#1: Project: Strength for 2 + Handbook + Nextcitement + ... (#54)

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Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry. Sunday early afternoon edition. Got a lot to talk about today. We've got the Aura score update. As I step up my training, AURA is reminding me that rest matters. Thank you very much. Aura 78 readiness, which is still good. I'm gonna go ahead and take that as good sleep. Last night was excellent. 7 hours and 58 minutes. Heart rate variability is fine. Resting heart rates at 45. I think I'm actually going to set up a new baseline there. I'm not going to try quite as hard to get that so low to the 39, 40, 41s. I'm going to make sure that I'm properly energized and fueled and then training hard while working hard. Other than the hrv, which is a little different than it used to be, and the resting heart rate, which they ding me on because it's at 45 rather than 40 or 41 or 42 or 43, I'm feeling pretty good. Previous day activity was pretty high. Sleep 8 hours and 51 minutes. 8 hours of actual sleep, 90% will take it. Hour and 21 of REM and an hour 49 of deep. I'm super happy with that. And then my challenge right now is I'm stepping up the training. So as I mentioned the other day, I've done one plus 10, plus 100 plus a thousand plus 10,000 for years. One sun salutation. I'm doubling it, basically. Right. So now I'm going to do two sun salutations, 20 pull ups, 200 burpees, 2,000 meters of row and 20,000 steps a day. Now the 200 burpees and the 20,000 steps are the challenging ones. Sun salutation, easy pull ups, obviously, easy rowing, that's easy. We're talking, you know, four to five more minutes here and basically just remembering to do it here. But the burpees, you know, I've done 110 burpees every day for years. 40,000 burpees a year. So I've got a base from which to expand. But that's a significant step up for me. So I need to be mindful, but make sure I have great form and then have great recovery. So when I've increased in the past, I've had some shoulder issues which I'm hoping to avoid this time. Got a massage yesterday, I'm getting another massage today. We're going to make that a regular habit. And then of course, hitting the PEMF and nano, keeping the nutrition clean, which it is anyway. And then the walking. 20,000 steps a day. That's some walking. You know, it's one thing to do it once in a while, which I used to do. It's a totally different thing to do it every single day. Right. So I'm basically always walking now, you know, like taking breaks and going on the half a mile loop with the kids and with the wife, which has been fantastic. So super fun. Even the other night we went out, I had to get my 20,000 steps. We were out walking after the sunset, around the time the sun was setting. Then afterwards, and it was actually really cool with the kids, we discovered on part of our property we've got like a firefly sanctuary, we called it. Butterflies hang out there during the day and there were tons of fireflies there at night. So anyway, stepping up the game, really excited about it. And frankly, I'm not as concerned about my aura scores these days. I want to make sure I'm, you know, doing fine, but I'm going to push myself hard right now and just get the recovery there, but be willing to go super hard, get the recovery where we need it to be, etc. So today's what's important now. I am loving. I walked you through the other day, my new identity. Notice we upgraded the binder clip in the daily number ones. Is this number one now? This is my. This is the number one. It's ready for a new clip too. We've done 50 plus of these now, which is cool. But this is the daily kind of journaling. Right? So basically the new Identity is I'm 101% philosopher and CEO. Dissolve the dichotomy, post ambivalent. Unleash all the capacities that are clamoring to be used. And I've spent half the last 20 years as a philosopher and the other half as a founder CEO. And this has been kind of dormant for a while now, the CEO side of things. And I feel like, okay, I'm post ambivalent as a teacher, you know, I've distilled my life's work into our Mastery series. The response has been, you know, scientifically proven to be robust. I'm excited to translate that into the book and then circle back to some of the CEO stuff. So anyway, the journaling that I shared the other day has become the new template for journaling soul goals, wildly important targets, which is the hundred thousand coach number this decade. I think of John F. Kennedy when I think of that moonshot goal we are going to land a man on the moon in this decade. When I think of that timeline for us within the decade, 100,000 optimized coaches of army of virtuous heroes. It's funny because every time I think of army, I think of my place paperweight coin, which I got when I visited the U.S. navy SEAL training facility. Captain Bob, who ran the character development for the Naval Academy and is one of the highest ranking seals, gave me and Emerson this coin, which I cherish, etc. So anyway, we've got the goal broken down into 10,000 coaches in 2021. We've got our flow wheel, we've got our strong platform that we've got the HA handbook, right? And then the new identities are athletes stayed the same although I2x my behaviors still disciplined as a virtue. Then philosopher plus CEO. And I love this. This is why I kind of walk through this. I love my new virtue is no longer prolific. Right. So I kind of flipped through here