Brian Johnson is launching Optimize Press to self-publish a book by year-end instead of pursuing traditional publishing. Within 24 hours, his community pledged to buy over 6,000 copies. He's planning a buy-one-give-one program to donate books through a new foundation.
Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry, happiest of Wednesdays to you. Today is my son Emerson's 8th birthday. Very excited about picking him up from nature school today and celebrating. And I got a massage in a few minutes, so we're gonna make this quick. Trouble sleeping last night? Aura asks. Well, yes, thanks for asking. I was pretty fired up. I don't know how they give me a sleep score of good 71 with 6 hours of sleep, but okay, I'll take it. I was on the phone with a strategic advisor who shall remain anonymous, who's one of the world's leading strategic thinkers on writing and publishing books. And we had a wonderful chat. Happens to be an optimized member and an optimized coach. Gave me some very compelling reasons to not go the traditional agent publisher route. Do in fact publish this via an imprint that we create a publishing business. We create optimized press. Not just this book, but I've always known there's a potential series of books. So we talked about that. I'll talk about that more in depth another time. But we are revisiting our strategy and it looks like we are going to very aggressively push this thing through for a number of reasons. I also read and publish it this holiday season to get to the punchline on that I've read we've had our community has hundreds of our coaches and optimizers have pledged to purchase over 6,000 books at this point in the first 24 hours. And I, you know, we ask them, hey, why are you excited? And anything you want to share with a prospective agent and publisher. And I've read every single one of these hundreds of notes and the underlying theme of all of them was a sense of urgency that the world needs this wisdom now. Super inspiring, super humbling. And then, you know, with everything going on in the world, waiting 15 months is just doesn't quite feel right. Again, longer chat there and then also I don't think we need to trade what we want to see. So we want to land on the New York Times Number 1 Best Selling Slot which is going to be a ton of effort. But I don't think that requires us to have the publisher after having this conversation with the strategic advisor requires a ton of hustle and a lot of things going well. It's going to be really, really, really, really hard but not impossible to do this by the end of the year. I think of Joe Disena in Spartan Up. He tells the story of Goran Krop. I think he was Swedish explorer, adventurer who Rode his bike from Sweden, pretty sure it was Sweden, to the base of Mount Everest and then he ascended Mount Everest without oxygen. Then he descended and then rode his bike back to Sweden. He's like, now you may think that's impossible. That's not impossible. That's just really, really, really hard. So what we're going to do is much easier than that, but challenging. We're going to create a publishing business essentially. Now I've published a book before, so I know the process and we're going to try to do our best to launch a best selling book. Now when we were in the process of recruiting an agent and publisher, we created this one page. I think my massage therapist is here. Zeus is letting us know this one page overview of Optimize Enterprises public benefit Corporation. Just to look at how everything flows together. Right? So we've got all these books that I translate into a philosopher's Note. We have 500+ of those, 1000 optimized + ones, 50 master classes, and then we have actually much more than 25,000 members since we started from every country on the planet. Then that goes into Optimized coach in the Mastery series. Science says that works. And then you've got all the coaches, you know, started with a thousand and two thousand. We're targeting ten thousand and ten thousand. Then you've got some kind words from Talbin Shahar taught the largest class in Harvard's history. Every day without exception. He says Optimize fuels me emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. He starts every day with an optimize plus one. Marci Schaimoff, Phil Sutz, Mark Devine also have some kind words. So anyway, we created this. We're going to use it to form some partnerships with the independent bookstores out there as we create our own publishing business. There's also some exciting things around an optimized foundation. We had one of our Optymyze coaches reach out and say, hey, can I invest in this? Can I support the launch? Which led me to an idea to create the Optymyze Foundation. I'm thinking about putting every single dollar that I and we make from the book into our optimized foundation and then being able to have a buy one, give one kind of thing. Kind of like Tom Spruce, but for books. Imagine buying the book. And for every book that's purchased, we give one away to those in need in the local community. I remember once I sent a case of my old books to a prison and I can't remember if it was a sister of the guy there or a guy who was in prison at the time. But I remember that being just a really profoundly powerful thing that he wanted to share it, they wanted to share it with some of the individuals who were there with him. So that was just such a powerful thing. So the idea of how can we really create something cool that embodies the best of our public benefit corporation intention? That's what we're thinking about. And then, yeah, so I had this strategic chat with the anonymous advisor and then I chatted with Michael for a while, which led to maybe I'm pretty fired up, which led to me getting up pretty early. So I never look at my watch, right. I look at how long I've been in bed and I usually go back into bed until I hit nine hours. But this morning I'm like, you know what? I'm not going back to sleep. So I looked at my watch and it was super funny. It was 3:33. And if you know me, you know I love three is my favorite number. Big three times too. Well, this is the big three times three. All right, that's more than enough for now. This is the creative process, by the way. You go hit it and then you take an aggressive first step and then you get data and then you adapt and you pivot and you get adjust and you have that spiraling up of clarity that you don't get if you sit on the sidelines. You got to push hard. Move, move, move, learn, learn, learn. And that's what we're doing right now, and I'm excited to share the process with you. The other thing my strategic advisor told me is there's three components to writing a book. One, the writing process, where you actually get down to work and you write. Two, the editing process. And three, the marketing process. And she was very clear. You need to separate those three. When you focus on the writing, be focused on the writing, then you focus on the editing. And of course the marketing needs to be run in parallel in a certain way to get ahead of the curve. But those are three distinct parts of the project. I take that very seriously. Share more about what that means in terms of our creative process and what we're going to be sharing free content wise through the end of the year. But I got to get a massage. Now it's time to recover. Training like a professional hero as I get my soul force where I needed to be to give you my best as we wrap up this year. All right. Sending love. See you.
