#1: My Top 10 favorite books ever (#39)

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

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian, happiest of Fridays as always. Let's kick it off by re declaring recommitting to being the optimist best version of ourselves or whatever your equivalent is. It's always day one. There's three days left to sign up for coach class three. Late registration ends Monday, midnight Pacific time. 2000 plus optimizers from over 70 countries fired up. Join us if you're feeling it. If not, we've Got Coach Class 4, January 1, 2021. I'm all in. Today's the day. So we've got aura scores. We've got my top 10 books of all time as organized around my our core fundamentals. We'll talk about we'll 1, 2, 3 it and that's about it. So again we've got the daily journaling. The stack's growing. Told you. I like growing stacks of paper for me models consistency. Which is interesting because yesterday in my interview with Larry King and James Pawelski, Larry actually wasn't 100% so he had to reschedule. So I'm going to do it again with Larry and James, Larry King and James. But yesterday what we did instead was a really cool interactive forum between that James Powelski, the founder of the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, he co founded IT with Martin Seligman. He facilitated a discussion between me and Jeffrey Schwartz. Jeffrey Schwartz is like the man in neuroplasticity. He literally coined the phrase self directed neuroplasticity. So he's been writing books on the subject for decades. Super cool, super passionate guy. And one of the things we talked about is the power of consistency. If you want to rewire your brain, you actually don't need to do that much every day, but you do need to do it consistently. So his thing is start with five minutes of meditation. Within two days, he said, you'll start to feel a difference. Within six to eight weeks, he in his lab at ucla Go Bruins. Will see measurable, demonstrable differences in your.

Brain.

