#1: Maslow says: Embrace "misery privileges" (Here's how...) (#16)

Foreign. You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry, late edition of our check in 1255. I usually do this right after my AM1 deep work time block. But this morning I actually violated my protocol, which I usually don't do. Usually I meditate, get up, do my thing, meditate for basically 23 minutes, two different sets of different meditation practices, then I do an opening series of sun salutation, etc. But I spent some time with the team yesterday talking about our strategy business wise. We've got a coach launch coming up which we're very excited about. I'm starting to hit the studio again for the PNTVs. This is a big old studio stack, etc. So my mind was buzzing with ideas for how we're going to approach our business and a chat I needed to have with my right hand guy. Michael, head coach, president of our business. You rock. And a couple team members of ours, Yana, our head of Impact, and Patrick, you both rock as well. Anyway, that took up my attention, kind of deliberately changed what I did. Had some great conversations. Here I am. The ultimate end point is just for our business, just creating an exemplary business. We're a public benefit corporation. We aspire to embody virtue, you know, in every single thing that we do. So we were just talking about how to do that, some price point choices, etc. I'll be writing a letter on that more. But just absolute integrity throughout every single thing that we do. And just having a dynamic where we want people to say, look, that's how I would do it. If I was building a business and I was doing it, that's how I would do it. Longer check, but longer chat, but fun standards. So this morning, up my energy. Yeah, I could do that. Or up my activity 83. I don't really like going into the low 80s. You know, I'll dip into the 70s at times, hit the 60s on rare occasions. Always an opportunity to see what needs work now, what needs work right now. There's two reasons why this is low. One, our daughter is no longer getting breastfed, which has disrupted the family sleeping situation. One. So that's easy. So we just need to go make sure we're going to bed a little earlier. Someone visited last night, we got less sleep, all of us a little bit tired. And my heart rate was higher than it normally is. Usually it's like 3940, right? It's 43. Running a little nutritional experiment. Oh, interesting. I think that was what was driving that and that I also worked a little bit later yesterday recording three philosopher's notes MP3s in the studio. It takes what it takes. Great book by Trevor Moad. Driven. Great book on how to structure your life to deal with your intensity. That'll be fun to do at TNTV on. And then also Future Visions. Abraham Maslow. I just fell even more in love with him reading this book. We're going to talk about one of the ideas in that probably today anyway. So a few confounding variables. So I can't say for exact certainty what was going on, but I got some ideas. But the point I want to talk about today is when. So again, we know the 1, 2, 3, what's working. Do more of that. What needs work, optimize it. And what are you going to do differently? What's the number one thing you're going to do differently? So for us it's we got to get to bed earlier. We went to bed too late last night. Get to bed an hour earlier tonight. Now the thing that's exciting when we spiral up. So this is the spiral that is difficult to draw with one hand, but that's the spiral that if you look at my coach, Phil Stutz, right, wrote the book the Tools. This spiral he used to he uses to represent evolution. Ray Dalio uses the exact same spiral. One of my chats with Phil, I had to get out Ray Dalio's book and show him this. In Ray Dalio basically says that you need to start with an ambitious goal, then you need to be willing to fail. Then you learn re architect and optimize your system. Then you set another goal and then you fail again and you set another goal and you go through this success spiral and you evolve. And he's so excited about this process of evolving and he knows that he's going to make mistakes. He's never going to be perfect. This is not how it works. But he wants to evolve and that's his number one goal, that when he makes a mistake, he actually gets a mistake. Learners high because he knows he's getting better. He knows he's going to spiral up now. You need to have a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. If every mistake you make is a sign that you're inherently flawed, then it's going to go like this. Oh, I'm an idiot. No, I'm really an idiot. Oh, my God, I can't believe I'm not perfect yet. And you have a vicious spiral going down versus a Virtuous spiral going up. And that's a huge difference in your potential. If you can embrace failure and mistakes and spiral up, boom, you can go here. If you don't, you spiral down. Ah, that's a big gap that you experience in the moment. And then you aggregate and compound that over a lifetime and that's heaven and hell. So again, we need to embrace the data