As many of you know, I've got a new book coming out. It's called The Way of Excellence. It's a big swing at reclaiming genuine, heartfelt excellence and making it a personal and cultural aspiration in a chaotic world.
Here are my top books on mastery that most influenced it:
My favorite book ever written. It introduces the idea of “Quality,” which Pirsig defines as the special resonance that occurs when an actor and his or her act become one. If any single book inspired The Way of Excellence, it’s this.
The sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here, Pirsig delves deeper into the notion of Quality and how it drives personal and cultural progress. I’ve read Pirsig’s books back-to-back on multiple occasions, and each time I get something new out of it.
This was my favorite source for understanding the mindset of a craftsperson—not metaphorically, but literally. What Korn describes is a theme that appears again and again in The Way of Excellence: the projects you work on, and the way in which you work on them, also work on you.
A brief read on the pursuit of mastery, from a great humanistic thinker of the late 1900s. Leonard is quoted a few times in The Way of Excellence—my favorite appears in the chapter on routines, where Leonard likens settling into a routine to settling into a well-worn easy chair.
In The Creative Act, Rubin talks about creativity in somewhat mystical terms—what I found utterly fascinating (and perhaps you will too) is that those mystical terms have striking parallels to the objective theory of excellence I sought to define in The Way of Excellence.
Wolf a great contemporary philosopher. She studies and writes on meaning. Wolf is quoted in the chapter on the philosophy of excellence, where she says meaning arises from the intersection of subjective attraction and objective attractiveness.
An ode to the satisfaction that comes from developing competence; a topic Crawford is quoted on in chapter 3 of The Way of Excellence. This book details how Crawford left a prestigious academic job to focus on working as a mechanic, and how he found more fulfillment that way.
Though this book is not directly quoted in The Way of Excellence, it is one of the best I’ve read on peak performance in sport, and how peak performance in sport isn’t so different from peak performance in life. Gallwey's writing on goals and joy in the process is top notch.
The best book on how to focus in a distracted world. Cal coined the term "Deep Work" and it's never far from my mind. Though he writes about it in a knowledge work setting, there are so many parallels for athletes, artists, surgeons, coaches, and on and on and on.
Rituals, Han writes, imbue our lives with gravity. If not for Han’s work, I’m not so sure I would have been convinced that “completion” needed its own chapter. But Han’s work convinced me, and I’m glad it did.
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