Mastery of Self: Building Meaningful Careers and High-Performing Teams

You can start your adult life thinking you’ll be an actor, only to switch gears a few years in and retrain as an accountant. Fast forward again, and suddenly you’re barefoot in a field teaching biodanza full time. That’s perfectly fine.

Because your life isn’t about mastering a single craft. It’s about mastering yourself. Whatever you do is really just a vehicle for self-expression. The craft itself is secondary. What matters is showing up fully – not perfecting the trade… but perfecting your presence within it.

Sure, you might have an inkling, a gut feeling, and that’s worth listening to. But it’s also worth pausing and asking: is that voice inside you… really yours? Or is it your parents’? Your culture’s? That anxious part of you that thinks an economics degree is safer than becoming a concert pianist, even though you’ve had a natural ear since you were five?

What if we treated careers like sampling ice cream flavours? Try a bit of this, a scoop of that – spit it out if it tastes off. Shooting in the dark isn’t a failure of planning; it might just be how real discovery happens.

Personally, I work with a brilliant bunch of people. I call them my team, though really, they’re co-conspirators. We gather around specific projects – if something excites them, they join in. If not, they politely pass. No drama, no hard feelings. There’s mutual respect and a shared understanding: each of us owns our own path. Some of them work with me purely on creative production – TV, advertising. Others focus on strategy and market development. And then there are the lifers – people who, like me, aren’t chasing mastery of a craft, but mastery through it. The difference shows. Our work is smart, fast, effective – and honestly, fun.

People love to talk about themselves. Not because they’re self-obsessed, but because talking things out helps them make sense of who they are and where they’ve been. It gives their lives coherence. If you create space for that – if you let people speak without jumping in to fix, judge, or steer – you create trust. You create safety. That’s the foundation of any high-performing team. People who feel seen, heard, and free to be themselves? They’ll move mountains for you.

Starting something new – a project, a job, a business – takes energy and skill. But staying with it? That takes meaning. Money, promotions, and shiny job titles… lose their sparkle over time. What sticks – what truly motivates – is doing work that matters, in a way that matters to you.