and I showed you that you can see prolific under philosopher. Prolific, prolific, prolific. That was just my thing. You can count on me to show up at a level that you can't even keep up with. Yes, I know. That's how it rolls. That's on purpose. Prolific. That was the virtue. Now I'm focused on what's important now, the soul force equation. Time times energy times focus on what's important now consistently. So it gives me a lot more freedom to do what's truly most important right now, which I'm really enjoying. And this morning I spent three hours in deep work on the handbook. So just briefly, and I appreciate you guys kind words on the support for the book and all that stuff and also that you like seeing the creative process. So I'm constantly touching this now, like every day I'm going to show up and I'm going to touch it, right? So I could keep the whole, you know, every iteration. But basically, you know, I started with the Optimize handbook Perennial Exercises. Well, I started by doing the scaffolding, right, that I showed you. This is the whole book distilled from the stack of notes like this from Mastery series for our coach program. Then the other day I did a version one draft of the perennial seller exercise question. So Ryan Holiday, perennial seller, he's got the exercises in his book, right? So I did those exercises and people wondered. Ryan is actually pretty close to us in the email he sent the other day was asking us if we wanted his baby donkey. Do you want our baby donkey? Oh, too fun. Kids are all in we're pretty excited about it too, now that we think about it. We're finalizing that thing. So anyway, basically, you know, from this version, version 1 to version 1.1, there's a ton of little things. And I also went off. So this will go into the recycling bin now. Right. But that's just what it's going to look like every day. I'm going to get a little bit better. I think I shared some of this with you. Who's the book for? And all that stuff. Then he's got the title, he's got the what's your book in a sentence, what's your book in a paragraph. I can give you the book in three words. Vice versus virtue. Ultimately, that's what we're trying to do is created this virtuous heroes to go out and create, conquer the viciousness in our world today or certainly stand up against it. Then he says creators must know which variables the project hinges on. What's your answer? That's what I worked on this morning. So then the short story is obviously if we want to hit our ambitious targets of creating an instant number one New York Times bestseller the week of November 23, 2021, and then sustain that success to become a 1 million plus copies sold perennial seller, there are three primary variables on which we need to focus. We need to have a great book, a great launch strategy and a great long term sales strategy. So I talk about variable number one. A great book, you got to have something worth reading, right? So I talk about that. Then I talk about a great launch strategy. And I love that, Zayed. And I'm sorry if I'm saying your name wrong. Correct me please. Zayed, I think is how you say your name. One of our coaches says, look, each coach is going to buy a couple copies. Put me down for five. So you already have tens of thousands of copies sold. Smiley face. I like the way you're thinking, sir. But as someone that reads hundreds of books a year, I have a really good feeling this one is going to be a mega hit a la a new Newport book or a pressfield book or a holiday book. Hundreds of books a year. I'm impressed by that. I didn't catch that the first time. That's impressive. So anyway, Zayed, Mr. Z gave me the idea of. Okay, well we need to email all of our coaches, right? Because the next domino in our strategy is we need to get an agent and then we need to get a publisher. So I'm going to start reaching out to my friends next week. To see if we can get a good fit agent who just gets it sole force wise. And then I had the idea from coach Z that I need to ask our coaches, hey, are you up for buying book? And if you're excited about the book and you know you're going to buy at least one copy, maybe 3, 5, 10 for your friends, family, colleagues, pets, etc. Then let us know. Because what I want to do is I want to. And this is called I create these little projects, right? So this is called project get an agent. So we're going to send an email out to our coaches on Monday that basically says, hey, really excited the book is coming out. I'd love your help. If you know you're going to want to buy a copy or three or five or 10 or whatever, let us know. And let us know for whom and let us know why. And we're going to package that as a PDF, sharing their stories and adding up the number of books we think we can sell via our coaches alone as we give that to our prospective agents and say, hey, look, this is part of our strategy. So anyway, I had that idea this morning, captured it, very excited about that. Then there's the long term sales strategy. The fact is, this book, Optimize a Handbook for the Modern Hero, is going to become the keystone to every single thing we do with our business. This is it. It's the cornerstone of our mastery series, which is our coach program. We're going to sell it hard for a very long, extended period of time to hit the other goal. Then they. Then Ryan says, okay, imagine sitting in a room with three executives from a publishing house. The publisher plus the editor plus the publicist. They have three questions. Who