Finding Mastery

Finding Mastery We help individuals and organizations unlock their potential at the intersection of high performance.

09/01/2026

Robert Greene says chasing the Goldman Sachs job straight out of college is wasting the one decade you can’t get back.

“Your 20s, you’re only young once...you’ve got to have fun, it’s got to be an adventure. But that adventure has to have a direction, heading towards something you love, that excites you.”

The point isn’t to try everything. It’s to try enough things within what you love that by 30, you’ve actually learned what you were destined for, instead of guessing at 22 and locking in.

09/01/2026

Oksana Masters says society decided what she was capable of long before she got a say: invisible, unworthy, limited by every label attached to her.

“My biggest pet peeve is determining what I’m capable of achieving and doing based on what their limited view is... I wanted to rewrite my own story.”

The labels were never accurate. They were just convenient, until she stopped letting someone else hold the pen.

08/27/2026

John Schneider, GM of the Seattle Seahawks, says tanking for a better draft pick is a strategy he refuses to run, even when the losses pile up.

“We’re not trying to get a certain draft pick. It’s kind of unnatural to me. That’s just unacceptable.”

His whole system boils down to three words: plan, communicate, work.

No shortcuts, no assuming you’re the smartest person in the room, just outworking everyone else because that’s the only edge that doesn’t require losing on purpose.

08/26/2026

Comment “TOMMY" and we’ll send you today’s episode of Finding Mastery with Tommy Wood physician, neuroscientist, associate prof., and author of The Stimulated Mind. This is a conversation about dementia, mental decline, and what we can do to help prevent it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

- Why we use to believe the adult brain was fixed and what we know now
- The 14 modifiable factors behind dementia risk
- Tommy's framework of Stimulus, supply, support, and how they interact
- Why midlife is the window to prevent future decline
- Why the factor that matters most is the one you may be skipping
- Where to start if it runs in your family
- The markers worth measuring now

If someone you love or you know has been through this, this conversation says you have more agency than you might think.

08/25/2026

Vanessa Van Edwards says two people can share the exact same life facts and walk away with opposite stories.

“Someone in a redemption narrative can look at those facts and tell you how it’s built up to them getting better. Someone in a contamination narrative will look at those same facts and see how they’ve gotten worse.”

The facts don’t change. The authorship does.

Her real mission is helping people become more themselves, because that’s what turns a life into a redemption story instead of a contamination one.

08/24/2026

Here is the lesson to take into the rest of the year: never give up.

Loved this from Robert Greene

08/24/2026

Jesse Cole named a baseball team “The Bananas” when literally no one wanted it, because he wasn’t trying to fix what baseball currently was.

“If we’re going to be like everyone else, we’re going to get results like everyone else. In Savannah, everyone else failed.”

Locals called it an embarrassment.

He was reverse-engineering from Walt Disney instead, the guy who nearly went broke betting on full-length animation and sound when three-minute shorts were the safe move.

Sometimes the only way out of a dying category is imagining what almost nobody else is willing to.

08/21/2026

Gaslighting isn’t lying, and confusing the two misses what actually makes it damaging.

“Lying would be, ‘I never said that, you never saw me there.’ Gaslighting is, ‘I never said that — but you’ve become so paranoid since Charlie was born, maybe this is some of your cuckoo coming back.’”

The denial is only half of it.

The real damage is the second move: turning your own perception into evidence that something’s wrong with you.

08/19/2026

What if the habits holding you back aren’t really about willpower, but about the wounds and patterns underneath them?

Comment “HABITS” to receive the latest episode of Finding Mastery with Jon Gordon, bestselling author of more than 30 books including The Energy Bus and his latest, The Power of Positive Habits, joined me on Finding Mastery this week.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

-Why you are your habits and how changing them can change you
-How unresolved wounds can show up in everyday behaviors
-Why recurring triggers and patterns are worth paying attention to
-The gratitude habit that changed the course of Jon’s life
-How to reduce friction when building a new habit
-What to do when you’re feeling anxious, stressed, or disconnected
-Why great leaders connect before they correct
-How adversity can reveal where you still need to grow
-Why letting go of control can create greater freedom
-How to build habits around purpose, impact, and legacy

Jon’s work is a reminder that changing your life isn’t always about making one massive transformation.

Sometimes it starts by recognizing the patterns that no longer serve you, understanding where they came from, and choosing a better habit, one day at a time.

08/18/2026

The brain can only focus on one truly novel thing at a time, which makes worry a lot more expensive than it looks.

“If our attention is on the success of worry, it’s not on the task at hand. And the present moment task at hand type of focus is the unlock to flow state, to the zone, to high performance.”

Flow isn’t a mystical state you stumble into.

It’s just what happens when attention isn’t being taxed by a worry that was never going to help you perform anyway.

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