
Play along with me for a few minutes.
Imagine placing a coin on your dining room table about four inches or so from the closest edge to you. Pick up the coin with your right hand by sliding it back towards you with your fingertips. Let your thumb contact the underside as it reaches the table’s edge. As you pick it up, make your hand into a fist around the coin while bringing your arm up and hold it there.
Do this 5-6 times to get the feel of it. Next as the coin reaches the edge of the table, pretend to pick it up, while letting it fall into your lap. You may want to put a cloth napkin in it to catch the coin. Your thumb doesn’t really make contact with it, and the continuing movement of the fingers just pushes it off the table. Then make a fist as if the coin was still there while bringing your hand up like before.
Blow on your hand and open it. The imaginary audience sitting opposite of you is amazed. You have vanished the coin. You are now a Magician with special powers. Ooh. Aha.
Do this a few more times until that moment of letting the coin drop is as natural as picking it up normally. Alternate between really picking it up and only pretending to, until the two sequences look and feel the same. You’ll get real good at this if you can try it in front of a mirror.
This is an elementary coin trick. Barely magic. Yet.
Let’s make it more effective. In doing so, there is much to be learned about what makes mastery.
Why put a coin down in order to pick it straight back up again? Who would do that? Such behavior detracts from a convincing moment of magic.
If you remove a coin from your pocket, place it on the table near you, then immediately pick it up to show it’s gone, then clearly the action of putting it down and picking it up was somehow special and necessary, and its very unnaturalness suggests something else must have occurred.
Compare this, say, with the situation where the coin was there already. If you are just picking up a coin that happened to be in place on the table, that becomes immediately much better.
So perhaps you might hunt for something in your pocket a little earlier, like your keys, removing a coin or two to look for your keys that were in your pocket.
The coin(s) get left on the table, forgotten and unimportant. One is in the correct position for the trick. Now all you have to do is pick it up to do anything with it. This allows you to start off with a much more natural set of circumstances.
Now, there is another issue to be solved. The coin is there on the table; you apparently pick it up and make a fist; you open the fist and it’s gone. Because the chain of events is so short and easy to reconstruct, it is more than possible for an astute observer to figure out the trick.
If it has gone from your fist then perhaps it was never in your fist, so you can’t have picked it up. Must have gone somewhere else. Aha! Somehow it slid off the table.
And an overly aggressive non-believer might dive over the table to search your lap area; you’re getting ready to be found out. You’ll have to resort to a distraction to keep them from lifting the magical veil of your art.
Instead we upset their chain of events so they can’t reconstruct so easily. This time, instead of making a fist around the imaginary coin, fake putting it in your other hand after you’ve supposedly picked it up, and then closing that fist around it. Do it with the real coin a few times to see how you would perform this normally, then do exactly the same thing without the coin.
By pretending to put a coin that isn’t there into your left hand, and curling your fist around it, you have now made it much more difficult for the observer to reconstruct the chain of events.
Blow on the empty left fist and show that the coin has vanished by opening your hand. If they think the coin was never really in the left fist, then the only explanation is you must have retained it in the right fist. By opening it they can see the right fist is empty too.
They will be too busy pondering this conundrum to work all the way back to whether or not you even picked it up.
This is one simple example of how one would go about to develop mastery; learning how to do it; doing it; then observing how to do it better by seeing what you couldn’t see before. Modifying your moves and practicing again. Over and over. Following the process until you reach the point of Mastery.
As in magic, there are things in business that are not as they seem. For example, most of the world has its own ideas on how one would go about building a super-successful business. Since most of the world has never built a super successful business, most of their ideas are illusions masquerading as “Common Wisdom.” They may look, sound, and feel real, but only because they have been repeated so many times.
The majority of the world is largely unaware of a body of knowledge. One which the most prosperous throughout all of history have used to build fantastic, durable, self-sustaining, self-growing businesses. Tried and true methods compressed into “Diamonds of Wisdom.” Offering “Financial and Time Freedom” to those practitioners who chose to master them. Common threads found in examining the lives of the most successful. Many of these time-proven methods have been heard of before but are dismissed too quickly by the majority. Partly because of how counter they run against what the majority of the world thinks is reality.

