#1: Constraints are good. Embrace them! (aka: Discipline = Freedom!) (#27)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian. Good morning. We've got 1, 2, 3. Aura goodness we'll go through today. And I want to start by saying thank you. I appreciate all of you who offered me some feedback in terms of duration for these videos. Seems like the consensus is like seven to 10 minutes, which is awesome. So less than 10 minutes is my target, and I think that's absolutely perfect. And it made me think of one of the number one rules of creativity that you want to embrace. Constraints. So this is my version of a tennis court. Very briefly, Alan Watts said, tennis is more fun with a court when you have constraints. Paradoxically, it makes it more fun. So when I know, okay, look, less than 10 minutes, boom, let's get in and out. Targeting, maybe even seven minutes. We'll figure it out. It will iterate. But think about your life the same way. Constraints are actually what makes life a game. Think of soccer. It's pretty arbitrary. You can only touch this round thing, ball with your feet, can't touch it with your hands unless you're a goalie. You've got this, you know, whatever arbitrarily shaped field with an arbitrarily shaped goal. You got to get this ball through with your feet. And these are all arbitrary constraints. The great composer Igor Stravinsky says, the more constraints, the better. So again, you can look at my life and my creativity. PNS Philosopher's notes. Six pages, period. Doesn't matter how long the book is, how good it is. Six pages plus one two to three minutes. Unless it's five minutes. 101s, 10 big ideas, one hour roughly, right? So these number ones, now I have some constraints I can play with, which makes it awesome for me. Now, of course, this doesn't just apply to creativity. Think about your life in general. The structure we create in our days creates the constraints that allows us to flourish. Most people aren't willing to create those constraints, which is why most people are unhappy and why Jocko Willink wrote a book called Discipline Equals Freedom. Disciplining yourself to actually do what you say you need to do. Creating these constraints is the very source of your freedom. We're going to profile Jocko in a PNTV soon. So then, a few things I want to share. 1. Tom, so funny to see your comment in the YouTube thread, because earlier in the day I had printed out your introduction to our coaches as a reminder for me of the power of these philosopher's notes. I Didn't mention I already signed this today. Boom, I'm recommitting. First thing I do every morning now is wipe this off, start again. Every single day, I'm going to start again, recommit to practicing my philosophy. So tomorrow, shared a comment on YouTube saying, hey, let's just keep it under 10 minutes so I can prioritize it during my day. A, I'm honored you're prioritizing this during your day. B, I'm thrilled to welcome you to the optimized coach program. And I love the fact that you shared basically, like, I print stuff like this out as a wink from the universe of, oh, okay, we're onto something with the PNTVs. Let's go all in. And I'll share this and I'll share Tom's quote on my desk right now. I've got this. So I show up in the morning. That's what the trigger that I see PNTV. Crush it 100% focus. And I got some ideas to remind myself, actually, I'm also playing around with the next level goal. I know I'm going to get to a thousand philosopher's notes by the time I'm 50 in 195 weeks or so. But now I'm playing around with how about 750 notes at 47, which is about 10 months away, 9 months away via 7 hours of deep work a day. Now I'm still playing with this. I'm not ready to commit yet, but that's fun. Target 40 hours of deep, deep, solid work a week. Can I do four books a week? Frankly, I'm not sure. But 40 weeks until my 47th birthday times four is 160. I need to hit 133. I'm at 617 philosopher's notes right now. Boom, boom, boom. Anyway, this is kind of the nascent way that I kind of scratch ideas as I journal in the morning. And again, this morning's journaling. Every single day I'm showing up. This took me 10 minutes this morning. Big soul goals, wildly important targets. This idea of giving more than half meeting God more than halfway up, giving 101% the target I just explained. And then my identity, energy, work and love. Athlete, philosopher, soulmate, virtues, Disciplined, prolific, connected. And then the things I'm going to do today, 1 through 10,000, all the things I usually do right, deep work, etc. Anyway, wanted to share that. And then Tom said that he. He was teaching a class in sports psychology on motivation, and then he found the philosopher's notes. TV on Pierce Steele procrastination equation. And three days later, my philosopher's notes TV obviously. Three days later, while searching for a summary of Jason Selk's book 10 Minute Toughness, he again ran across this Brian Johnson fellow. Fast forward 365 days and he's been an optimized member, doing the Mastery series and then taping his mouth and all that. Now he's joining as a coach. And again, I'm so inspired by you, Tom, and by our community of just awesome humans. Become a better husband and dad. Do it longer. We call that energized longevity. Big Peter Attia fan with a desire to think and live with integrity and congruency. Amen. Even considering becoming a coach for a new set of folks down the road. Used to coach college basketball and golf. That is so cool and I love this. Looking forward to sharing that next 300 plus one days with each of you. Let's do this. Yes, let's Tom. Again, thanks for the support on creating constraints. Let's look at yesterday real quick. So yesterday I woke up. This morning I got an 84 readiness. I'm still paying back some of the sleep debt. Didn't train yesterday because we hustled to go to the zoo. Very important folks. There's an otter show at 11:30am we weren't going to miss that. Was planning to take the day off anyway, but got my steps in and recovery day. Sleep