that we get. Nothing's wrong with us, we just need to redesign our systems. If they're not working, blew right through that little thousand second timer. So the way that we coach our community to do it is always see what's working, celebrate that, feast on it, say yes, that's like me, I'm doing it and I'm going to do more of it. Right? And then when you fall short, you inevitably miss your target. Then you say, this is a Lanny Basham inspired idea. Needs work. Needs work. Neutral thinking. What didn't work. Oh, okay. So last night for us, we went to bed too late. I may have worked too late. Okay, cool. I immediately run back to the point in time at which I made a mistake and I see to myself, I say to myself, what could I have done differently? And then I replay that optimal scene in my mind and imagine it. And then boom. I got better from the mistake, literally. That data became a catalyst to the next best version of me. I didn't shame myself or get upset with myself or with my daughter for getting up early and, you know, whatever. This is what it is. Boom. So we need to embrace imperfection. We got to have that growth, mindset, have a mistake, learners high, etc. And then it was funny because I'm sitting there and you know, challenging times, going to bed, whatever. And I thought of with my daughter having a challenging time. I thought of Abraham Maslow in this great book, Future Visions. It's his unpublished papers, right? And so in the note I kind of walk through, where am I going here? I'm not used to having double sided printers. I got a new printer after forever and this fancy thing prints on both sides. Wow. Anyway, he has something called the EU psychean ideal, which is basically good. U is Greek for good. Psyche is soul. Good soul ideal. Now when I read this book was just like lightning bolts of awesome because our whole thing is you daimonology. Good soul is daimon. It's exactly the same as you psyche. And I've never seen anyone use that terminology before, so felt an even deeper kinship, if you know what I'm talking about with eudaimonia. You know, what I'm talking about. Then he talks about the psychology of happiness. This is what we're going to focus on after that long prelude today. He talks about what he calls misery privileges. I'll just go ahead and read this little passage, he says. I am convinced that the hedonistic definition of happiness is false, for real happiness necessarily implies difficulties. For example, it is a privilege to undergo the misery of creativity, even the related insomnia in tension. We talk about this in a prior number one, and he talks about it in his book. He says every single time he's coming up with a creative idea, he gets insomnia, he gets indigestion, he gets tension. And his wife says to him, something good must be cooking Abe. Pretty funny. We talk about that in our Mastery series. I say cooking hero bars. Salty hero bars with Abe. Leave it at that for now. It is a privilege, he says, to have children to weep over because of their troubles, rather than no children at all. It is a privilege to love family members and friends, even though doing so inevitably means to suffer all their pain in addition to your own. Indeed, this situation is infinitely better than the misery of being wholly alone in life. We must therefore define good living and happiness to include these misery privileges. That's what I was thinking about this morning as got a very early awakening. Misery privileges. This isn't supposed to be perfect. And there's a beauty to the imperfection that we want to embrace as we embrace the true psychology of happiness, where it isn't all supposed to be feeling great all the time, whether that's raising a family or trying to create a business that has deep impact and meaning, or doing whatever it is that you feel called to do in your life. And he goes off with some other ideas I share. You can check out the note, and then I riff on Talbin Shahar and his ideas. And I also touch on Kelly McGonigal's point, which I'll briefly touch on here. She just says, look, if you want to have a life of meaning, embrace stress, period. End of discussion. The two go together. Ma is also a big fan of stoic philosophy. That's it. Oh, actually, that's not it. There's another huge idea in here that is so good, I can't wait to do the PNTV on it. He calls it the Jonah Complex. Basically, you refuse the call. Right. You're unwilling to answer the call to your purpose, to your life's purpose. Right. Amazing idea. I'm gonna leave it at that. We'll talk about that another time. All right. There you go. Of course, I did everything else I do. Boom, boom, boom. Let's go. Hope you're doing great. Excited to share the PNTVs. I just love having big stacks of stuff. Got my big stack of mastery series stuff, the workbook that goes with our coach program, and then the hundred Philosopher's Nerds TV episodes. I'm gonna bang on the next couple weeks. Let's do this. All right. Have a great day. See you. 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 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.