Everything is trainable

“Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment” by George Leonard

George Leonard has been practicing Aikido since 1970, and has taught it regularly since 1976. He even wrote a book called “The Way of Aikido.”

It was through practicing and teaching Aikido that he got an epiphany of the big-picture view that fitness and health are related to everything we do. This view that he developed then became an article that he wrote in 1987 Esquire magazine, where for the fourth straight year the May issue featured a special issue covering what it called the Ultimate Fitness.

As Leonard recalled, “The previous Ultimate Fitness specials had enjoyed exceptionally high reader interest, but the May 1987 number was something else again. The subject this time was mastery, “the mysterious process during which what is at first difficult becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice.” The purpose of the feature was to describe the path that best led to mastery, not just in sports but in all of life, and to warn against the prevailing bottom-line mentality that puts quick, easy results ahead of long-term dedication to the journey itself.”

The article was so popular that requests for extra copies and even reprints poured in, Corporate CEOs gave photocopies to their employees, various training groups spent hours discussing the mastery principles. And in 1991 Leonard turned this article into a book. This book.

Leonard’s main argument is difficult to refute: if we can learn to touch our forehead as a baby, to learn to talk, to stand up and walk; then we can learn to do anything. The conclusion is very much inline with my favourite motto: everything is trainable.

And in the article (and thus, in this book) Leonard provides us with the tools to guide us into the path to mastery. As Leonard illustrates, “You started with something difficult and made it easy and pleasurable through instruction and practice. You took a master’s journey. And if you could learn to touch your forehead, you can learn to play a Beethoven sonata or fly a jet plane, to be a better manager or improve your relationships.”

So what are the tools? Leonard breaks it down into 5 keys:

1. Instruction: Find the best teacher or mentor or guide.
2. Practice: Dedicate a lot of time to practice what the teacher(s) tell us, make practice as our core habit.
3. Surrender: Surrender ourselves to the subject focus, willing to let go of ego or prior knowledge, willing to look foolish at first, accept our ignorance.
4. Intentionality: Be deliberate on every actions, use visualization and mental focus to guide our physical practice.
5. The edge: Cultivate that extra grit or extra nudge, take calculated risks, push new limits.

Each one of these keys have a dedicated chapter for them, using examples from various disciplines, such as aikido, tennis, basketball, golf, jazz piano, karate, running, and more.

But of course, nothing will be smooth-sailing. In reality, the way that the world is set up is providing us with the wrong kind of incentives, which is true in 1971 and 1976, true in 1987, true in 1991, and also true today in 2026. As Leonard explains, “The trouble is that we have few, if any, maps to guide us on the journey or even to show us how to find the path. The modern world, in fact, can be viewed as a prodigious conspiracy against mastery. We’re continually bombarded with promises of immediate gratification, instant success, and fast, temporary relief, all of which lead in exactly the wrong direction.”

This quick fix mentality and the yearning for a quick dopamine release or instant gratification can prompt us to learn just the basics of anything and then proceeded to stuck in a mediocre level in exchange with showmanship. This is not what mastery is. In fact, “If you’re going to go for mastery, it’s better to start with a clean slate rather than have to unlearn bad habits you picked up while hacking around.”

But the problem is if we take the proper path to mastery, it doesn’t look pretty. Leonard uses tennis as an illustration: “The practice just goes on and on: hold the racket correctly; know where the racket makes contact with the ball; move shoulders, hips, and arm together; stride into the ball—you seem to be getting exactly nowhere. Then, after about five weeks of frustration, a light goes on. The various components of the tennis stroke begin to come together, almost as if your muscles know what they should do; you don’t have to think about every little thing. In your conscious awareness, there’s more room to see the ball, to meet it cleanly in a stroke that starts low and ends high. You feel the itch to hit the ball harder, to start playing competitively.”

But when you think you’ve got it figured out, “Until now your teacher has been feeding balls to you. You haven’t had to move. But now you’re going to have to learn to move side to side, back and forth, and on the diagonal, and then set up and swing. Again, you feel clumsy, disjointed. You’re dismayed to find that you’re losing some of what you’d gained. Just before you’re ready to call it quits, you stop getting worse. But you’re not getting any better, either. Days and weeks pass with no apparent progress. There you are on that damned plateau.”

