Brian Johnson distinguishes between SMART goals and soul goals, urging you to dream big like "castles in the air" before building foundations. He walks through his Heroic Quest module: clarifying your quest, establishing motivation, collecting reasons-to-believe, anticipating obstacles, creating commitment and protocols, and practicing daily.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. In our last plus one we talked about sole goals vis a vis smart goals. We established the idea that smart goals are fantastic for widget making linear goals that can easily be thrown into specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time based buckets. Sole goals that challenge us to do what we're here to do as we go out and live our heroic quests. Those scientifically optimized, unreasonable legacy goals are a little more challenging to throw into a handy dandy formula and or matrix. And of course it's never either or. We've got to start in the audacious realm of big picture thinking and then we need to nail that vision into the ground of reality. Henry David Thoreau comes to mind. He tells us, if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. And by the way, here's the full paragraph from Walden from which that line is pulled. He says, I learned this at least by my experiment that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind will pass an invisible boundary. New universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. Or the old laws will be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense. And he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude nor poverty. Poverty nor weakness. Weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Thank you Henry David. So we have our soul castles in the air. Now it's time to put a foundation under them. Here's a super quick look at how we did it in our heroic quest module. First we established the fact that we all have one common to actualize our potential and live with Eudaimonia. Then we moved on to get clarity on our specific quests, the ones that challenge us to give the world all we've got within our own constraints of reality. Energy plus work plus love wise. Then we focused on the why, getting our motivation up to the proper activation energy by establishing a strong desire. We followed that up with a discussion on our reasons to believe collecting cookies hero bars for our journey before whooping it to make sure our eyes are wide open regarding the inevitable obstacles we'll face and the price we'll need to pay in pursuit of our dreams. With that momentum, we talked about dynamic commitment and energized our soul force via a strong protocol that before lining up our dominoes and remembering that today's the day to work our process, we wrapped up our third session in the module with a recap of what science says and the reminder that we win or learn all day, every day. All easier said than done, of course, and all part of a longer chat, but I wanted to share a super quick, high level overview of heroic quests. If you feel so inspired, take a moment or 10 and do a quick pass through those ideas. If you feel even more inspired, consider joining us next year for our Hero Training Mastery Series optimize Coach 2 program. For now, here's to you and your castles in the air with super strong foundations beneath them.
