#1: Soul Force equation + deep (RHR) data dive + best book on relationships EVER! (#33)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian, happiest of Saturday mornings to you. Just had an epic morning. This might be one of our longer ones. I've got a lot of cool stuff I want to share from the aura score to some creative distinctions and also, well, just a lot of stuff. So we will start our day together by recommitting to living with virtues. It's day five of optimized coach class three. You can still join for another, like, I think 10 days or something like that. We've got a late registration phase and then the next train leaves in 2021. But again, it's always day one. Yesterday was the very first Soul Force Forge session, which is what we call my time that I spend live with our coaches. So twice a month I get together with our coaches live and I share my latest thinking and then I do one on one coaching in a group environment via Zoom. Right. Yesterday was the first time we ever had optimized coaches from Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 together in the same Live Soul 4 session. So it's a really special time together. And, you know, we now have 2,000 coaches, as I've said a number of times, from over 70 countries around the world. It was epic. We spent three and a half hours together and I actually kicked it off with the virtue prayer that we did the other day, the one that, you know, we walk through our virtue compass, Wisdom, self mastery, courage, love, hope, gratitude, curiosity and zest. It was powerful and fun. So we'll talk more about that. We'll talk about how do an interview next week with Larry King and James Pawelski, who started the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at Penn with Martin Seligman. One of our coaches, optimized Class 1, works with them and produces a podcast they have where they've interviewed some extraordinary teachers. I'm honored to be on their show next week. You can check it out live. We'll put a link to it below. But anyway, I'm going to do philosopher's notes on each of their books and haven't read Larry's yet, but I'm sure it's great. But this book, James Powelski and his wife Susie Pawelski, is extraordinary. If you want ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools for your relationship, this is it. I have been waiting forever to have a book that I could say this is the book to read for relationships, well, here it is. This is the book to read. And I have Goosebumps right now for relationships. Check it out. It is so good. I'm so excited to share the philosopher's note and be able to share their wisdom. And we're honored that James and Susie will be joining our optimized coach program as luminaries later this month to share their wisdom to practical tools personally and coaching. And then they're going to do coaching with our coaches as well. We now have over 30 luminaries, by the way, which again is just astonishing from other positive psychologists like Talbin Shahar, Sony Lybomirsky, Gabrielle Otengen, some of my favorite teachers. Anders Ericsson, before he passed away, was going to join our program. I'm so sad that we didn't get a chance to share his wisdom, but so thrilled will be able to bring James and Susie in. So there's that, then there's this. Let's do our 1, 2, 3 today. So fascinating stuff. So relax and recharge. Your overall readiness is good, but your elevated resting heart rate indicates that you might not be fully recovered. Slept really well. I'll share some data on that. I went to bed early last night, 8pm it was a big week. We. We launched Coach Class 3. We launched our podcast with PNTVs. We did a ton of other stuff. I was a little tired, ready for a good night of sleep. But here's what's interesting. My resting heart rate was lower than normal. I'm sorry, higher than normal. 45. That's high for me. But you can see it kind of climbing here, right? So we were at 39. We had a nice little streak there. I mean, we got as low as 38, right? 38, 40, 38, 40, 40, 39, 40, 41, 42. Then started climbing. 43, 44, 45. Now what's interesting is I'm always thinking, what's working, what needs work? What am I going to do differently Right now? The PEMF machine I've been using, which was one of the reasons why I think we got down so low. That and the nanov thing I talk about a lot. The PEMF machine is being repaired, so. So I'm getting that back on Wednesday of next week. I can't wait to see what it does. But that's not why my heart rate was high last night. My heart rate was high last night because I ate late. I ate at 4. 40. I went late with the coaches. Three and a half hours. Just awesome epicness. Two little breaks. Three and a half hours. We worked with people from all around the world. It was awesome. But I ate at 4:40, I went to bed at 8. That's less than 2.5 hours. You know, as I say, you want to eat more than four hours before you go to bed if you want to be a professional optimizer and follow the advice of some of the teachers I really admire on longevity, on reversing or preventing Alzheimer's, et cetera. But then I was thinking as I was driving back from the office where I did the zoom call the other day, that there are really like a handful of reasons why your resting heart rate might lower late. If you use aura or you use any other thing to measure your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, etc. Keep these