#1: A quick look at my creative process (via Top 3 books project!) (#41)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian, happiest of Sundays to you. I'm feeling good, pleasantly fatigued. Left it all on the court last week. We'll walk through the aura scores. What? 1, 2, 3. And I'm also going to share a little bit on my creative process. Had some insights I'm excited about and one of the things our coaches often ask me in our one on one coaching is how I approach things strategically, where I put my energy, how I decide what's important now, stuff like that. So I will share some of my behind the scenes messy creative process and how I go from super messy to more clear. But first, as always, today is day one. I checked the calendar. Yep, today's day one. Today's the day to be our best selves. I'm recommitting. How about you? Moving from theory to practice to mastery requires us to create today as a masterpiece. So let's do it. On that note, last time I'm going to say this for a while. One more day to sign up for optimized coach class 3. The extended registration ends Monday at midnight. The next class is Coach Class 4. January 1, 2021. If you've been thinking about it, now's the time. Otherwise would be honored and blessed to have an opportunity to create some magic in your life next year. All right, Aura then creative process. How are we doing? Aura score. You need to cool down, Brian. Your overall readiness is good. But your resting heart rate indicates 81, right? That you might not be fully recover. That's absolutely the case. But you know what? It was influenced again. I'm always amused by by the effect. 45 resting heart rate 57 heart rate variability 8 at 5 something within 3 hours of eating. And again, we know that this is not quite it but I'm always kind of willing to experiment again and the data always comes back the same. Now my last meal got pushed back significantly because I was in the studio for way longer than I thought it would be. Three hours hammering out the next batch of optimized plus one. So I didn't eat till I had the get in make the food and I didn't eat till later. In reality I could have just fasted and this number would have been much lower. My body would have had time to recover. But when you eat late, your body has to work hard and it's going to affect your resting heart rate. It's going to affect your heart rate variability. I will Be your case study on this and continue to share the 1, 2, 3. So what's working? That needs a little bit of work. That's fine. What's working is my sleep. Had a great night of sleep last night. Nearly nine hours in bed, just over eight hours of sleep, 90% efficiency. I'll take it. Hour and a half of REM, hour and a half of deep boom. And then the other thing I want to focus on is just as we optimize, we want to celebrate really what's working, right? So that's why we go 1, 2, 3. What's working? What's awesome? Well, you know, my resting heart rate just for a moment to humbly celebrate it. My high is 45. I gotta remember personally to celebrate that. That's pretty awesome.

You know, it's easy for me to.

Be the straight A student and I want that at 40 or 41 or 39 even, you know, but whatever, life is good. Continue to optimize while celebrating the wins. And whether that's you happen to get great nights of sleep or you happen to be super connected to your family or you happen to be flourishing in whatever domain, you always want to make sure you're celebrating that while you continue to hold yourself to high standards. So my creative process, and then I also mentioned I am pleasantly fatigued today. I had a nice climb up an awesome mountain last week over the last several weeks. Today it's a day to kind of unplug. The thing I'm going to do differently, by the way, is so we got 1, 2, 3, what's working, what needs work, what am I going to do differently? I am going to relax today. Training, easy, eating by three and I'm also going to start a movie. I realized that this was one of the ways I got my heart rate variability up. I ended my days with a movie, the documentary series, just like 15, 30 minutes. What is it called? The Last Dance featuring Michael Jordan. So if you have recommendations for me on great documentaries, inspiring ones, and there were great movies, please drop them in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. I also watched the documentary on Usain Bolt which was amazing. The fastest man on the planet has scoliosis. Whatever it's called, where your back is all weird. The fastest guy on the planet had to go through that obstacle in order to become the best in the world. Inspiring story. So anyway, now for the creative process. So in our last Soulforce Forge, which is what we call the one on one coaching I do with our coaches, again, we got people from over 70 countries. Thousands of coaches now from over 70 countries. One of our guys, Mo I mentioned before, super cool guy from Islamabad, Pakistan, younger guy who's saying, look, if you were me and you wanted to create, optimize from scratch, what would you do? How would you do it? And I focused. And he said, you know, should I focus on content? Should I focus on marketing? What should I focus on? And I said, what you should focus on is getting your soul force dialed in. Your energy times, your focus on what's important now consistently. And what's important now will vary. Sometimes it will be researching or studying or reading or creating content or studying marketing or creating marketing initiatives. We want to be flexible with that, but ruthless on creating your soul force. Get your energy dialed in, get your ability to focus your energy dialed in, and then get really good at focusing on what's important right now, which is a dynamic process. You want to have a sort of, you know, structure to it, but also be willing to be flexible. So yesterday, I called an audible on my AM work because the response to my video on my top 10 books ever was awesome. You guys were excited about it. I'm like, that's a cool video. I should do more. You know, people are asking me, well, what about the top, you know, 20 books? Right? And I realized that what I could do. We got Eleanor cheering us on. What I could do is create a series of top three books, right? And I had this idea. These ideas that were, wow, we got it. We got animated. We're gonna. We're gonna connect. Come say hi.

