of the first jobs they both had, particularly the husband, as I recall. We all have a history, and those histories shape how we understand what we're capable of, how we are tested, and what we can become. Those experiences are part of our story, even when they don't seem favorable, and even when it feels like it might not work out. I'm inspired by the agency of humans to really take control of their micro-choices and to be connected to others who support and challenge them to make those micro-choices in a healthy, organic, and optimized way. That was my hope in the arc of the story.

Thank you for bringing that up.

You know, I wish I had left the Beethoven one in suspense as well.

You will not be able to guess it from the origin story. Unless people look up the name now.

Yes, I think you're on it. Again, it makes perfect sense that you would pull that insight and that quote out. I struggled quite a bit to get that prose and that phrase together. Then it just hit me---no different, perhaps, than John Denver---trying to thread the inner and outer together. I know you've done a beautiful job of that as well. It's complicated to think about mastery, but I want to make it as simple as I can for myself. I try every day to create a living masterpiece, which is quite ambitious. For me, a living masterpiece requires being really present throughout the day, holding the depth of the emotional experience, and challenging my ability to explore the upper limits of my capabilities. So, there's an emotional component, a skill expression, and a present-moment experience. When I do all of that, I feel like I'm really in alignment. I think you used the word 'core.' For me, it's alignment with something divine---an energy that I don't know how to explain or put words to---and with the physical. When I'm in alignment, that's what a living masterpiece is. But I have to stretch myself to the upper limits of my capacities. There's an agitating state before I get to that alignment, which I wish wasn't there. Maybe I don't understand it well enough yet, but I'm still in the phase where I can't just blink or snap my fingers and get into that state. There's a decision, a commitment, and some action to get still and connected. Then it's agitating, and then I might just get there. That's how I'm thinking about it.

And it's hard not to crave or want, you know, and to surrender and let go. That's part of my challenge. I thank you for highlighting that. I love the counterbalance you mentioned earlier---the ease of life or how you move through life when you have this developing awareness. With that awareness, you're able to micro-navigate just a little bit easier. What once used to throw you off no longer does. Over time, if you think about the most wise people, it feels like they rarely get knocked off center.

Aspirationally, that's where I'm trying to spend more time as well.

Yes. It's a first principle. We're all interconnected. Everything is. I want to thank you for creating this space for us to play, muse, and share ideas in new ways. I found myself putting words together in new ways, which is always fun. So, thank you for that. I feel like we should maybe complete the story of who we were talking about earlier---or we could do it on social media, which would be a modern way of doing it. What do you think? Should we finish it here or on social media?

Let's pay it off here. This is a person who has probably influenced billions of people, and we will all recognize his commitment to the spiritual life. I'm going to listen to my intuition and just say it.

Pope Francis. We tend to think of figures like the pope or the Dalai Lama as if they just arrived one day fully formed, like they've always been that way. The same with world-class athletes. We forget all the training and early experiences before the media and attention were on them. One of my clients is Felix Baumgartner, who is very public about our work. He jumped from 130,000 feet and became the first person to leap from that height. The world thought he was crazy and that he was going to die. But we miss, when, at age 3, he jumped off the curb and thought it was the greatest thrill. At age 7, he jumped from a tree branch and thought it was amazing. We miss all those experiences---the scar tissue, broken bones, challenges, thrills, excitement, insights, and wisdom from those early days. In this case, he was born to be pope. That's the nature of the story. Thank you for bringing it forward.

Yes, that's cool. How fun is that?

Thank you so much.