things in mind. The number one thing for me is eating late. So here's what I'll do. I'll run an experiment today and I will eat my last meal at 2 today. Just as a fun little game of let's see where we're at. Now it's going to be confounded because I, Alexander and I are going on a little date. We're going to a hotel room tonight. Nama's visiting so we get a little date time together. So that'll be confounded staying in a hotel, but we'll experiment with it and see what happens. But eating late drives my resting heart rate up, period. It's unbelievable to see the correlation between that and. So you know, when I got this 38 the other day, where were we? 39. And heart rate drove it of 86. I ate at like 3 that day, maybe even a little bit earlier. Now again, if you have a hard time having that 14 hour eating window between your last meal and your first meal. And remember, that's the number. Last meal, first meal, 14 hours. Research has been done. It's still nascent, but research has been done showing a higher recurrence of cancer among breast cancer patients who don't have at least a 14 hour window. That's no joke. We want to pay attention to it. We need to give our bodies break because it takes a lot of energy. Your heart needs to be harder. If you ate late, your brain can't do its glymphatic cleaning system right, which means that you're going to have more vulnerability for things like Alzheimer's, etc. Eating late not a good idea. That's a way to raise your resting heart rate. So is being dehydrated. This is an interesting distinction. You want to make sure that you're well hydrated throughout the day and as you go into the night. Obviously not overdoing it, but that's a big issue with resting heart rate. Again throughout the day and at night. Of course if you train late that will increase your core body temperature and also keep your heart, you know, having to work later into the night. Pay attention to that and Aura will often say did you work out too late? Or they'll say did you eat too late? It's often one or the other. And then for me there's the working too late, which for me is like 6:30. I never go late. I'm not that guy anymore. I want to feel great. The next morning I'm going to shut down complete. I don't need to get into a manic. I'm so fired up I got to stay up until 3am What? No, I want to be consistent. So I turn off, I come back the next day feeling great and I do that again and again and again. I'm not interested in occasional bursts of creativity. I want it every single day, which is something we talk about a lot in our soul force equation. I'll talk about in a moment. Anyway, if I work late or I have tech inputs late, I don't do email, but if I did email that would be stressful. All these things are jacking up your cortisol. And remember your cortisol and your melatonin are like a seesaw. If one's up, the other is down, right? You want to get your cortisol down and get your melatonin up. So having a shutdown complete work ritual like we talk about and turning off your electronics digital sunset style is super huge. And of course I don't do coffee. You may have noticed I have a lot of energy. I don't need any more up. I train my recovery and so I can oscillate like that and have my energized tranquility. I don't need any coffee, I'm agnostic to it. If you're going to do it, cool. But have a caffeine curfew has a half life of like six hours or something like that. So you have a lot of caffeine in your body. If you have your Last sip at 5, you're still buzzing on half of that caffeine at like 11, not going to be able to sleep very well. So jack that back or drive that back to like 2 noon, even 10am to give yourself time to get that out of your system. So anyway, that's the thoughts on resting, heart rate lowering late now. Good news is I actually slept really well. So let's go look at that real quick. So my heart rate variability is 75. I'm very happy with that. And I would have had a really high readiness score this morning if I had actually gotten my resting heart rate down by eating a little bit earlier. Right. So there we go. Heart rate variability spiked at 166, averaged at 75. Resting heart rate lowest was 45, average was 48. That's really high for me. And again, just. Yeah, we don't need to go there. And then sleeping again. Went to bed early, in bed for nine hours. Slept for eight hours and 18 minutes. 91% efficiency. I'm stoked with that. And as I was looking at this data, I'm like, I wonder if eating late actually helped me sleep well, because I got two hours of deep sleep in an hour and a half of rem, which is great. So then I flipped through, right? Because maybe it raises my heart rate. Eating late, but I actually sleep better. Huh. Interesting. This is how I think about things when I look at this data. So I looked back. I ate late again this day. So I scrolled back to that day that we talked about before. Right. I think Sunday was like the great day. So Sunday, my readiness was actually. I'm looking for the heart rate. Let's go back one more day to Saturday. So Saturday I got to 39, which means I know I ate early that day. Heart rate variability was great. How did I sleep? Let's go see. I slept great. I was in bed for 9 hours and 12 minutes, and I crushed 8 hours and 30 minutes of sleep. 