A few have tried using some of these wisdoms but gave up too early. Blinded from seeing how they could achieve what they wanted to achieve. Still others failed, trying to use them with “C” or “D” team members. The non-talented, or the talented who were placed into the wrong positions. Thus, the majority never fully comes to appreciate nor benefit from their powers. Nor appreciating how the life they desire is more attainable than they realize. An easier path than what they are presently on. How by following in the footsteps of those who have gone before, making the same journey, doing the same work, they too could master a life of great success.
“Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it.” – Aristotle
Learning just one of the universal wisdoms will increase your possibilities. Mastering that one wisdom releases magic that increases your probabilities.
As you integrate more of the time-tested, time-proven Wisdoms in a mutually reinforcing manner, you unlock their collective power. Transforming you into a master business builder. One who is creating a durable, self-sustaining business. A business which will reward you with the kind of life you have yearned for.

The journey of Mastery is much like climbing a mountain you’ve never climbed before. When you get to what you thought was the top, you see more opportunity to go further and higher because you can see more of what is possible.
Who you become in the future depends on the skills you choose to acquire today.
The famous coach John Madden told how he discovered what true mastery was when he attended an all-day lecture given by Vince Lombardi. The legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. How Madden and the rest of the attendees were held spellbound for eight solid hours while Lombardi talked about one play. The “Power Sweep,” which he made famous with the Packers in the 60’s. Madden said when he left, he realized he hadn’t known a thing about football before walking into the room!

Mastery is the “common-denominator” of peak performers. One which must be approached with the right mindset.
To successfully make the Journey, you May want to Keep this map at the top of your mind:

True mastery is earned only by those who “stay the course.” Refusing to quit or give up when things get difficult. Understanding that success requires slogging through the swamp of disappointment for a while before reaching the shores of success.
You will be better prepared when you begin to carry a few great mindsets with you. Ones which will power you forward each day. Others to have on hand when what look like insurmountable challenges start to appear on the horizon.
“This will be more like an odyssey, a trek, an adventure. One with many challenges. Maybe not exactly like Harry Potter or Fantastic Beasts, but one which will add to my skills-stack. Learning how I can have a fantastic life.”
You will want to remind yourself there will be lots of distractions which will come up to tempt you to step off the proven path. This will be a lot easier by continually reminding yourself you are following the trail taken by the most successful who have gone before. Staying on it is how you will achieve what you want to achieve much quicker and easier. Opening your eyes wider and wider, seeing what has been hidden from you. Things the vast majority never sees.
This a journey requiring the successful traveler to become both master and student at the same time. Following a step-by-step process. Where the clues are only revealed one at a time. Rewarding those who refuse to quit with an arrival at their desired destination.
Mastery is how you put distance between you and your competition
It is your differentiator
Learning how to do
Then seeing how to do better
Making all the mistakes you could make and learning how to recover from those
Tweaking
Refining
Over and Over
Mastery is transformational in how it changes you into who you need to become to have what you want to have. It’s rewarding, frustrating, and rewarding again. It’s a path that all top performers have taken and it comes with plenty of ups and downs. Challenges they all had to experience to have all they desired.
The man who grasps the Wisdoms can successfully select his own methods.
The man who tries his own methods, ignoring the wisdoms, is sure to have trouble.
This journey begins much like what a magician experiences when first learning how to perform a new trick. They begin by learning about each of the steps. Mimicking the master. Learning how to do a single move in several different ways. Figuring out which works best for them. Experimenting until they find their sweet spot. Then stretching and building muscle memory. Learning what doesn’t work and how to recover when mistakes are made.
Moving on to practicing in front of mirrors. Seeing their performance anew from different angles. Noticing what they couldn’t see before. Making more adjustments.
Practicing in front of a camera comes next. Observing from different angles. Making more refinements before asking for help from a professional spectator(s). Those with the talent for spotting performance weaknesses. Identifying flaws and defects hidden from the Magician’s view.
As we move more through the layers of learning, the more our eyes are awakened. Revealing what we couldn’t see before, what is still hidden from others. There is a lot to mastery. It’s a challenging process. Difficult but not impossible. One that most are unwilling to put themselves through. Yet with jaw-dropping rewards for those who do. Think David Copperfield, the magician who owns his own private island.
Brain Works
Before any magician can bring magic into their performances, they must acquire a working knowledge of how the human brain processes information.
As an event happens, we take it in via our five senses which together download over two million bits of data per second. Too much for our brains to process and absorb in real time. In defense, we filter this down to a more manageable 126 bits per second. Deleting, and summarizing all of the input to make it more manageable.
We then take this summarized version and put it through another sieve. One constructed from our experiences, memories, decisions, values, beliefs, and attitudes. Editing this data-set down further to create our customized version of what we think just happened.
Because this happens inside of our subconscious in nanoseconds, we never truly understand how we arrive at what we think is truth. So, instead, we create a story. One in which we tell ourselves how rational we are. How good we are at seeing things as they are. Egoless truth. How we know exactly what has happened. Completely oblivious to reality of it all. Sometimes getting so far off track it’s funny:
88% of Americans rank themselves in the top one-half for driving safely
90% of college professors think they are above average teachers
1% of college students thought their social skills were below average
We don’t do this with malicious intent. It’s a survival mechanism. Using mental shortcuts to deal with the fire hydrant of data constantly flooding in.
So, we are always making up stories, always trying to make sense of what we are experiencing. Creating our own versions of what we believe has happened. We tell ourselves these stories based on what we expected, understood, and believed to have occurred. Even though they aren’t 100% accurate. This is called “Creating a Narrative,” or “Creating a Story.”
We’re always creating these stories. Trying to navigate life with utterly convincing tales. Fabricated from incomplete and erroneous information. Which is why a magician can be so successful. Having learned how our brains function they leverage this knowledge to deceive and entertain. Making us think that maybe they do have magical powers?
So realities are more like a collection, or montage of edited clippings. Pasted together to create our own idea of what we thought we saw or heard. Our thinking processes work pretty much the same as our vision process. When we see an object, our eyes relay only a small portion or an outline of it to our brains. Leaving our minds to fill in the blanks. We are always “making-up” part of what we think we see. Giving us a distilled assessment, a summary, a view of an event colored by how we tend to see the world. Our own ideas about reality.

