James Arthur Ray on Ultimate Human Performance (Interview Archive)

This conversation comes from A Psychology Of The Future, an online summit put together by Erik Lenderman that gathered voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine to talk through ideas from practical psychology. The guest for this session was James Arthur Ray, then CEO of Harmonic Wealth Global, a New York Times bestselling author, and one of the co-authors of The Secret. He had appeared on programs including The Today Show, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and in print in places like Fortune. By his own count he had put more than three decades into studying what he calls ultimate human performance psychology.

Erik opened by asking about two things at once: where Ray came from, and what that phrase, ultimate human performance, actually means. Ray laughed at the double question and started with the biography. He came up through the corporate world, spending several years at AT&T in sales before moving into training. He became the company's national sales trainer, and eventually landed at the AT&T School of Business running management training and team development for the whole country. After leaving, he launched his own company.

The pull toward human performance, he said, predated all of that. For Ray the term points to actualizing your own greatness, which he describes as bringing your particular gifts and whatever genius you have out into the world so it contributes something. He had spent his working life studying the psychology, the science, and the daily habits of people who seem to live fully. He was careful to separate that from net worth. Some of those people are wealthy, sure, but the money is beside the point. What he was tracking was people doing work they love and pushing their natural abilities as far as those abilities will go.

Asked how he first got onto this road, Ray went back to childhood, and the picture was not of a born performer. He called himself an insecure, introverted kid, skinny, no good at sports, and still an introvert as an adult. He noted the thing that tends to define introverts: they recharge alone rather than through a lot of socializing. Books were his refuge all through school.

He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the home of a Protestant minister, raised firmly in Christianity. At eighteen he picked up the Buddhist scriptures, not out of rejection but out of a restlessness he couldn't quite name. He still holds Christianity in high regard, he said, but he was chasing answers he wasn't finding within it. That search carried him into psychology, and at one point into quantum physics, a subject he said still holds his attention.