#1: Are you CELEBRATING your life? (It starts with Acceptance then Gratitude then…) (#4)

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

Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. Thank you for your kind words and feedback on the new videos. I think I'm calling these number ones the number one thing I'm thinking about this morning. This morning, thinking about a couple different things. Just wrote a little, little weekly email to our members. Core theme there is our optimized coach. Class three starts in two weeks. Very exciting. I also shared these videos and.

Basic.

Overview of the Mastery series, what I've been working on. You can check it out again at Optimize Me Coach. Anyway, yeah, I worked on eating, moving and sleeping. The fundamentals, Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing. Filmed all those this week. It's pretty awesome week. Now I am preparing for celebrating. Then we're going to do prospering, then we're going to wrap up the program. So here's a look at my messy process. So I've got another several, many, many deep work blocks to go into the preparation for my class. So I'll wind up having a really tight, like, let me see, I can show you. So here, that's the stack of notes for my. The mastery series. 300 day program. 25 sessions over these seven modules. I'll walk you through them in detail, like eating, right? So it gets boiled down to my 10 ideas and then each of them gets its own page. So when I film it, I take a break between each of these, kind of check my little notes here. Then boom, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So I've got eating, we've got moving, 10 ideas, we've got sleeping and I've walked you through that and breathing, etc. So anyway, I've got 25 of these sessions, but it starts out really ugly, like painfully ugly. I've got like all these notes and I've already gone through and thrown away a ton of other notes that I had that just weren't going to fit or, you know, I refined them or whatever. But the basic class, just to give you the kind of messy overview, celebrating is really important. So you get your eating or moving, you're sleeping, you're breathing, you're focusing, right? But we need to remember to celebrate life. It's too easy to have really high standards then fall into the trap of what I call the paradox of optimizing. Where yeah, you want to hold your high standards but you got to enjoy the process right now, right? So this class is going to have three main parts that I'm still formal, kind of finalizing and figuring out how I want to flow it. But it starts with radical acceptance. If you want to celebrate your life, you have to radically accept it. That's a phrase from my coach, Phil Stotts. Radical acceptance. You need to radically accept yourself. All of your imperfections. There are no perfect human beings and you and I will not be the first. You gotta wear your scars like metals. Common humanity, everyone goes through challenges. Radically accept yourself, all your idiosyncrasies, etc. Then radically accept reality. Quit arguing with reality. We'll talk about some stoic ideals here. Joseph Campbell got some great wisdom there, but Byron, Katie, she says whenever I argue with reality, I lose, but only 100% of the time. We need to radically accept reality if we want to have a shot at celebrating it. All right, then we want to radically accept failure. We're going to talk about the fact Joseph Campbell says when you follow your bliss on the hero's journey, yeah, there's a chance for bliss, but there's also the chance for a fiasco. Derek Jeter once said that if you want to hit the game winning home run, if in game seven of the World Series, you need to be willing to strike out in that same batter's box, you go for heroic things. Bliss, fiasco. You got to be willing to radically accept failure. And if you don't, good luck celebrating life. So we start with acceptance. Then we're going to move into gratitude. And I'm still figuring out how I want to frame this, but gratitude is crazy. How quickly it boosts your well being. The leading scientist in gratitude, Robert Emmons, says that it's this. It's a greater predictor of your well being than almost any other virtue. Zest, your life force, your energy is the number one predictor of your well being, which is why we spend so much time on it, then tied for second. Or hope your belief that the future will be better because you're going to, you have the ability to make it so and you'll do whatever it takes. And then gratitude that you're grateful for the blessings you have in your life. You don't take things for granted, you take them as granted. So we're going to talk science of gratitude. It's crazy what it does for us. Then we're going to talk practicing gratitude. So we accept, then we're grateful for then we get into celebration. We're going to talk about how to celebrate. BJ Fogg has some great ideas on this behavior design guru. So does Seneca. Seneca has A bunch of great ideas on everything. We talk about him as well, on Euthymia. Knowing your path and then walking it powerfully, that's one way to celebrate. Then finding opportunities to celebrate. I'm going to suggest we win all day, every day. We have the breakfast of champions. We have a lunch of champions and a dinner of champions. I literally start every single day with my journaling, but that is preceded by my prior wins. And then if you look at my wins and the things I'm most proud of in my life, every single one of them came with failure. Literally. I failed and I persisted. Then I succeeded. I'm going to talk about the fact that hero bars, the things you're most proud of. There's some salt from the