Ah yes, plateau after plateau. As Leonard elaborates, “Going for mastery in this sport isn’t going to bring you the quick rewards you had hoped for. There’s a seemingly endless road ahead of you with numerous setbacks along the way and—most important—plenty of time on the plateau, where long hours of diligent practice gain you no apparent progress at all. Not a happy situation for one who is highly goal-oriented.”

So, the majority of people will quit. Leonard identifies 3 types of people who fail to reach mastery because they cannot handle the plateau:

1. The dabbler: People who are enthusiastic at first but quits as soon as the early excitement fades and progress levels off.
2. The obsessive: Result-driven type of people, who are also impatient. They usually push too hard in order to get quick gains, but eventually burned out when they can’t maintain the pace.
3. The hacker: Those who stay in the plateau indefinitely and eventually settles for a “good enough” level of competence.

And then there’s a case of our psyche tying to protect the homeostatis. As Leonard explains, “Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed—and it’s a very good thing they do. Just think about it: if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you’d be in big trouble.”

“The same thing applies to your blood-sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body”, Leonard then continues. “This condition of equilibrium, this resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture—and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning.”

Moreover, homeostasis also applies in social situations: “Homeostasis in social groups brings additional feedback loops into play. Families stay stable by means of instruction, exhortation, punishment, privileges, gifts, favors, signs of approval and affection, and even by means of extremely subtle body language and facial expressions. Social groups larger than the family add various types of feedback systems. A national culture, for example, is held together by the legislative process, law enforcement, education, the popular arts, sports and games, economic rewards that favor certain types of activity, and by a complex web of mores, prestige markers, celebrity role modeling, and style that relies largely on the media as a national nervous system.”

The problem is, homeostasis is a mechanism to keep things as they are, regardless whether they’re a good thing or a bad thing. It simply resists ALL change. So, how do we deal with homeostasis? 5 steps:

1. Be aware of the way homeostasis works, that it is natural for our psyche to resist changes. And thus don’t be discouraged by a backlash from yourself, in fact it is expected and it is a confirmation signal that you’re on the right life-changing path.
2. When resistance comes, we don’t back off and we don’t bullshit our way through. Instead, we start to negotiate. For example, “the long-distance runner working for a faster time on a measured course negotiates with homeostasis by using pain not as an adversary but as the best possible guide to performance.”
3. Develop a support system. It can be a support from family members, or better yet joining a group of people who have gone through or going through a similar process, who can share stories, can hold us up when we’re having a backlash, encourage us when we’re down.
4. Follow a regular practice. People who are embarking on a quest to change can gain stability and comfort from implementing a new consistent habit. And once we get familiarized with it (usually takes about 21 days to internalized a new habit) we will have much less resistance. As Leonard remarks, “Practice is a habit, and any regular practice provides a sort of underlying homeostasis, a stable base during the instability of change.”
5. Dedicate ourselves to lifelong learning. As Leonard elaborates, “The lifelong learner is essentially one who has learned to deal with homeostasis, simply because he or she is doing it all the time.”

So, thus far we have the tools to mastery, and we know how to deal with resistance and backlash. What’s next? Like in any other efforts, we need energy.

As Leonard remarks, “Remember when you could barely keep your eyes open in class, yet were totally awake and alert during hours of tough after-school sports practice? And how about that rush of energy at the beginning of a love affair, or during a challenging job situation, or at the approach of danger?”

Indeed, as Einstein has said energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be changed from one form or another. Within the context of mastery, there are several ways to attract energy:

1. Maintain physical fitness.
2. Acknowledge the negative thoughts but accentuate the positive thinking.
3. Try telling the truth.
4. Honor but don’t indulge your own dark side.
5. Set your priorities.
6. Make commitments, take actions.
7. Get on the path of mastery and stay on it.

As you may have noticed by now, Leonard loves actionable bullet points. His explanation and elaboration of the bullet points are also compact and direct, which says a lot about his approach in life; making this book a concise and no bullshit guide to mastery that gives us the raw truths and the know-how to navigate ourselves in them.

And speaking about the raw truth, perhaps a last word on the pursuit of mastery: Nobody say it’s going to be easy, but as we can see from the book, it is not impossible, the path is actually clear, and it is trainable. The only question is, are we willing to make the time, effort, and sacrifices to go into the path of mastery?