This past Super Bowl Sunday, NFL quarterback Tom Brady secured his legendary status as the Greatest of All Time, leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to victory over the Kansas City Chiefs and winning his record-breaking seventh championship ring. Love him or hate him, for whatever reasons you do, Tom Brady is undoubtedly the best of the best in sports.

Brady’s level of mastery commands respect and wonder. Defying any call to retirement or reason, at the age of 43, Brady also defied the odds. He left behind the elite comforts and winning certainties of the New England Patriots franchise to lead a precarious team to their second-ever Super Bowl trophy. Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated contends of the team: ‘They were there because of Brady, and they succeeded mostly because of Brady. He does everything—not spectacularly, and certainly not perfectly, but he still does it. Brady has always been a team-first grinder, but the more he accomplished, the more that attitude influenced his teammates.’

Rosenberg identifies that Brady’s mastery is not flawless, so much as it is versatile and consistent. It is also seemingly the fuel and product of a winning mindset. This suggests mastery is self-propagating, on a feedback loop that propels it towards new gains. Robert Greene - author of The 48 Laws of Power - proposes, in his book Mastery (2012), that ‘at the core of this intensity of effort is in fact a quality that is genetic and inborn - not talent or brilliance, which is something that must be developed, but rather a deep and powerful inclination’. The italicisation of the word in Greene’s text emphasises the nature of the concept: it’s a leaning. Inclination is a natural tendency or urge - a disposition to feel or act in a certain way.

Using biological reasoning, Greene counters the human tendency to view mastery as singular or rare. He offers that while ‘inclination is a reflection of a person’s uniqueness […] genetically, every one of us is unique.’ This means that mastery is not elusively beyond the self, occurring randomly in extraordinary individuals. Mastery is a mining of the self. Where we sense that people like Tom Brady ‘dig deep’ to win again or in new directions, that is in fact precisely what they do.