I love the energy.

If we can get a little help halfway in. Welcome to the Johnson family house. All right, where were we? Yeah. So basically, I realized it would be really, really cool to create a series of my favorite top three books. And literally yesterday, I worked for, like, 45 minutes just journaling before I even meditated. I just had all these ideas. Oh, that would be cool.

And.

And this would be cool. And this would be cool. And I created a list of, well, shoot, it'd be really neat if I can walk you through all the areas of our lives we want to optimize, right? My top three favorite books all time. How about Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science and Habits and Nutrition and Movement and sleeping and focus and breathing. Because I've got top threes and number one recs in each of these different subjects. That'd be kind of cool. And I was getting more and more excited as I started thinking about it, and. And I just, boom. Version one. What else could I do? Oh, Purpose, Fiction. That'd be cool. Mental toughness, Virtue, Leadership. Ancient stoicism. Modern Stoicism. Because I have so many favorite stoic books. Let's break it up. 20th century humanistic psychologist. Creativity. Let's do this, like super inspiring books. Goal setting books, right? And then what about someone asked, I think it was Dennis, hey, can you do a top 10 on the virtues? I'm like, that's an awesome idea. What are the top wrecks for wisdom? Right? Ancient wisdom, Modern science. How about gratitude?

How about love?

How about curiosity? How about self mastery? How about zest, Courage? Ho. I'm like, that's a really cool idea. Anyway, I just kept on going and had all these ideas super messy. And I wound up having a chat with Michael, our head coach and president about this yesterday, on Saturday, before we checked into Deep Love, which was awesome. Then I started journaling some more this morning and then I wound up with, and I should say I also created a paper document that I shared with the team to capture my ideas and to let them know I think this is a really cool idea. Let's create a top three times 33 and then let's create immediate value. So we're, you know, doing some business and marketing stuff right now. There's a long term or lifetime value ltv of individuals who are part of our community, right? Which is an important thing for us to create a profitable, thriving business.

But I realized, you know, we need.

To create to accelerate our marketing efforts. Immediate value. We've got to create immediate value for our, I don't really consider our optimizers customers, but for our community that we're serving, our quote customers, our coaches, our overall community, we got to create immediate value. And all this is part of a longer chat on conscious businesses and all that stuff we talk about in our membership platform, et cetera. But how do we create immediate value for our existing community and help our existing optimizers walk through all the different areas on our platform? And how do we introduce ourselves to a new community of people via Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, right? While creating an offer that can get them excited to come into our community. So we have the, you know, you know, healthy red blood cells profit wise in order to move forward. So this is kind of the distillation of my thinking over the last few days. This is literally trash now. All these notes, trash. I distilled it into this and now I distilled it into this and now I've got a document that's oh, this is the plan. We're going to do 33 top threes, right? And I captured it. Oh, okay. All time habits, ancient wisdom, positive psychology, all the things I just shared. My top three nutrition books of all time, plus a life changing idea from each. I'm so excited about this, right. And I've got the idea for this set. I'll go into the barn studio, we'll have a cool desk we've got in there with books around it, maybe a jumbo stack off to the side we've got my philosopher's notes, then the top 10. And hey, here's the top three and here's the number one. Repeat 33 times. Then I've got a little intro, kind of idea of what I'll say in the beginning and then you know how I want to share the top three, the ones that didn't quite make the cut. And then the number one most life changing idea from each of those books and the number one overall. So that with each of these videos we're truly adding value to everyone's lives in everybody's winning. That's a quick look at my creative process, you know, intellectually, entrepreneurially, strategically, etc. That's all I got. Emerson's going to nature school today. It's a knife building class. Where was the knife building class when I was growing up in school? Hope you have a great Sunday spent in deep love, deep connection as you energize and restore and get ready to give us all you got next week. All right, sending off. Let's do this. This. What's your number one for today?

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 optimized 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.