Target mastery.
If you want more success, go for mastery.
When you are focused on mastery, you bring excellence to what you do, and you are compelled to become better and better through daily practice.
Look at any professional athlete and you see mastery in their approach to continuous improvement, always striving to be bigger, better, faster, stronger.
And mastery is more than this.
Mastery is the pursuit that keeps you forever engaged in your craft.
There can be no such thing as boredom when you are always challenging yourself to grow and become better.
And, of course, when you are focused on mastery, you are far more likely to get crushing results through crushing performance.
Recently I saw this article about the actor Bradley Cooper, which describes his process for becoming the character of Chris Kyle in his film American Sniper.
As did I, you might have thought of Cooper as a somewhat laid back fellow, yet what you see in this article is the mastery he brings to his craft.
For those of you who want the crib notes, here’s three ideas I enjoyed:
- Every day before going on location Bradley Cooper recited the six pages of exercises. They had been pieced together by his speech coach, Tim Monich, to further reinforce a Texas accent and dialect that Cooper knew, if it didn’t come to him automatically, would rob all credibility.
- It probably wasn’t necessary for Cooper to do the six-page exercise by the time shooting on the film started, last April. During three months of prior preparation, he had temporarily relocated Tim Monich from Connecticut to Los Angeles so they could have two face-to-face sessions of two hours each day except for Saturday and Sunday.
- The sessions were in the morning and early evening, sandwiched around two workouts a day of two hours each to gain the 40-odd pounds of pure muscle to resemble Kyle physically…During his workouts, Cooper listened to the exact playlist that Kyle had when he worked out as a navy SEAL in Iraq in between shifts.