was good but interesting thing. And the number one thing that I'm learning today is just how important is for me to go to bed at a certain time. So my ideal time to go to bed, it tells me, is 8:15 to 8:45pm and again, that may seem absurd for you. That's great. Perfect. Last night I went to bed at 9:15 and it chipped away at my sleep. Right. I only got seven and a half hours of sleep and I was only in bed for eight. Now it's great efficiency but the night before I went to bed literally an hour earlier and I got an hour more sleep. I like that extra hour of sleep. So what am I going to learn? Well, I do my needs work analysis and I say hey, what needed some work there? It's all good. But basically I took the kids out. Where are we? I don't know. I took the kids out to Whole Foods, went to the zoo in the morning, Whole Foods in the afternoon. Giving mommy some time, me some time with the kids and we wound up getting our car washed. First time in three months since we bought it. Country living folks took an extra 20 minutes. And then we bought some extra food for Nama at Whole Foods. She's visiting. I had to buy a bunch of stuff. I don't usually get extra 20 minutes. Boom. It added up all good. No regret on either one of those, of course, but I'm going to need to work it. How am I going to get better? Well, that comes us to our. Brings us to our new little sheet I'm creating. I'm going to retarget today's game and we'll check in tomorrow. See how I did number one target today is 7:30. Is family wind down. I kind of run the clock on this, right? 8:15, we're in bed, we got tape on our mouth. Everyone's saying, love you, Boom, Sleep. We'll see how that goes. That's my number one best equals baseline. I made a little distinction, went a little past. I didn't even get home until around 8 o' clock last night. Which again, for us, that's a wild, raging party on a Saturday night. Taking your kids to Whole Foods, getting the car washed, getting some food for Nama, being a little late. But again, the little things matter when you're playing with the intensity that I'm committed to playing. Which leads us to this little paper document I just threw together quickly. You may want to consider doing this, perhaps as you watch these episodes. Best equals baseline. What are the number one things you're learning every single day? Do you realize I have a ton already? I could put on here, algorithms I run. But imagine your life if you actually did this for 101 days or 300 days in our optimized coach program. So I've learned with even deeper clarity that my last food input is no later than 4pm My last intense, intense work output is 4pm Right. I'm going to recover at 5 with an inspiring documentary that's kind of one of my fun games now. And then that 7:30, move the family toward bed, etc. Why? Because I want energized tranquility and energized longevity. I want to have a resting heart rate pegged at 40 and a heart rate variability target now is 100. Back to here. Yesterday we had the resting heart rate of 40. We had the heart rate variability of 70, which is lower than where I've been, but still extraordinary for me and I'm stoked about it. And that one other thing. I've got PNTVs. I'm gonna go hammer in the studio. We may make today 11 minutes, folks, as I get my rhythm. I have a deal with my two bosses, my Daimon who's a proxy to God and my wife that I can now do a little bit more work on Sunday. So I'm gonna go hit the studio, hammer Some more PNTVs, which I'm excited about. Great books. Healthy Deviant by Pilar Gerasimo. Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo. Discover the power within you by Eric Butterworth. This is one of Oprah's favorite books. And then positive psychology in the body, the science of that, which is awesome. Travis Macy is one of the world's leading ultra endurance athletes. He's featured in the Amazon. I think it's on Netflix too. World's Greatest Race series. He did the world's Greatest Race with his father who has early stage Alzheimer's. Amazing story. Well, Travis is joining our Optimized coach program tomorrow, Monday as one of our luminaries to tell us about the ultra Mindset, one of his great books we did a note on. I'm super inspired by that. He and his father were actually planning to be at Optimize 2020. We pivoted from that and brought him into our coach program. Again, we've got dozens of coaches, sorry, dozens of world class luminaries from Travis and again watch him on Amazon to Cal Newport, Tall Bentrahar, Mark Devine, Pilar Gerasimo, etc. In our program. Check it out. Optimize Me Coach. The program begins day one in two days. Super fired up about that. And then also just a little thing, just want to mention it now because otherwise I'd forget. Mr. Rogers we all know is awesome. I've got three notes on his books I'll be doing PNTVS on. But we don't have a tv. Our kids don't watch anything other than the occasional documentary or whatever. But they've started watching Mr. Rogers and I am so excited about it. You know, they spend just watch him for a half an hour and he is such a beautiful man. And to watch our kids interacting with him and to invite him into our family and into our culture creation as a juxtaposition to the viciousness of most media has been really inspiring for us. And again we homeschool and so many people are these days with COVID etc. I just wanted to encourage you to consider bringing him into your family, slowing down the pace. It's a show on virtue. I mean his, his show was literally his ministry, which is absolutely astonishing. So there you go. We covered a ton. We're going to be 11 and change. What's your number one? How do you make your prior best your new baseline? Let's do this today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze 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 Optymyze, check us out at Optimize. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosophers 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 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.