Should You Read The First Rule of Mastery by Michael Gervais?
A Book Review
Are you curious of if you should spend the time to read The First Rule of Mastery? You're at the right place. Let's talk about it!
So this truly was a random pick purchasing this book. I was on the Harvard Business Review website and was looking at where they recommended books and saw this one on the list. I was curious because I feel like I had a bad habit of worrying about what other people thought of me for so many years that I didn't create or reinforce boundaries. So I wanted to know what this author, Michael Gervais, had to say about it. This book was surprisingly really good. So, I'll give you a quick review of the book so that you can evaluate for yourself if you'd like to take the time to read it. Let's begin!
First let's look as some high level info about the book itself.
This book isn't too long of a book at all to me. It's 191 pages and 13 chapters long. The chapters range from about 10-20 pages per chapter. It's a pretty steady read with a lot of key information to digest from it so I wouldn't recommend trying to breeze through it. Really take in each chapter and reflect off of how it applies to you but we'll talk more about that later.
Author Credibility
So I've never heard of this author before so this was new to learn about him. Michael Gervais is a performance psychologist. He also has a podcast called Finding Mastery which is also the name of his consulting agency. His focus is to help people perform well in high pressure environments in being their best. Apparently he's work with a variety of people in business, sports, arts and sciences to hone in on their mastery skills to be the best in their area of expertise.
Something interesting from his bio is that he use to be a sport psychology consultant on the Seattle Seahawks team for 9 seasons, 2 of which they went to the Super Bowl and won one in 2014. He's always worked on multiple Team USAs for the Olympic Games for sunmer and winter as a high performance psychologist. He definitely has an impressive track record. And that's just a few things that I read. From the look of it, he seems legit in knowing his research and how to apply it to help his clients.
Readability
Yall know I will always be honest with yall. So I'm going to give you a heads up that this book does have moments where it sounds like it's written from a researcher. Now the thing is that it's not heavily loaded with jargon. I think the author did sincerely give an attempt to break things down well. However there were a few chapters where my eyes did cross just a little to push through it. BUT it was well worth pushing through in those moments because I did get quite a bit of interesting insights from the book. That's why I said in the intro of this that it's something you should take your time to read to take in.
Teach vs Theory
No, I have not come up with a better name so please let me know in the comments of you can come up with one. Naming things isn't really my strong suit. But any way as you know this category is to describe how much effort the author gives in sharing their theory and how they teach to apply the topic. If I had to put to percentages I would say it's 70% theory and 30% teach. For the most part you're going to read him break down the concepts that he shares and gives examples and cite research to validate those concepts. But he does spend a little bit of time of giving suggestions of how you can apply it to your life. However if you want more in depth instruction of the how, apparently he sells a 7 module e-learning course on his website to help you with grasping the takeaways.
From my perspective, I feel like his book will give you just enough to grasp the basics of applying his theory. But if you're really trying to apply it fully, you'd probably want some more advanced understanding and I'd assume that would be in the course. Now I only recommend courses and resources like that if I've actually went through it myself so since I haven't I can't give an evaluation on that. All I can say is that at least the book will give you a taste of how you can start making improvements to mastering your craft.
Alright so that's my take of The First Rule of Mastery. If you're looking for something that can help get in the right mindset to really mastering your skill, this will help you address it. It really made me analyze how I looked at myself and my journey to improving my skillset and how I may be getting in my own way by overthinking what others may think of me in the process. Even with doing this with Substack, this is so out of my comfort zone but it reassured me of having a realistic look at what the journey would look like in go after a goal that is visible for others to see.
So I'd highly recommend if your paranoia of what others will think of you is stopping you from achieving a goal or even trying. Take some time and read this book. It'll challenge you to adjust your mindset about it and hopefully help build up the courage in you to just go for it. Go get the book and then let me know what you got out of it.
Would you be interested in reading this book? Tell me in the comments, why or why not. If you’ve already read it, let me know of your impression of it!