You can see this when there has been a car accident with multiple eyewitnesses. The police will hear several very different stories. Which they will then piece together with the physical evidence to arrive at a more accurate description of the events. Not always 100% accurate.
Because our eyes can’t pay attention to every detail they see, they look for patterns. Our thought processes are the same. We perceive our thoughts through our own custom shorthand filters (lens) shaped by all of our past experiences.
When an event occurs or when we meet a new person, we can’t process all of the details. Because we only see a pattern or an outline, we look for something that closely fits with our expectations based on our past experiences. We then fit the event or person into a category. Our own version(s) of how we expect to see or experience the world.
Thoughtfully thinking through every new occurrence or object we see would be way too exhausting. Impossible. So we edit, edit, edit everything down to speed up our processing. When we’re solving a problem or realizing an idea, we tell ourselves how rational and objective we are. But just as with our eyes, we aren’t aware how our thoughts are being squeezed down into our own biased versions of reality.
Keep this in mind each time you are talking with anyone who is not seeing or hearing what you “think” you saw or heard. Or when trying to solve a problem. You may never get to 100% accuracy about anything. But by being aware of this tendency, will help you get a little closer.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Improving Our Vision and Thinking
In mastery we go as far as we can see. Then we see how we can go further. The more we practice, the more we become aware of. We see what we previously edited out. More details, and more clues.
Just like watching a movie or reading a book for a second time we see more of what we didn’t see before. We hear things we didn’t hear before. Sometimes swearing those things weren’t there previously. Each time we go through something, we take in more data points, more information. More pieces we didn’t have before.
This is why you have to practice. There are too many data points on too many levels to be able to consciously identify in one single pass. You need to experience the material over several sessions. Eventually as these extra pieces add up, we have a much fuller and robust picture. One which is better than anyone else’s. Our thinking improves. We are now able to solve problems others couldn’t or didn’t even know existed. Mastery is liberating and empowering. It is how we escape our initial incomplete or erroneous narratives. It gets us closer to the “real” reality. Egoless truth. Making us much more valuable because we have the ability to see and understand what others can’t. To offer “valuable insights” that amaze, simply because we have taken the time and effort to build up a larger, more complete data base about this thing we’ve mastered.

