The Stairway to Wisdom
The Stairway to Wisdom
The Stairway to Wisdom is a living document of becoming — raw, reflective and grounded in one question I have never been able to put down: how do you pursue greatness without losing your humanity?
I set out to become an unbreakable hockey player. What actually broke open was something else: the realisation that ambition without a centre of gravity doesn't make you stronger, it makes you smaller — smaller in your body, in your relationships, in the way you look at yourself. Injury, disappointment, a breakdown, the period I now call The Septic Tank, and long conversations with the coaches who kept me in the conversation taught me that the mind is not something you force. It is something you build.
This podcast is the building. Each episode is one step on the stairway: a principle from the 49 that run through my two books, The Magical Mindset and The (UN)BREAKABLE Mindset — ambition and intention, ego and ownership, vulnerability and recovery, identity and the roles we perform, gratitude, love, and the discipline of asking better questions.
Along the way I bring in the people and ideas that shaped me: philosophy and sport psychology, the monastery, a ninety-year-old former cyclist who taught me what "I can't" really means, and the relentless voices who never let comfort be the answer.
Not theory for its own sake. Every step ends with a question you have to answer for yourself, in your own time, privately. Because wisdom isn't a destination you arrive at. It is a way of climbing.
Greatness with a heart. Rise without losing yourself.
Welcome to The Stairway to Wisdom.
The Stairway to Wisdom
72. Invictus. By Morgan Freeman.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
When you lay down and can't get up again. When you lose courage. When you feel like lying down and not getting up again. Recite this. This can give you what you need to keep going.
Invictus
1849 – 1903
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
https://poets.org/poem/invictus