The First Rule of Mastery
Stop Worrying about What People Think of You
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4.2 • 28 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A USA Today Bestseller
High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a groundbreaking guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people’s opinions (FOPO).
FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives—and the consequences are great. When we let FOPO take control, we play it safe and small because we're afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. When challenged, we surrender our viewpoint. We trade in authenticity for approval. We please rather than provoke. We chase the dreams of others rather than our own.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
In The First Rule of Mastery, Michael Gervais shows us that the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us. He reveals the mental skills and practices we need to overcome FOPO—the same skills he's taught to the top performers in the world, including sports MVPs, world-renowned artists and musicians, and Fortune 100 leaders and teams.
Filled with fascinating stories from the worlds of sports and business, leading-edge science, and insights from the frontier of human performance, The First Rule of Mastery is a much-needed wake-up call that when we give more value to other people's opinions than we do our own, we live life on their terms, not ours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"When we give more value to other people's opinions than our own, we live life on their terms, not ours," according to performance psychologist Gervais's repetitive debut. Case studies of famous individuals illustrate, with varying degrees of success, how vying for others' approval can stymie personal growth and damage one's mental health. For instance, Gervais suggests that champion swimmer Missy Franklin's reliance on winning for self-validation left her distraught after underperforming at the 2016 Olympics. He's less persuasive, however, in claiming that a despairing letter written by Beethoven as he was losing his hearing signaled the composer had "accepted his deafness" and stopped worrying about "external opinions," which allegedly enabled him to create his late-period symphonies. To Gervais's credit, he adds a bit of nuance to his central argument about not basing one's self-worth on others' approval when he contends that it can be beneficial to learn from criticism. Unfortunately, he otherwise does little to expand on his thesis, instead repeating the same point ad nauseam and buttressing it with superficial psychological observations ("Our interpretation of the opinions of others often reflects more about what's inside us, and our own beliefs, than the opinion of the other person"). This is too slight to make an impact.