are you? What brought you to this room? What is the book about? And how will we sell it? Great questions. And again, Ryan's like a marketing genius in general and particularly a book marketing genius. So who are you? What brought you to this room? Well, I wrote that this morning. Nice to meet you. My name is Brian Johnson. I'm the philosopher/CEO of Optimized Enterprises, Public Benefit Corporation. I've spent half of the last 25 years as a philosopher and the other half as a founder, CEO. And then, boom, walk through my little mini bio. What brought me here? And then what's the book about? We'll see the one sentence and one paragraph descriptions above. And how are we going to sell it? See what I just shared with you? Boom, there we go. And we've got some other fun stuff we'll add in but that's this morning's iteration. And again, I'm constantly getting to a finished, completed point with a certain draft and iterating, iterating, iterating. It's getting pretty close to shareable. Then I also worked on the letter. So when you publish a book, and this is actually good to show this. When you publish a book, you know, months before you send out what's called a galley. And I've received hundreds of those. Right. People and authors and publishers that want me to feature their book. Right. So I've read a lot of these different letters that I receive when I get a book. And so I wrote it already. This is the book we're going to send out basically in a year, almost exactly. Not even like 11 months, 10 months, we'll send this letter out. And this is my first version of it is actually I wrote years ago, but the most recent version of it is here. And I go through it and boom, there's a lot of things I can make better. So that became this version. And again, this is what I do with everything I work on, the plus ones, etc. I'm constantly iterating it like that. So there you go. Those are the two big things for this morning that I created. Three hours of just awesome deep work. Get an agent. It's gonna be fun. Thanks again, Coach Z. Can't wait to see the responses to that. And thanks in advance and thank you already to everyone who said they're gonna get a copy. So that's that. I'm excited to read this book soon. I got this book at the Mailbox today, the Social Dilemma. If you haven't read it yet, I'm sorry, If you haven't watched the documentary the Social Dilemma yet, watch it. This guy, Jaron. I think it is. Lanier. The 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Compelling. Alexandra actually started flipping through it. She's like, it makes me want to not even turn on my computer. This is so powerful. So I'm excited to do that. We'll do a note on that soon. Got my economist. It's time to engage in my news for the week. 21st century power. How clean energy will remake Geopolitics. Excited to read that. And also in our outdoor office, we are going solar. Kind of fun. We're just gonna go to a super simple, like basic solar power setup for the computer. Pemf. Pemf. We think we're gonna move you out. I gotta ask our PEMF guy, Patrick, who watches these. If we can bring the PEMF machine outside and what I need to do to protect it. Other than that, what do we got? I think that's it. Dropped Emerson off at the camo. He's doing a class on how to camouflage yourself. He goes to like a nature school that has survival training and stuff. So he's got a camo. Camo class. Where was the camo class at Catholic school? Didn't exist. Oh, we did come up with a cool plus one that he and I will do. I said, dude, are you excited we're driving there with Eleanor. You excited about your camo class? And he says, yeah, and I'm nervous. I'm nervous and I'm excited. I said, well, totally. That makes sense. We've talked a lot about I'm excited. Right? When you feel afraid, you say I'm excited. Same energy, right? A high arousal state that you can go from negative. Oh, I'm anxious to positive by saying I'm excited. And then we had fun. And I said, well, you need to combine nervousness and excited. You're next cited. And then I realized, oh, you're actually next cited. You're excited. You're nervous and excited about the next thing you're going to do. Right? He said something sweet like, yeah, I'm always nervous before I get there. Then it's just so much fun. I just always love it, you know, so super fun. So we'll have fun with a plus one on that. And then I got to mark off my. I like to flip the calendar to start a new month. So I've already flipped it. Put the remnant days up here. I've got a. I've done five pull ups. I do a little mark there. I've rode my 2k. How many pull up burpees have I done? I've done. What is that? 110 plus another 55. I do sets of 11 every time I do it. So every one of these hash marks is another set of 11. So we've got 55, 110 and then another 55, 165. We've got 176. Is that right? I don't feel like I'm doing that math right, but I'll figure out the math. It's basically I have to do two more sets of 11 plus two to hit my 200. I've got a lot of walking to do and my buddy is like competer me. He's sending me texts right now. I know, I'm look talking to you right now, sir Competerate. He's up to like 19,000 average. I got you dude. I got you. I did spend time with wifey on the loop this morning and with the kids. That's all I got. What a long today. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more. Let's do this heroically 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 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.