This week’s book: “Inner Excellence” by Jim Murphy.
“True mastery stems from mastery of oneself, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with the ever-changing moment.”
Jim Murphy, Inner Excellence
Chapter 5 of this week’s book is called “The Code of the Samurai.” (Note: Jim Murphy has real samurai ancestry.) It’s about self-mastery, and Murphy breaks that into three parts:
1. Self-awareness, knowing what’s going on inside you.
2. Self-discipline, doing what matters whether you feel like it or not.
3. Personal growth, deciding you’re never finished.
His claim is that extraordinary success isn’t something to chase. It’s the by-product of mastering yourself first.
But the line that made me sit up and take notice was this one: everything is here to teach me. It’s all working for my good.
Think about that. The setback. The failure. The person who wronged you. The hard lesson you didn’t ask for. What if none of it is happening to you, but for you, each piece teaching you something you needed in order to grow and become the master of yourself?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know if that’s literally true every time, for everyone. Maybe some hardships are just hardship for no reason. But I know this: the people I admire most live as if everything is a lesson to learn from. They squeeze a lesson out of everything, good and bad, and it makes them almost impossible to defeat. They will not be held back. They get up and go back to living their best life.
I’ve watched it up close. My mother spent years on dialysis and refused to let it shrink her world, she traveled the globe, packing up and hauling her dialysis machine right along with her. It never slowed her down. She wrote many articles about her life that were published in the local papers where she was visiting. I have a friend who’s broken his neck twice. He didn’t quit living. Quite the opposite. He adjusted, found new things, and he is one of the most active people I know. Another close friend was born with a left arm that stopped just past the elbow. He played high school basketball at a high level, is a 5 handicap golfer, and now runs a national not-for-profit organization he helped build from scratch.
And I’ve watched the opposite, people who took a setback and made it a permanent excuse, a reason to stop, to settle onto the couch and watch life go by. Same kind of hardship. Completely different response. The difference wasn’t the circumstance. It was what they decided to do about the circumstance they found themselves in.
Self-mastery is not controlling what happens to you but mastering your response.
Murphy puts the whole thing very simply: The ego chases temporary pleasure. Mastery builds permanent character. One of those fades by morning. The other is yours to own for life.
Something to try today
Think of one hard thing you’re carrying right now. Instead of asking “why is this thing happening to me,” try asking “what is this teaching me, what can I learn from this?” You don’t have to believe it fully, yet. Just try it and see what happens. I bet your perspective changes.
When has a setback turned out to be teaching you something you needed? I’d love to hear, if you feel like sharing.
I’ll go first: leaving the money world felt like a failure at the time. It turned out to be the thing that finally pointed me toward work that matters. I didn’t see the lesson for years. But it was there and I’m better for it.
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Talk Friday,
Mike
Helping you become the best version of yourself