The First Rule of Mastery

Renowned high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais Seattle Seahawks, Red Bull Stratos, Team USA presents a guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people's opinions (FOPO).

With the proliferation of social media, the intense pressure to succeed, and our overreliance on external rewards, metrics, and validation, FOPO is running rampant. Our concern with what other people think about us has become an irrational, unproductive, and unhealthy obsession in the modern world. And its negative effects reach into all aspects of our lives.

In The First Rule of Mastery, Michael Gervais shows us the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us. As one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between the mind and human performance, Gervais takes an in-depth look at the noxious effects of FOPO while laying out the mental skills and practices we need to achieve personal excellence the same skills he's taught to the top performers in the world including sports MVPs and Fortune 100 leaders and teams.

Filled with fascinating stories from the worlds of sports and business, leading-edge science, and insights from the popular Finding Mastery podcast, The First Rule of Mastery is a much-needed wake-up call that when we give more value to other people's opinions than our own, we live life on their terms, not ours.

About the Authors

Michael Gervais, PhD, is one of the world's top high-performance psychologists. His clients include world record holders, Olympians, internationally acclaimed artists and musicians, MVPs from every major sport, and Fortune 100 CEOs. He is also the founder of Finding Mastery, a high-performance psychology consulting agency, the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, and the cocreator of the Performance Science Institute at the University of Southern California.

Kevin Lake is the Chief Creative Officer at Finding Mastery. He has collaborated with some of the world's leading performers. He produced Gleason, a feature documentary film that was short-listed for an Academy Award. He created and produced Playing It Forward in partnership with Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey. For seven years, he led the film division of Mel Gibson's Icon Productions.