As we come across new, higher-level challenges that improve our ability to see, we gain more insight into what we didn’t know existed before. Mastery helps us to get closer to the truth.
About Practice
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal can’t be what separates winners from losers. The difference is winners have the habit of continuous small improvements. Habits which compound self-improvement. Multiplying their benefits as they continue to repeat (master) them.
Take Phil Mickelson, the famous golfer. He will place 10 balls in a circle, three feet from the cup. He commits to sinking all 10 on his first attempt. He then repeats the process nine more times. If he makes a single mistake anywhere before getting 100 perfect shots, he stops and re-starts the whole process over again!
Perfect practice makes perfect.
Successful people like Phil Mickelson’s couldn’t achieve what they achieve without engaging in such a demanding regimen. Which is why they live the lives most only dream about.

Leadership and Mastery
It’s important if you are a leader who is learning new things that you not fake knowing. You will do well to be humble. Do not pretend to be someone you’re not. Do not try to pretend to know something you don’t.
You have to ask the questions you need to ask. To admit without apology what you don’t understand. To do the work to learn what you need to learn, as quickly as you can. There’s nothing less confidence-inspiring than a leader faking knowledge they don’t possess.
True authority and true leadership come from knowing who you are and not pretending to be anything else.
The Path to a Fantastic Life

Failure is not a word the majority believes you should use in describing how to become extraordinary. Instead they have twisted the meaning of “failure” into an illusion. Wrongly believing failure is something to be avoided at all costs.

While the successful minority thinks 180-degree differently. They understand failure is part of the journey one must take to have a great life. That it’s crazy to waste your energy whining about your failures. Failure provides the necessary ingredients needed to mold us into who we need to become, to have what we want to have.
Everyone fails when first trying to do something new. To earn the right to stand on the winners’ podium requires you to first journey through the yuk of failure. Ask anyone you know who has ever achieved great success. Better yet offer to buy them a cup of coffee and ask them if they’d share with you some of the details of their past failures. Chances are, if they’re honest, you’ll hear some very interesting stories you never expected to hear. Missteps and blunders they made along the way to having a great life.
There is a huge difference between obtaining long-term success and being a failure.
It comes down to how we choose to react when failure visits.
The people who make it to the “winners circle” are the ones who keep persevering when failure visits. They keep working to overcome and learn from every obstacle that threatens. After each failure they re-group, re-plan, re-adjust, re-commit, and keep going. They use each lesson learned from each failure to course correct and move forward. Over and over.
Imagine you’re a poker player who plays with your buddies once a week. Say you decide to improve your game. Let’s say there will be the possibility for you to learn 60 different lessons in one night. Lessons like, what are “tells” of each of the players? How do you know if each is bluffing? How does each tend to bet? How smart are they about the game? What are they likely to do under different scenarios?
Say you learned just six of the lessons. You’d be missing 90%. You wouldn’t have learned a lot, yet you wouldn’t have needed to if the other players weren’t learning anything from the game. You’re going to do better in the long run just by learning those six.
Perhaps one of the other players wants to improve their game too but they aren’t working that hard. Maybe they learn three lessons. Even with you missing 90%, the odds are still in your favor. By learning more than the other players you’ve positioned yourself to have a much better chance to win the game. To achieve what you want in life you must change your view of failure. You must look at failure more as a gift, not a penalty. It is your opportunity to learn what does not work! You must continue to remind yourself failure is and always will be part of the learning process. It is a sign you are making progress.

Says Easy – Does Hard
You may want to step back and reexamine the ways in which you look at the world. To compare how you do things with those who are the most successful. Learning what they’ve learned, putting yourself onto a more reliable and proven path. Learning how to see what others can’t. Mastering wisdoms only a minority of the world even knows exist.