92% efficiency. That's actually one of my best sleep nights ever. REM of two hours, deep sleep of two hours. I was probably catching up a little bit there, but that seems to indicate that the earlier meals isn't negatively affecting my sleep per se. Maybe it is. We'll keep an eye on that, etc. That's that. That was obviously long, but stoked about it and hope you got something out of that. Now I want to chat about the flexibility I had this morning. I thought this morning I was going to read this book. I've started it. I'm in love with it. That's what I thought was going to focus on. Then I realized, no, actually what's most important right now was capturing the virtue prayer. The optimized virtue prayer. Right. We had a lot of people say, oh, is this written down? I want to be able to, you know, memorize the certain words for it. So I decided that was actually Most important. So I got to work writing that, and in the process, I wound up writing three plus ones. This is what my plus one process looks like. I write it down. I'm sorry, I do this, I edit it, and then I go to the studio, which I'll do this week. But the important point here is that I was flexible enough to say, you know what. What's most important right now is capturing this while it's still fresh and people want to hear about it, we can share it with them, et cetera, right? So I did that, which is interesting, because one of our coaches, our Class 3 coaches, is an awesome guy from Islamabad, Pakistan, named Mo, right? And he was asking me, hey, when you started your optimized journey, if you were just starting it, because I'm trying to do this in Pakistan, and I have tears in my eyes right now. 70 plus countries around the world. This is how we're going to change the world. Which is why the first +1 I wrote this morning was our coach program. You know, boom. I draw this symbol to represent it, right? We can literally change the world if we can get people to move from theory to practice to mastery, to. To be the change they want to see. We have 2,000 coaches from 70 countries now. We are going to have 100,000 coaches in all 195 recognized countries that the US recognizes around the world. I don't know when that's going to happen, but I'm all in. We are going to do everything we can to make that happen. I can feel it. So we've got. And I'm committed fiercely to making it happen, as is our team, et cetera. So Mo says, hey, if you were starting optimize like me as a young man, and I want to do some great things in Pakistan, gosh, what would you do? Would you focus on this? Or would you focus on this? Or you focus on this? You know, how would you start? And he was thinking of, you know, copywriting and, like, product development and stuff like that. And I stepped back and I said, look, first we got a channel. Cal Newport and Steve Martin, right? And Cal and I just had a great chat the other day about exactly this, that you need to be so good they can't ignore you. You need to be what we call a radiant exemplar, right? And then I said, in order to be that, you need to create power around what we call our soul force equation. So our whole thing is eudaimonic soul force. Eudaimon is good soul, right? So we want to cultivate Soul force. And we have a little equation. We say it comes down to energy times, focus times what's important right now, to the power of consistency. And we just did a plus one on this the other day. So you need to get your energy dialed in. Everything starts with energy. If you don't have energy when you get up in the morning, good luck showing up at your best, period. Which is why we're just fierce on creating masterpiece days that start the night before your day started the night before. We say, boom. Did you get a good night of sleep? Because if you didn't, good luck showing up with energy on what's important. Then you take all that energy and you focus it like a laser beam. Deep work style, pre inputs, no distractions on what's most important. Now w I n think about that. If you can get your energy to 101 out of 100, then you can focus your mind by getting rid of your digital addictions and being able to put your mind where you want, when you want, for how long you want. Scientists call that your spotlight of attention. Having control of that is one of the most powerful, important things for flourishing humans. Can you do it 1 to 100? 100 times 100. And then can you actually decide flexibly, dynamically, like I did this morning, what's truly most important right now? And again, this isn't just work. I'm going to transition from here into love. And I'm going to do my best to bring my energy focused in presence on my kids and my wife. Boom. So 100 times 100 energy times, focus on what's truly most important right now. 100. 