#1: 101 days left in 2020 = LET'S GOOOOO! (What're your wildly important targets?) (#48)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry hanging out in the barn studio. I just love seeing these books. We're gonna set them up, by the way, against that wall eventually. And I'm gonna give you a tour once we get it cleaned up and dialed in. It's kind of like a little mini Optimize. Oasis, meet studio. We've got a sauna we've got to set up and some other stuff. But for now, we've got an aura. One, two, three, sleep. Work in HRV is still. I'm still repaying some debt on that. We'll talk about that. And resting heart rate. I'm also really excited. There are 101 days left in 2020. Did you know that? 101 days left in 2020. Let's go. How are you going to finish strong? One of my mentors, the former CEO of Adidas, named Steve Wynn. Not the Vegas guy, but the Adidas guy, received a thank you note. So this is the handbook, kind of the table of contents. Right? I'll walk you through that in a moment. But anyway, this guy was my mentor. When I was 24, 25 years old, I raised $5 million to finance my first business. Then we h Steve Wynn after doing that, winning a business plan, competition, et cetera, to replace me as the CEO. So I'm 25 years old. I pick him up from LAX. He flew in from Portland, where Adidas was based. Right. He just stepped down as their CEO and we got him at E Teams, which was amazing. Picked him up from lax. And we drive from LAX to our offices in Westwood, which are these ridiculous offices with ping pong tables and dart boards, you know, 1999.com boom, number one action. But I learned so much from him in those chats and in different contexts. And one of the most important things was finishing strong. So we hired him right before the market collapsed in 2000. Right. So rather than going out and raising our next 25 million bucks. 20, 25 million. We wound up bringing an investment bank and selling to one of our two competitors. And it was a really challenging time. And he was all about finishing strong. He's like, look, it's easy to start things. That's easy. It's hard to finish things really, really well. That's what it's all about. So anyway, that's been tattooed on my consciousness since then. And by the way, I actually share more of my story, which I'll share more about. Here in the prelude to the book which I wrote this morning. But 101 days left in 2020. Let's finish strong. 2020 has been a weird year, obviously for everyone. Perfect. How can we use it as anti fragile fuel to become the next best version of ourselves in 2021? Make ourselves proud. I love the way the rain hits the tin roof here in the barn. Pardon that sound interruption. Now here's how I do it. I want to get clear on what are my soul goals, what's most important to me. Soul aching goals. We talk about this a lot in the coach program, of course, but energy, work and love wise, what do you want to achieve in your life? And then boil it down to what's a wildly important target for you? And we can use this constraint of 101 days left in 2020 as a perfect way to get clarity on, well, what are you going to do? What is your. And I draw this little symbol for a target, right? To represent teleological beings. We have targets. That's what telos means, right? Happy people have projects. This is how Sony Liebomirski puts it. So what's your project? How are you going to wrap up the year? Strong. I've got. This is my number one project. I got a lot of stuff going on, but writing my handbook and publishing it and promoting it really well is my. And sharing it proudly and widely is my number one wildly important target for my work. Right? What's yours? And then of course, you run it through your identity, virtues and behaviors. Big 3 times 2 model, if you're following the optimized protocol. But for now, what are you going to do? How are you going to wrap up the last 101 days of 2020 and get in the best energetic shape of your life, do the best most creative, productive work of your life, and be the most connected, encouraging, present person in your love life that you've ever been. What other standard is worth holding? Know your identities, know the virtues you're going to embody, know the behaviors you're going to engage in. And for me, that all comes down to soul force. So I literally use this equation to see where I can optimize soul force equals energy times focus times what's important. Now, consistently, if you run that through the math that we do, it's 100 times 100 times 100, which is a million. If you're at the top of each of those levels, you put that to the power of 100. It's infinitely powerful. So one of the things I did this morning was to look at how I can plus one energy focus and what's important now. Because that's all I care about right now. In order to write the best book I'm capable of writing and distill the Mastery series into this book which again I've been working on for arguably the last 20 years. But I need my soul force dialed in. That is by far the most important thing that I need to focus on right now. So how can I get my energy to my best possible levels? How can I get my focus to the best possible levels? And how can I focus on what's most important now consistently? And I've got my little list of things that I'm going to do. The first and foremost is my book handbook is getting my absolute best energy in what I call my genius work time block first thing in the morning, pre inputs every morning period. End of discussion, non negotiable. Then I've got other ideas that we can talk about another time. But that's what I'm focusing on. What? What are you focusing on to get a little bit better? Actually I'll share just a little bit because it might be helpful. I'm having my last input of technology and food at 3pm I'm going to connect with my family at 5pm it used to be 6pm I just adjusted that. Which is actually tied to our aura score for today. Right. I had another great night of sleep. My resting heart rate was a little high for various reasons, heart rate variability debt. So my readiness score is only 81. But my sleep was 93 which is great. And we talked about the fact that I went to bed earlier, actually had two and a half hours of REM sleep and two hours of deep sleep, which is crazy. But I went to bed at 8:03 last night. Went to bed at 7:47 the night before. We're adjusting to the sunset which is about 7:30 now. Looked that up. So anyway, I'm