Brian Johnson walks through a daily practice pairing morning intentions with evening reflection. Start your day by journaling on energy, work, and love, then pick one virtue to practice. End it by asking what you did well, what you did badly, and what you could do differently.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another optimize plus one. In our last plus one, we talked about the PM ritual Pythagoras came up with 2,500 years ago that the Stoics like to follow. Allow not sleep to close your wearied eyes until you have reckoned up each daytime deed. Where did I go wrong? What did I do, and what duties left undone. From first to last, review your acts and then reprove yourself for wretched acts, but rejoice in those done. Well, today we'll step back a bit and put in an AM intention practice to go with that PM reflection practice. Let's go back to Donald Robertson's how to Think Like a Roman Emperor. He encourages us to follow another one of Aurelius practices and contemplate the sage specifically. He tells us that Marcus made it a practice to think about the virtues he admired in others that he aspired to put into practice in his own life. He also tells us, I quote, in addition to the virtues of real people, the Stoics were also known for contemplating the hypothetical character of an ideal sage or wise person. Then he shares my favorite practice. I quote again, in addition to asking ourselves what qualities the ideal wise person might have, we can ask what qualities we might hope to possess in the distant future. For instance, what sort of person would you hope to be after having trained in stoicism for 10 or 20 years now? When I read that, I immediately thought of our carpe diem journaling process in our Mastery series. After establishing the ultimate game we're playing and how to play it well, we walk you through a Stephen Covey inspired eulogy exercise in which you attend your own funeral and listen to what your loved ones have to say about you. Pause for a moment if you feel so inspired and imagine that scene. You're gone. It's your funeral. Who says? What specifically? What virtues do you hope people use to describe you and your presence in their lives? Write those down. We then proceed to help you get more clarity on who you are at your optimist best so that you can more consistently express those virtues. Today, we need to move out of the abstract. Oh yeah, that's how I'd like to be remembered. To a very concrete well, if I really think those qualities are important, then today is the day to live in integrity with them. Right? Which leads us right into the next piece of wisdom Donald shares, which also happens to map over nearly perfectly with what we encourage our optimizers to do. He tells us to reflect on your ideal self and those virtues you intend to embody every morning. Write them down. Imagine your ideal self interacting with people today. Who are you? How do you show up? That's essentially what Aurelius did. We call our optimized process carpe diem journaling. We start by getting clarity on our optimist best selves in our big three of energy, work and love. Then we briefly reflect on that best self identity and write down the virtues that version of you embodies. Then we identify the number one behavior we'll engage in that day as we recommit to being that version of ourselves. Today Donald encourages us to add a PM reflection so we can go through what he calls daily learning cycles. At the end of each day, he tells us to ask ourselves three simple questions. Number one, what did you do badly? Number two, what did you do well? And number three, what could you do differently? Now those three questions happen to be exactly the questions Lanny Basham tells us to reflect on after a performance. Only he switches number one and number two, starting with the positive. Shall we start that reflection process today? How about right now? If you feel so inspired, reflect on those three questions for your day so far today. Number one, what did you do well? Number two, what did you do badly? And number three, what could you do differently? Fantastic. Imagine your life in 10 to 20 years if the only thing you changed was adding that simple reflection practice into your life. Here's to aggregating and compounding those incremental gains over an extended period of time. So that best version of us is the one looking back at us in the mirror in 10 or 20 years.