sweat in there and from the tears. We got to embrace failure. We've got to know that it's not supposed to be easy yet. We've got to remind ourselves of what we've done in the past that has led to our success. Then we end all of our classes with what's the number one thing you're going to do today to write that prescription for yourself, et cetera. And then in this case, what are you proud of? What have you done in your life that you're really proud of? How have you grown over the last 2, 5, 10, 25, whatever years? Really appreciate that, because as we actualize and strive to actualize and hold these high standards, we gotta remember the paradox of optimizing that you don't wanna be a perfectionist and spin out and always need to do things perfectly in order to feel good about yourself. You want to radically accept, you want to be grateful and you want to celebrate. I'll be sharing more on this as I get more clarity on it, but just wanted to share the high level, messy process, which in itself is important to remember. Nothing comes out perfectly. No one we admire just does things perfectly out the gate. The other thing I did this morning, by the way, just to share with you, another number one for me from this morning. Abraham Maslow. What one can be, one must be extraordinary human being. I found this book recommended by another positive psychologist. The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow. We have notes on two of his books, Motivation and Personality and this Toward a Psychology of Being. This book literally has one Amazon review. No one has read it, but it is ridiculously awesome. Thank you, Scott Barry Kaufman for the recommendation. It's his unpublished stuff. He passed away at 62 years old of a heart attack and he had all this unpublished stuff, you know, and letters and Whatever. So it's a very intimate portrayal. You want to see how I interact with the book? Here you go. That's how I find ideas that I think are worthy of pulling out. I read it and I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's awesome. Boom. Big idea. And I wondered here, did he read Aristotle? I don't think he did, because he's talking about things that indicate that wasn't a deep part of his studying, but fascinating parallels, right? We've got some great stuff in here that I'll be sharing in the Philosopher's Note. But then I actually wrote a plus one on this passage that I might spare you the details on. But long story short, he was going to give a talk, right? And he started his talk. This is a transcript of his talk. So, again, if you don't know, Abraham Maslow is one of the world's greatest humanistic psychologists, one of the leading luminaries of the 20th century. And in this talk, he talks about how he struggled, right? And so he was going to give a talk at the University of Maine, and then he shows up, and his first words are, I changed my plans this morning. I was going to give a talk on what you expected me to. But then I realized, you know what? There's something else within me. He says, I don't even have any notes with me, and I'll actually read it for you a little bit here. Let's see if I can do that without making you nauseous and dizzy. I do not have any notes with me, yet I am willing to try to talk about this subject. I also confess that I'm a little shy and timorous with the topic. Then it occurred to me that this shyness has been a characteristic feature of my own intellectual work. Whenever something new pops into my consciousness, I initially fight it. In the psychoanalytical sense, analytic sense, I experience Timex watch going off, stand up, do burpees. In the psychoanalytic sense, I experience resistance, often involving just plain fear. I develop insomnia, cold chills, even poor digestion. Yet I also feel a kind of pride, as though I am wrestling with something strong. And slowly it dawns on me that something is cooking intellectually inside. So by now, at the age of nearly 60, I know that if I begin to suffer from insomnia, digestive problems, glumness and grimness, it is actually a good sign. My wife will aptly comment, something good is cooking, isn't it, Abe? He says, I am just at the point of developing a new theory, and I'M not quite courageous enough to fully accept its implications. It almost frightens me. I am scared of what it may mean in overturning mainstream psychological notions. And it rouses a whole conflict of pride and humility, hubris and fear. Well, let me try it. And if my voice begins to quiver, you will understand why. How amazing is that? Then he goes off on this new theory that he's really literally figuring out in discussion with his audience. And it's just so beautiful for me to see a hero doing the work. And again, we think that they don't suffer, but they do. So anyway, one of the other things I did this morning was write a plus one on it. It's called Maslow on glumness and grimness when it's actually a good sign. Just emphasize the fact that these people we admire experience that insomnia that, you know, sleepless nights, digestive problems, angst, etc. It's not just us. We all, when we push our edges and we're trying to do great things, experience this. It's time to accept, to be grateful for the opportunity to go do great work and to celebrate every moment. We are blessed to be alive and give ourselves to the world, hopefully even a little bit more fully. When. How about today? Hope you have an awesome day. See you. Hey guys, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that video.

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, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize 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.