going to transition to deep love an hour earlier. We're going to be in bed at 7, lights off at 7:30 kind of thing. We read the book at 7 again. This is my idiosyncratic path. What's yours? I'm going to increase my PM meditation at least a half an hour. I might even do an hour and then I've got my one through 10,000, you know, pull ups, I'm sorry, sun salutations, pull ups, burpees, rowing steps. And then I'm committed to walking 100,000 steps a week, checking in on YouTube once a day. Cool team. What am I going to do there? Walk three solo to think, etc. So yeah, there's that. We already just talked about that. That's probably enough for that. I'm going to continue doing what I've been doing. So now I'm going to work the protocol of ending the day earlier, continuing to get the mind calm so I can focus on what's most important to me right now by reducing inputs, et cetera. And then here's the handbook. So this morning's AM1 deep work genius work time block was work on the book. So I did my journaling as always. You know what? We haven't even committed today. What are we doing? Geez, Bry. I hereby recommit to making today awesome. Today is the day to move from theory to practice to mastery. Boom. The book. So I sat down this morning and I intended to write Module Zero. And then, you know, I wanted to start it with an introduction, right? Just, hey, how you doing? So I started writing it and then I realized actually what I need is a new section which is going to be the prelude to the book, which is nice to meet you. For curious souls. Here's my story, right? Because I never really told my story in one place that I actually go into some detail on, you know, So I started writing that, you know. Hey, this is Brian. How else do you start a book? Nice to meet you. I appreciate you taking the time to read the book. I wish we could actually meet so I can learn more about you. What I do know is that you're busy and I strive to deliver more wisdom in less time. So if you want to jump straight into the wisdom side of things, please just skip this little prelude and head to module zero on heaven or hell. For curious souls who'd like to learn more about me and what led me to write this book. I'd like to offer a kind of quick biographical sketch of what led me to do what I do. Then I give kind of a short story and I give a little bit of a longer story, and it actually wound up kind of being fun to write of, sharing the seminal, you know, moments in my life that really shaped who I am, what I'm doing. I was doing that, so I added this, which I kind of like Prelude. Nice to meet you. And then at the end, as I was doing it, I realized, you know, I have a lot of people that I'm really, really grateful for. So I created this extra sheet. Each of these little sections for the book has its own paper link, right? These are all hyperlinks. So I can kind of create the book, you know, one section at a time and then work with the team to get it into the actual book. But I created this other sheet. Thank you notes. God, thank you for blessing me with the gifts of such heroic friends. And I literally was emotional and crying this morning, literally as I was reflecting on the people who wrote my very first checks. You know, I'm talking about my first business. I started at 24 and you know, the friends and get emotional right now. The friends and investors and team members who believed in me, you know, and who supported me and made my life possible and so to take the time to actually write them. Little brief, you know, three line thank you notes. But here we go. Thank you. You know, you've made my life amazing. So anyway, that's the work on the book. I will show you as we continue to develop it. This is like a strategic overview of what we're going to do. You know, there's three components to the book. I got to write it, we got to publish it and we've got to promote it. So we're working with the team to get that strategy dialed in and to do it, you know, aspire to do everything at a world class level. Then the other fun little thing is we're building and I'm building an outdoor office. So I connected yesterday with a guy who's going to build us and I'll give you a little tour of where we're going to put it and what it's going to look like. But basically like a super cool outdoor office that'll become my primary office. That'll be like a mini version of our front porch which I absolutely just love. Concrete slab, these cool brown pillars, a white tin roof with like a blue little trim and white there, whatever. So I'm super excited about being able to work outdoors. Cool desk. And then we're going to do fun things. Like on one of this will be open, no walls, right. We're actually going to put a door here. Just a fun like almost like just their door that I'll symbolically walk through and you got it. To get to the the office you got to like walk down this meandering trail and then you'll be able to go to the trail by meandering down here crossing a creek. It's going to be super cool. But we're going to have a glass dry erase board hanging like a frosted that you can see through yet you can like capture ideas on. So I'm so stoked about that. We're working with a Marie Kondo organizer right now too for the house and pretty soon she's going to help us with the business stuff. So I was thinking about something and she's like, oh, you need to make it a glass see through thing so you still have a view. Because the trees back here are just epic, right? I'm like, oh my God, that's a brilliant idea. So it's just going to be suspended from whatever cool ropes or, you know, system we come up with. Little storage area down here, maybe like a bookshelf here or whatever. Anyway, I'll share that with you too. I literally can't be more excited. Couldn't be more excited about that. But let's go back to where we started. 101 days left in 2020. Today's the day. If not now, when? If not you who? We need you to step up and be the best version of you in service to your family and to your community and to your world. Let's go. Let's do this today. Look forward to sharing more soon. See you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Number one quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, etc. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus Optimize plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach. If you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.