This post is a personal essay on how to manage your emotional states. Over the last few years I have battled the ups and the downs of the black dog in my life, this has made me acutely aware of the impact that your mental frame of reference has upon your day to day life. In the title I talk about performance, but to me, this performance can simply be getting out of bed and going about our day.

This post has three primary sections:

1. An introductory background section
2. A section covering three theoretical techniques to help manage emotional states
3. My personal success with applying this in my own life

Your experiences may vary, this is still a new concept that I am introducing into my own life and I’m not an expert on it. I still suffer setbacks and there are definitely areas where I can improve. This article is my attempt to introduce a different way of looking at a world where if you’re not perfect you’re nothing. Instead, I argue that maintaining a continuous slow improvement is the most important element of your longer term success.

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This is an article about how to get good at things. You may even be able to use this article to get great at something. That’s up to you.

I tend to structure my life around what I term Mastery Pursuits. A mastery pursuit is any activity with a high skill ceiling. Golf, pottery, writing, the violin, gymnastics, bodybuilding, power lifting, cooking and carpentry are all mastery pursuits. Traveling the world, becoming a restaurant or movie buff or any other activity where progress is measured by consumption are not mastery pursuits.

Mastery Pursuits are about excellence. Getting insanely good at something and in the process finding a lot of fulfillment from the act.  This article is about how to maximise your progress in that pursuit. You’ll like it if you want a collection of meta strategies to help you get good at something.

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Sometimes the hardest thing of all is to simply get started. The moments in your life where you want something so badly, but it just doesn’t happen. There is something holding you back. An inner fear. You may want everything to be just right before you start. Or there may be something stopping you at the back of your mind. Something which says, you’re not good enough to do this so what’s the point of even trying?

One of the hardest elements that I’ve personally had to struggle with is the idea that things don’t have to be perfect. Sure, it would be nice if they were but they don’t have to be perfect for them to still be worth doing.

Seeking perfection stops you from even trying

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Overview

• Discusses how to go about structuring your life to achieve FI through the use of systems
• Practical focus as opposed to theoretically focused.
• Illustrates how one element of your life can impact others
• Approximately 7300 words

Now that we have come to the end of our long journey we need to pull everything together. The previous sections have covered a reasonably thorough introduction to the world of Financial Independence and Early Retirement or FIRE. As you hopefully understand by now, FI is not a fast solution, it is not sacrifice free and it is a little bit different from the rest of the consumption oriented world. I have focused upon the financial elements in this section as opposed to the early retirement as I do not want to put the cart before the horse. Instead, we must focus upon the journey.

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