Brian Johnson recommends Tripp Lanier's This Book Will Make You Dangerous, particularly a chapter that uses cosmic scale to shrink your problems. The Hubble telescope found 3,000 galaxies in a pinhead-sized patch of sky. When you remember how small you are, your daily drama stops mattering so much.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. My friend Tripp Lanier is a very funny guy. He's also a very wise guy. In his new book called this Book Will make youe Dangerous, he shares some of the wisdom he's acquired coaching guys for the last 15 years. If you or the man in your life like to laugh deeply at some irreverent humor while joyfully getting your optimizing on, I think you'll enjoy his irreverent guide for men who refuse to settle. As Phil Stutz, who has coached both of us, says, you become dangerous not when you're a threat to others, but when you become a threat to the excuses and bad habits that have held you back in life. Tripp's book lives up to its title. It's a practical guide to a victory over yourself. Only then are you truly dangerous. Side note, it's funny because when I thought about how we both came to work with Phil, I realized that it started when I sent Tripp the tools. Then he interviewed Phil and Barry. Then he introduced me to them so I could interview them. Then I hired Phil. Then I reconnected Tripp and Phil. And here we are. So, moving on to the point of today's plus one, Tripp tells us that we need to drop the nonsense and get to work experiencing the things we really want more. Freedom, aliveness, love, and peace. Now, one of the stories he tells toward the end of the book blew the hair on my head straight back. Well, it would have if I had any. In a chapter entitled Find the Fun, Trip tells us you're not a big deal. Then he drops this perspective building bomb on us. I quote, and it's a long one. When we think of big, and I mean really big, we usually think of the sun, right? It's massive. In fact, you could fit 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun. Let that sink in. But according to astronomer and scientist Michel Thaler, if you were to shrink the sun down to the size of the dot in this letter I right here on the page, that tiny little dot. If you made the sun that big, then the relative size of our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the Earth. Take a minute to visualize that. But let's not stop there. A while back, astronomers found a tiny section of the night sky that appeared to be empty. And tiny means the size of the head of a pin. If you held it out at arm's length. If you were to hold that tiny pinhead up to the sky, then that little, tiny portion of the sky appeared completely void of celestial light. So they focused the Hubble telescope up there and let it absorb light for 10 days. And in that tiny, tiny, dark part of the night sky, which looked completely empty, they ended up discovering 3,000 galaxies. Holy poop emoji. So what does this all mean? You, me, all of us. Our daily crises and dramas and getting upset because the barista forgot to put 3.5 vegan whatever sprinkles in our lattes. When we start to imagine this massive universal perspective, we start to see that no matter what we are thinking or doing, it's really just not that big of a deal. And it never will be. End quote. So, yeah, that's today's plus one. We're not a big deal. And that's a really liberatingly big deal. Let's zoom out far enough to see that all those daily crises and dramas just aren't a big deal, period. Then let's zoom back in and enjoy this precious life of ours today.