From a brief bout of meditation done consistently over six day weeks. It's astonishingly empowering and it was super fun to go back and forth with James and Jeffrey and some of the community members who asked questions. So we'll share the link to that. I think they're sharing it early next week. We'll share that. It was just so fun. I had such a good time. And then we're gonna come back and do the Larry King edition of it, which we'll talk about soon. So I'm up last night working later than I usually do. My interview didn't start till 5:30. We went till 6:30. Then I cleaned it up with like 30, 60 minutes of work after that. So I was up late and I knew that my readiness would take a hit. Perfect. This is what we trained for again, the whole idea. And I'm an 82 for those listening, which is good. I like to be high 80s, low 90s. Right. I'm a. I'm a former, you know, whatever, straight A student. I like to get the good grades, so I like to see this higher. But I also know that I'm not living my life to have a high heart rate variability score and readiness score, etc. Even sleep score for that matter. I'm living it such that I can use the energy I get from my practices to get to the destination I want to arrive at, which is serving heroically. So again, all of this work we do, eating well, you know, sleeping, moving our bodies, this is optimizing your energy. This is the vehicle, not the destination. We use that to get to where we really want to go, which is high fiving or inner daimon. Now that's Captain Obvious. But we want to make the point. Getting this score dialed in is not the point. Getting this score optimized such that we can do what we're here to do is the point. And that means at times it's going to be low. And that's actually a good sign. That's a reverse indicator that we're hammering it now again, we want to pay attention and not chronically push ourselves. We want to train our tranquility, train our recovery. Be on, be off, but do so mindfully and flexibly. So anyway, 82 readiness. Good enough. It thought I ate late. I didn't. I worked late. But it was a good guess on their part. Sleep was actually really good. Surprisingly, my deep sleep. We'll just take a brief look. I was in bed for eight hours and 30 minutes. I wasn't going to stay in bed any longer because my brain was pretty hopped up from all the different stuff. But I got seven hours and 40 minutes of sleep, an hour of deep, which is less than what I usually get, although they still like that in an hour and 40 minutes of REM, which frankly was surprising. But my deep was less, I think in part because my screen time was late. I didn't finish turning off my electronics within an hour of going to sleep. I do that almost every night. It helps get a good night of deep sleep. So again, if you're finding your deep sleep is not where you want it to be, perhaps you're overstimulating yourself. We need to have that digital sunset installed, etc. Heart rate was high fine. Expected heart rate variability was not quite where I like to see at 48, but that's fine. We'll get that up this weekend with some recovery. But it also tells me your heart rate variability balance. I need to pay attention. Completely agree. I've been going hard time to train the tranquility. That's that. And again, you have bright lines on the practices you want to engage in so that you know when you move over them not so that you're always going to perfectly do it right. But so you know, I just went over that bright line. No problem. Bring it back. So then what was interesting was the top books I was reflecting this morning on. I've now got a new top three books of all time. The Tools by my coach, my spiritual godfather, my Yoda, Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels. The Tools number one all time. I think it's just going to stay there forever. It's awesome. Love it. Soul Force for the win. Then Cal Newport's Deep Work. Love Cal. We're back on our regular communication schedule. Talked to him last week, talked to him again next week. Just get fired up every time I chat with him. And Deep Work is how we show up most powerfully in work. So if we've got energy, work and love as our big three, the Tools is like Soul Force embodied. So that's our energy on one level. Not the fundamentals which we'll talk about in a moment, but a high level soul force energy. We want to get our work optimized. Go with Deep Work. That is the book to read. You want to know how I create at the level I create, which someone just asked. Deep Work. We've got our genius work equation. We talk about in different contexts and then we've got love. And my new favorite book, James Powelski, who I met via this interview series. His book Happy Together. Not only is it my favorite love book of all time, period. Read that if you want to optimize your relationships. It's also my number three. So being my favorite love book gets it in the top 10 unquestionably, but it's also my favorite book on the science of virtue. It's amazing how they connect the modern, ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools for relationships. But he also Brilliantly walks us through Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics, eudaimonia via arete, etc. It's just, it's truly the best I've ever read on that front. So number three, Happy Together by Susie and James Powelski. Then I had fun saying, okay, well, what are our top books by Fundamental Sleeping is arguably the number one fundamental. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. This is the number one book I recommend people read in our coaching program, even before these other ones. Why We Sleep. You can change your life when you figure out your sleep. If you aren't getting at least seven to nine hours of real sleep. Again, not time in bed, but real sleep, you are not operating at your highest capacity, pretty much, period. Matthew Walker goes off on that. Check out the notes on all these, of course, but that book's amazing. Then for nutrition, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating and prospering are our fundamentals. So sleeping and then eating. Food Fix. Mark Hyman's newest book, Phenomenal. It's a systemic look at the societal issues related to our food production system and some practical tips to improve your well being. This is just so good. Food Fix by Mark Hyman. Then number six, Movement. The best book on movement is the Joy of movement by Kelly McGonigal. I used to say Spark by John Ratey, which is also good. But Kelly McGonagall's book the Joy of Movement is unequivocally awesome. Highly recommend it. Then we've got Breathing. I liked Breath by James Nestor, but I still go to Patrick McGown. The oxygen advantage. I love Patrick. He's a humble, amazing human being. He's coached me personally a number of times. He's part of our Coach program. He's just a good, good human being. The Oxygen Advantage. Check that out. Then we get back to focus. Right? So again, our fundamentals are eating, moving, sleeping, breathing and focusing. And you know what? I've got Cal Newport, twice In our top 10 deep work and Digital Minimalism. If you want to focus your attention, you got to start with the Kryptonite. The number one Kryptonite is your technology addiction. Conquer it. Digital Minimalism. You need a philosophy for your tech usage. Cal provides it for us in Digital Minimalism or love that. Cal again is one of our visiting guest faculty for the Optimize Coach program. He also taught a class, digital minimalism 101. You can get as part of your Optimize membership. Optimize me free 2 week trial. Get access to all these notes. By the way, at Optimize me. Sign up for a two week trial, get access to everything, download them and cancel if you want to. Cool. We got 600 notes. I'm pretty sure you're going to find some value in them, but if that's your thing, go do it. Check it out. We're pretty confident that you're gonna love it. And while you're there, you can get Digital Minimalism 101. Then we've got so again, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing our attention. Then we've got celebrating. And this is actually cool. I realized, you know what? BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits is perfect for celebrating. It's also of course the book to read to change your life by changing your behaviors. But he also teaches us the value of celebration. And he says this will be as powerful as gratitude and mindfulness in the future. And I agree, getting good at celebrating your life is huge. And he teaches us how. Check out those notes. And then the final fundamental is prospering, which literally means to go forward with hope. The best book on the subject is spiritual economics, hands down. Eric Butterworth, Maya Angelou's spiritual advisor, wrote one of Oprah's favorite books. We've got a PNTV on that coming out soon. That's my top 10. The tools, deep Work, Happy Together, why We Sleep, Food Fix, the Joy of Movement, the Oxygen Advantage, Digital Minimalism, Tiny Habits, and Spiritual Economics. And then the most important book though is your Carpe Diem journal. So this is my stack of notes. It's your reflections on the wisdom that you're committed to integrating into your life today that's always going to be the most important. How are you idiosyncratically channeling this wisdom into your life today? Get on that. Make today another awesome day. Sending love. Let's go.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hi, this is Bri again.

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