The universal wisdoms that have proven themselves over and over again. Generation after generation. They hold the key to unlocking the massive doors of a phenomenal life. Where your dreams have a much better chance of becoming reality.
Learning these on your own will move the needle—a little bit. But you will miss out on capturing the lion’s share of their value due to your blindness. How your present ways handicap you.
To fix this, and to live the life of your dreams, requires two simple things:
- A commitment to have faith in the tested and proven wisdom routines.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
- To Not Quit. To press on when your old beliefs and habits start digging in their heels, complaining about how hard and difficult this will be for you.
Reality is the highest ground you can get to, where you can best see what’s coming.
Note: Facts are stubborn. If the facts of your idea turn out to not be true then you’ll be out of business someday.
Building a great life will happen much quicker and easier the sooner you understand the big picture. This journey is the same for everyone who has ever attained great success. By hanging in there, keeping the faith, and not giving up, you too can reach the shores of great success.
The first steps are always the hardest and take longer than we expect. There will be a lots of mis-steps along the way. Mistakes and blunders. Things that are always part of the landscape you will have to navigate. To sharpen and harden your skill sets.
This type of journey is much easier when you don’t try to make it by yourself. Life is short, and your time for learning is limited and valuable. Without any guidance, you’ll waste valuable years stuck in some cul-de-sac trying to figure out some wisdom that is more quickly acquired with the right help. Follow the example set by those who came before you. Find yourself an experienced guide each time you attempt something new.
The coaching relationship is the most efficient and productive form of learning. The right coaches know where to focus your attention and how to challenge you. Their knowledge and experience becomes yours. Because biases are so easy to spot in others and so hard to spot in ourselves. This is why we need to have a coach to help us sharpen the skills we are biased against seeing. They provide a less risky feedback loop so you can improve more rapidly through a mentored one-to-one interaction.
Recruiting help is the key to making these changes happen much faster and easier. To more quickly experience the compounding of the benefits over time. You will get much farther with an experienced guide. An old hand who has made the journey themselves. Someone who has a track record of helping others. Those who can show you how to reach higher and go farther. Always look for someone to help you avoid making the same mistakes of the previous generations.
Someone to pull you back from discounting the value of the lessons. Things you may have dismissed in the past. Either because you didn’t believe them, or you didn’t understand how to benefit from them. Things you may have tried once or twice not giving yourself enough time to learn and master before giving up and quitting.
I attribute the quickness of my rise to success from a willingness to seek out those who could help me grow quicker. At one time I had four coaches. Each coaching me on something different. Looking back on my journey I can honestly say my coaches have been the reason I achieved what I did. They were some of the best investments I have ever made. My only regret? Not employing them earlier.
It will be important when you start to feel any resistance to anything that your coach is teaching you to immediately share that with them. Let me be clear here. You will have resistance to what your coach tells you. At other times you will grow weary of learning one more thing (which is a whole another conversation). There will be times when you won’t believe what they are telling you will work. You will think some of it is old-fashioned. Let me caution you. As soon as you experience any of this, or anything else, tell them.
The most important job of a coach, any coach, is to help you overcome you. To help you get to a more “real” reality. To help you get past your feelings of embarrassment or self-consciousness. To help you reap exceptional returns on your investment of time and effort from this process.
I can’t emphasize this enough. The most valuable part about having a coach is how they will help you overcome you. Your opposition to what’s already been proven to work. They have solutions to many of the problems you don’t even know are ahead. Answers others have already worked out. You don’t have to pay as huge a price as those who went before you paid.
Put your pride into your back pocket and be brutally honest and transparent with your coach. Share your fears. Understand they have been there as well. They have to know where you are at when you are hesitating about moving forward. So they can help you grow out of your old self.
“The only dumb question, is the one you don’t ask.” – U.S. Marine Corps
Whenever you sense any disagreement with your coach, swallow your pride, and ask for help. That’s why they are there. Ask for examples or stories to help you keep the faith when you get stuck. To help you more clearly see “why” in terms of what they are telling you, is so vitally important.
“People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them.
They went out and happened to things.” – Leonardo da Vinci
Mastery is like climbing that new mountain. When you start out you have a limited view, limited knowledge, and limited wisdom. With more information, more knowledge, and more wisdom the journey becomes easier and more rewarding.
There is no substitute for consistently studying to master one’s craft. Studying history builds a shock absorber for your life. You’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to what you thought were new problems. You will thank me later.

Our world is full of optical illusions, common wisdoms disguised as true wisdom. Things aren’t always as they appear. Our mind is constantly trying to understand the world around us, taking shortcuts to quickly process the absurd amount of information available to us in every moment. Usually, such shortcuts help us to process information. But they may also cause us to make mistakes by overlooking and missing valuable information.
Return to page 7 now and look at the image again. Once you have seen the circles, you cannot unsee them!