#1: Be So Good (and Energized and Awesome) They Can’t Ignore You (and a bunch of other little ideas) (#14)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, this is Brian, happiest of Mondays to you. There's so many things I could chat about. We could hang out like all day and just have so much fun. We will go through our quick 1, 2, 3. As always, start the day with this. Feeling good, Ready for the day? Yeah, I'm feeling pretty excellent sleep. This is good. You know what? It wasn't too good at the Johnson house. Alexandra has stopped breastfeeding our little daughter Eleanor, which has led to some interesting sleep things. A little less sleep than what I normally like to get, but all good and all a reminder that none of this is perfect. We're never going to figure out the perfect systems that make everything just dialed in forever. I actually talked about that in a plus one today. It's dynamic equilibrium. Dynamic balance. There's no such thing as static balance unless you're talking about six feet under @ the end of your life. So we want to get good at walking the tightrope and adjusting with flexibility to what life throws at us. One of the things I've loved. So again, I, you know, every single day, boom. This is what's important. You can look at my little stack. I don't keep a journal anymore. I used to have a journal. I just keep loose leaf of papers. But I love seeing it grow. Just my stack growing. I've got the little number ones, little notes for my number ones. This is going to grow into a very, very big stack. I love seeing things aggregate and compound. But I'm committed to being the athlete, the philosopher, the soulmate, big three, energy, work and love times two. I'm going to be disciplined. I'm going to be prolific. I'm going to be connected. This is what I'm going to do today, behavior wise. Take it out of theory, put it into concrete practice. This is what I'm going to do work wise and what I'm going to do, soulmate wise. Now, one of the things that's been awesome re engaging with YouTube and then I've been paying attention to the comments lately just to kind of see what's up and what you guys like, etc. But it's been just unbelievably powerful for me to hear some reflections from our members. I think you say your name Andre. My apologies if I'm not pronouncing this right. Andre. One of our coaches from members, I think he's a coach in our program from Croatia, just sent this amazing note. You know Just thanking me for producing the backbone that has changed his life. He's been listening to notes since 2014. We hang out on his runs and hikes and commutes and just, you know, to read this, I literally got tears in my eyes this morning reading this note. There's another amazing one from Jonathan. Jonathan, thank you for your thoughtful, kind note. You know, but then now sharing this with Alexander, this morning I literally nearly started crying. He said, you know, you motivated me do this and this. You made me broaden my horizon as a medical doctor, become a better father and husband, putting my plans on paper, starting writing a diary, training harder, but most importantly, you made me want to become what you call a modern day hero, to be the change I want to see in the world. Thank you. Wait a minute. I get emotional just saying that. And that's how we want to start our days. We want to fuel ourselves with a connection in our love work. We talk a lot about energy, work and love. And we talk about how to bring your love to your life on a day to, day to day basis. Right? So one of the things we talk about is love 0.0 for yourself, 1.0 for your family, 2.0 for your community, and then love 8.0 for your work. And there's been some fascinating research that I talk about in a number of notes and plus ones. But we want to help our community. You make the connection. You want to see the people whose lives you're affecting. And the science on this is incredible. Even people that pick tomatoes, for example, if you make a connection with them between the work they're doing in the field and the people they're serving and their supply chain with other people who will take the next step and the people that will be consuming the produce that we're so blessed that they pick, they'll pick more tomatoes, like a crazy percentage more. Your productivity, your meaning, your flourishing, your sense of joy and what you do will go up radically when you make a connection. Now everyone's going to have a different idiosyncratic expression of that, but make the connection. See the people you're serving, whether that's your kids, if you're a stay at home mom or dad or your colleagues at work, even if you don't totally love your job, you have people that are awesome there and then find ways to bring that love into what you do on a day to day basis. And you will increase your productivity, you'll increase your meaning, and you'll enjoy your life a heck of a lot more. I think the Note we talked about this was called Life's Great Question by Tom Rath, which is amazing. So anyway, there's that and then there's just so many other fun things we can chat about very briefly. So again, I use this ipod because I don't want any inputs, right? So that's just. I do not want to be distracted before I do my deep work, which I only have aura on this and Emerson uses it for listening to Audible books, but that's it, right? This does not challenge me to stay deep. And then I do things like I put these little black dots on my screen. So I don't want to know about Dropbox notifications while I'm working. I don't want to know about. I want to know about that thousand second timer. I'm 99 burpees in today. I don't want to know about notifications and interruptions, etc. And then I wrote about Cal Newport today. And then I thought, oh, interesting. Cal Newport, so good they can't ignore you. Deep work, digital minimalism. His next book is called A World Without Email. And as of the last draft, I'm actually a case study in the book because I don't use email, right? And he talks about the systems we've built. So just very briefly, like, this is my spreadsheet, our team spreadsheet that we use to create plus ones. So I come in here in the morning and I've got the title, I've got the subtitle and I've got the paper link, right? And we have just. I spend so much time thinking about systems, thinking about what is it that I and only I can do. And then I want to offload every single other thing I possibly can. And then our team takes the baton and just crushes it. Thank you, team Michael and Yana and Patrick and Kalman and Zach and Chani and Charlie and Seth and Ben, all the people behind the scenes allow me to do this. But this is one of the things we do. So you want to think about how you can systematize what you do so you can show up in your Daimon zone, in your genius zone, as much as you possibly can. So there's that. And then this morning I'm trying to get ahead so I can do the philosopher's notes we talked about yesterday. And I thought it might be fun to talk about how I go about kind of planning my weeks, right? So I know what I want to do. I've got my big goal. These are some of the plus ones I worked on this morning, hanging out with Larry King. I was on an interview with Larry King and the guy who started the positive psychology master's program at the University of Pennsylvania, which is awesome. So I'm working on that plus one. It's still rough, but basically I like to lean into the four disciplines of execution. 