+1: #890 Profound Service
17 Dec 2025 · 0 min
Brian Johnson explores his morning routine and journaling practice, then traces profound back to Latin roots meaning before the bottom. Deep work, he argues, enables deep service. He urges listeners to serve profoundly today.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. This morning I was doing my normal thing. In the process I came up with a little insight I'm excited to share. First, the quick recap of what led to the insight. Of course, my day started yesterday when I shut down early the day before 4pm right after my every Monday coaching call with my Yoda Phil Stotts. Then I hung out with the family, then went to bed super early 7:30pm and deliberately spent 10 hours in bed getting 9 hours of sleep including 1 hour 24 minutes of REM sleep and 2 hours and 23 minutes of deep sleep. Four curious souls. Then I was up at 5:30am I'm sleeping in these days folks with an aura. Little Oura ring readiness score of 95. I'm having fun gaming that. Then of course a 20 minute meditation, 5 minute movement, then am one deep work I started the deep work with our quick Carpe Diem journaling session, noting my identities virtues plus behaviors for energy plus work plus love. Little note here. This practice is a cornerstone of our Mastery Series and Optimized Coach program. Aspiring coaches need to log 200 days of optimized Carpe Diem Journaling as one of the requirements to get certified. So got a little image here of what my journal page looked like this morning. What you'll see is my energy, work and love identities, athlete, philosopher and father. Then my virtues for each of those identities under the athlete. I talked about the virtues I want to embody that day, which are today radiantly energized, calm, confident and grounded. Then I reflected on the virtues for philosopher, focused, diligent, patient, persistent, iconoclast. Then father, calm, confident again, present, exemplar and awesome. The virtues that I want to embody. There's a few others I missed, but you get the idea. Then I reflected on the things I was going to do today in order to embody those virtues such that I can express that eudaimonic identity. These things included for energy. The athlete will hit the trail going to nap and I'm going to eat by 3pm, which is a whole other conversation we'll have soon. Then for the philosopher, the work identity. I'm going to put in 4.5 hours of deep work and I've got a call with Cal Newport later today equals smiley face. Then for the father, the love identity. We've got 8am some time with the kids in the morning and then 5pm shutting down completely being with the family. So I did that. Then I spent some time doing some strategic planning for 2020 and beyond that, journaling looked something like this. Now you can check this out in the app and on the site at the top I wrote Philosopher. Technically I drew the philosopher symbol, little phi symbol to represent Philosopher. Then I wrote soul force, Then elegant simplicity, then focus, then flow. I've actually got a picture of this page in my journaling and the other page as well. You can check out again in the app or on the site. Then I wrote Body of Work and drew this little sketch of my vision for what I am currently inspired to create. So I've got ones. PNs 101s + ones are daily. PNs are weekly. 101s are about quarterly. Today. I've got a column for today. And then I've got 10 years from now and 25 years from now. In the Today category, roughly we have a thousand plus ones. I'm excited about that. We have over 500 philosopher's notes and we have over 50 101s. Then fast forward 10 years and I imagine having around 5,000 plus ones. Having 1,001 philosopher's notes. I write that down, I underline it and I think about how cool that's going to be to hit 1,100. Then we'll have about 101 optimal living 101 classes. Fast forward 25 years, then what? Then we have 10,000 plus ones. We have 2,500 philosopher's notes and we have 250 101s. Now every time I write down that 10,000 number in the plus one column in 25 years, I imagine this 70 year old version of me smiling and waving and saying, hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. I think my beard might be down to here by that point. And I actually got misty just typing that, imagining the potential of us hanging out for that long little note number two here. If all goes as currently planned, we'll share that plus one, the 10,000th one, exactly three months after I turn 70 on August 22, 2044. Now, below that body of work. Goodness. I sketched out the three primary components of our business as I currently see them. We're slowly approaching the point of today's plus one. These include what I call core wisdom, which is basically the plus 1s, PNS and 101s as articulated in that body of work we just went through. And then I draw an arrow to infinity to represent my current plans. To do those from forever as the foundation of our work together. And so I can be like that rip the right front tire off guy I've been talking about all the time. Then I draw a greater than symbol to represent the fact that all that core wisdom is going to be distilled into what I'm calling a mastery series. Imagine my absolute best stuff distilled into a this will change your life program that will, well, change your life. Then I draw kind of a less than sign. So it all goes into that. Then it all comes out into our optimize coach program, which represents the fact that a select group of people will go through the mastery series and not only master the wisdom for themselves, but use our optimize protocol to coach others on how to optimize their lives. Ultimately, my my sketch looks like this core wisdom drills into mastery series comes out into optimize coach. But again, none of that is really the point of today's plus one. Although I do like sharing my thought process and I hope you enjoy it as well. I feel like we're creating something together and I think it's important to share my often messy creative process as we have fun creating something awesome together. So that is a very long way to say. Below all of that, I reminded myself of my and our mission, change the world one person at a time together, starting with you and me. Then I wrote down elegant simplicity plus fierce consistency plus energized tranquility plus operationalizing virtue. Then, and we're arriving at the point, I drew two, then circles those that cross over one another. Next to the one on the left, I wrote elegant simplicity. Next to the one on the right I wrote profound service. And all that gets us to the point of today's plus one. After writing profound service, I got up and cruised over to my dictionary. I was curious what profound literally meant. Do you know what the word means? Apple dictionary tells us that profound is an adjective that has a couple definitions. First, it's of a state, quality or emotion that's very great or intense. Profound feelings of disquiet or profound social changes. Number two of a person or statement having or showing great knowledge or insight. A profound philosopher is their example. Now those are interesting. But what I really wanted was the etymology of the word. It's from the Latin profundus, which means deep, and is made up of two little words. Pro which means before, and fundus which means bottom, right before the bottom. And I literally laughed when I read that. Profound, it means deep as in right before the bottom. The best part was the I have a chat with Cal Newport scheduled for this afternoon, and I can't wait to tell him that deep, profound work is what allows us to engage in deep, profound service. And that is today's plus one. Let's serve profoundly today.
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