100 times 100 times 100, right, is a million. Now, if you bring that to the power of consistency and you raise that to the power of 100, where you don't show up once in a while, you show up day in and day out, day in and day out. Which is why I'm at 365, 366 leap year guy. I don't take days off, period. In energy, work, or love, I oscillate. I show up powerfully in all of them. But I'm consistent. And if there's one virtue I want to embody, it's that disciplined, consistent, prolific nature. Now, if you take 100 times 100 times 100, which is a million, and you raise that to the power of 100, you know what the answer is. I highly recommend you do this in a scientific calculator. The answer is infinity. You have infinite power. We call this soul Force. So I told Mo in Pakistan, hey, bud, you want to create your own version of, you know, your expression of a great business like optimize, etc. Work on your soul force. Get really, really good at getting your energy dialed in, being able to focus on what's most important right now and do it consistently and be a radiant exemplar. Because that power, that sole power that you're going to cultivate is going to be your greatest asset as a social entrepreneur. So go do that and then you can decide what's important. Is it mastering, you know, studying something? Is it creating a product? Is it copywriting and marketing effectively? You tell me that will be dynamic, but this will run consistent across all of those dimensions. And that is our number one today. Although actually I'll share one more thing. So I'm doing this this morning. I got some strategic insights as well. And I wanted to pull something from our an imessage chat I had with Alexandra. So, you know, we've got this Soulforce forge, right? We've got a bunch of people, you know, they're blowing up Zoom Chat on it and I was just blown away by a couple of them, right? So one guy said, hey, you know, this is David. I'm in class one, My dad is in class two and my sister is in class three. Hooray. Dawn Brown and Cheryl Choet. I don't even know what to say about that. But so many families go through our program together that it's unbelievably inspiring. And then literally right after that, this was at 12:41 and 24 seconds. At 12:42 and 14 seconds, 50 seconds later, right? Diane tells us I'm already sharing. She just started the program five days ago. Four days ago. I'm already sharing some of this wisdom with my sons, 3, 4 and 8 years old. I also use the trips to heaven and hell, which are the reflection exercises at the end of module 0 I use to wake you up in a women's group I facilitate. So unbelievably inspiring for me. On that and quick note, we are giving away week zero or week one of the program. You can get my hour and 45 minute lecture on the overview of my life's work 300 day program and then all the worksheets that go with it. Our head coach Michael's practice session where he helps you move from theory to practice to mastery. And this Soul four session at Optimize Me Coach. We'll put a link below. I'll put it as the first link so you can check it out Module zero everything there for free so you can get a sense of whether this is a fit or not. And again, at the risk of over quote promoting this but with the intention of if you feel inspired, join us. Another 10 days to sign up. Again if it's not the right time for you, Perfect 2021 is going to come here. Not too long but if you feel inspired to go to the next level, optimize me Coach. So then I go on to messages, right to pull this because I had shared this with Alexandra so I can put it in this plus one. And I see a note from head of our VP of Impact, which is what we call marketing impact and culture, Yana and she sends me this amazing thing, right? And I'm like oh wow, that's so cool. And then I send her something and then she replies she's there Saturday morning, right? And then Michael, our head coach is on this imessages thread, he sends something awesome and I'm just sitting there saying to myself, you know, I'm so blessed to do what I love to do with people who love to do what they do and we all get to do it together while going all in. Not just on our work, but our energy and our love as well. Pinch me God. Thank you for blessing me with the gift of doing what I love to do in service to the world with awesome humans. And by the way, I wrote this plus one to share this story with you soon in our plus ones. Then I thought of that quote we shared recently on the Master in the Art of Living. This one, a Master in the Art of Living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing to himself. He always seems to be doing both enough for him that he does it well. So I shared that with Yana and Michael and Patrick. Because even right now, what am I doing? Am I working or playing? Abraham Maslow says, you get to a point in your actualization where those apparent dichotomies dissolve. I don't know. Feels a lot like play right now. But does this work? You tell me. Then Yana says, ha ha ha. I came across this video that she shared in family time last night while watching a professional pianist play oh, Chopin, right? And I said to Lucas, her husband, who's also part of our program, by the way. Yana, our VP of Impact's husband is in our coach program. So is her mom and so are a number of her friends. My mother in law who's visiting now is an optimized coach. She went through class one. Anyway, she says in regard to this video I'm going to share with you, this is the perfect rendition of our week. I'm going to link to a video of a professional pianist playing on a public piano and just unbelievable. 40 million views. I watched it and said exactly. That is so epic. So there we go. Masters in the art of living make no distinction as we cultivate our soul force not just for our work, but for our love as well. And it's time for me to go get on the deep love train. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Long Weekend Edition. Let's do this today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Bri again. 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 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.