4 dx. You can check that out. I'll put a link to the PNTV on that. The four disciplines of execution. Those guys tell us that you need to start with a wildly important goal. This is how I plan, right? Start with what they call a wig. A wildly important goal. Like so important your soul aches. You just need to achieve it. So for me, it's getting to a thousand philosopher's notes in 196 weeks. In four days. Four days now. Forgot three days. Shoot. Clock's ticking, right? Boom. And it drives everything in. What we're doing right now, that's a. We call that a wildly important target. Boom. This is what I'm going to do then. They say you need to know what your lead measure is. So if I want to achieve that big goal and all the outcome goals that come with that, what am I going to do? That's a lag goal. The outcome is a lag. The lead measure is what you're going to do in order to hit that. We call that a process goal, right? My process goal is unbelievably simple. It's deep work. So I strive to do seven hours of deep work during the week and then more on the weekends to hit 40 hours of deep work a week. I'm not talking 40 hours of just whatever, shuffling papers and reading emails and responding to inputs. I'm talking deep focus. No inputs. Deep work. That's a hard, hard goal to hit when you're committed to oscillating. And you're also committed to shutting down complete by 6pm, spending time with your kids, etc. Etc. But that's my target. Now I know that if I hit this target, I'm going to hit that target mathematically. It's just, that's just how it's going to work. I've done the hard work to figure out what my goal is and then what I need to do in order to get there. So while the important goal, what's yours then? What's your lead measure? What's the process goal that you're going to measure yourself on to a day to day basis? Those are the first two disciplines and again, disciplines of execution. Then you need to have a scorecard. So my scorecard is my wall calendar, which sits on our little PEMF machine thing here. Right? So you know, last week I'm going through it and I tallied up. Well, how many hours did I work? Here's my scorecard. Oh, I've hit it five. I'm working on Sundays a bit more. And then I've got 6.75. Then I got 6.85 hours. Seven's a hard standard. Six point something. Can't even read my own writing. 6.7 hours. Boom. Five hours. And then I hit another four hours yesterday because that's the target I wanted to hit in order to hit 40. Boom. 40. My scorecard is clear. Then the fourth discipline of execution is consistency. You need to do it again and again and again. So then this is this morning. I started out with my compass and we're focusing on what's important to me. Then I focus on plus ones because I got to get ahead so I can go hit the studio on PNTVs. I wrote four plus ones this morning, right? Boom. And I'm celebrating each one of those. This is my burpees. I do. I realize this is so chicken scratchy, but as I say in Journaling, 101, which you can check out at Optimize me journaling. I do one sun salutation every morning, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, a thousand meters of rowing, 10,000 steps and 30 minutes on the trail. And then as I do those things, I put a smiley face. I go, yeah, that's like me. Every single time. I got a little micro win, which we know scientifically is how you have great days. You celebrate, you make progress and that's when you feel great. So I'm celebrating every single little milestone I hit. Boom. I've already put in two hours of deep work this morning. Awesome. Then I'm going to oscillate. Now I'm going to spend time as a dad. I got an AM goal and I got a PM goal. Each time I hit one of these things, I'm celebrating it. And I can hold myself accountable to my wildly important goals. Energy, work and love wise. And this is again a very quick look at how I do it. Very roughly. You need to find your own idiosyncratic style. But whatever it is for you, make it happen again. So much more we can chat about. I'll leave it at that. Let me see if I can get some concrete wisdom. What was good today? All right, so I worked on this idea, be so energized and so awesome that they can Feel you and adore you. This is the plus one I was working on. So Cal Newport's got this great book called so good they can't ignore you, which is amazing. Based on a Steve Martin quote, which became the second note I did today. So Steve Martin was once asked in a 2007 Charlie Rose interview, hey, what advice do you give for aspiring performers? And Steve Martin says, nobody ever takes note of my advice because it's not the answer they wanted to hear. Martin said again, Steve Martin, great comedian. What they want to hear is, here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script. But I always say, be so good, they can't ignore you. Think about that. Be so good, they can't ignore you. In response to Rose's trademark ambiguous grunt, Cal says Martin defended his advice. If somebody's thinking, how can I really be? How can I be really good? People are going to come to you. Be so good, they can't ignore you. Cal's book, he talks about the craftsman mindset versus the passion mindset. Check out the notes. I'll add a note to make a link to that as well. Note, link. So good. Pntv. Check out the comment or the whatever you call it description. But anyway, today's plus one I riffed on and I said, okay, look, being so good they can't ignore you is the great standard for work. But what's our standard for energy? And I suggest that for energy it's be so energized they can feel us for our coaches. We talk again and again and again. You need to be a radiant exemplar. You are your number one asset. When you walk into a room, people need to feel that you're in integrity with your deepest values. Be so energized they can feel us right then what do we do for love? It's not enough just to have our work dialed in or to have the six pack energetic abs. Right, what's our love standard? And I had fun coming up with this in our Mastery series. Let's be so awesome. Capital S. I print these out and then I'll edit them in a separate phase. I kind of batch everything. Let's be so awesome. They adore us. Imagine that. That's your standard for love. Being so awesome that the people in our lives adore us. Let's do that as always today. All right, have a great day. Appreciate you guys. 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. 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