#1: Stepping into the (re-)new(ed) identity: Philosopher + CEO + Handbook WINs +... (#52)

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Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. I'm back at the book studio. Finished the top three first batch. Anyway, top three series. We've kicking that off on October 1st. I'm super excited about it. We're gonna have a little welcome video, then the top three favorite books of all time. And then we're gonna hit habits. Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, Nutrition, Fitness, Sleeping, breathing, focusing. Then what do we do? Celebrating, prospering. And then I threw in weight loss as the first kind of batch. Favorite books, Check it out. Optimize me. Top four 3. I don't know if that's set up yet, but it will be as of October 1st. Before we go any further, and we do have a fun day today. We've got an extra book up on the stack. I'll share with you the design comp for our book. We've got some aura. I totally, I'm like, it's like 5pm So I don't even know what it said. Go easy. No, I didn't go easy today. Thank you for the tip, but we went pretty hard today. We'll talk a little bit about that. So I hereby recommit. Been recommitting all day, every day. And I've also kind of set the compass here. Today's virtue orientation predominantly was hope and courage. Just that real enthusiasm for stepping into the next best version of myself and optimize as we go even more deeply into our commitment to making a difference in the world. So that was today's focus there. Where do we want to go? PNTV is just quick update if you're following along there. We decided to change the schedule from every day to every three days to account for the top threes that are coming down the pipe. And these number ones again, launching the top three on October 1st. And yeah, well, I'll just share with you right now. So in our last one, we shared the first version of the book cover and we made some little tweaks. So the creative process for me and for anyone is all about the tiniest little tweaks. Right? So we had to trim this up and fix that. Then we had to fix this. Phil Stutz is officially on to write the forward. I can't remember if I said that yesterday or not, but that is official. Super excited about that. And someone guessed that we were modeling the book design after Steven Pressfield's the War of Art. And you know, it's interesting because we're actually taking what I love about this book. So Austin Kleon Steel Kleon Steal like an artist style. Right? Like, who do you really admire? And how do you take some of the elements of their design work and then bake it into yours? Right. That's what great artists do. They kind of synthesize different ideas. So I'm really inspired by a number of books. Obviously all of these books. I'm kind of a book aficionado, both covers and content. But I absolutely love the hyper simplicity. I think it was Matt who guessed the similarities, but I love the hyper simplicity of Steven Pressfield's brand. And just look how much better these look, for example, than the book he published with the Domino Project. I mean, that's cool. But these are just, boom. Yep, that's a Stephen Pressfield book. I got it. We've got a title that hits you in the face, and we've got the iconic image that captures the essence of what the book is all about. Right. And I mentioned actually Turning Pro, that, you know, the true professional creative artist shows up to their job like they're a construction worker. It's not this choir of angels singing all day every day. He says, no, actually, it's Stephen King in one of these books. I think it's actually over there because I remember admiring it when I picked it up and stacked it up. Stephen King says your muse is more like a. What does he call it? Just some guy that's got bowling trophies in your basement. He doesn't say he's like a troll, but he's kind of like a troll that lives in your basement. The dude drinks coffee. He needs his bowling trophies polished. He needs you to work hard. Right. That's how he gives you the fairy dust. The magic of creative work. You gotta show up and turn pro. Anyway, inspired by that and also inspired by Ryan Holiday's book. The. Well, all the books that Ryan's written. But Stillness Is the Key is a beautiful book. Like, you feel it, it's just perfect. The size of it I really, really like. Right. So it's a different untraditional size, which is fantastic. And so when we worked with our designer, we basically said, hey, look, take some elements of this, combine it with the white feel here. And then, boom, there we go. Oh, wait, we got the book. No, I have a second copy of Ryan's book. Oh, I was going to bring in the little tape I used here, which is the same tape I use in my mouth. Now. This is nowhere near what it's going to be but it's really, really fun. Fun to, to play with it for me, you know, I like to physically, viscerally feel where the book's gonna go, you know, and just to see this obviously. And again we're gonna tweak that. I'll show you the next rev of that. But just to celebrate the little tiny gains in the creative process, Teresa Amabile style out of Harvard. That's when we feel best. It's not when we go and hit the huge goal three months after hard work. It's when you can line up little micro wins day in and day out. And for me, this is an example of that. And again, I can now see forward by Phil Stutts, best selling author of the Tools Boom. So excited to and honored that he's going to do it and excited to see what he's going to come up with. Anyway, there's that. And then I also spent some time and it's kind of funny because Ryan emailed me today. He was talking to Cal Newport and we're going to be advertising on Cal Newport's podcast, which I'm really excited about, which Ryan's team kind of I think helps produce and all that. And potentially on Ryan's Daily Stoic as well and reaching out to some other friends to do some stuff. And this morning I was working on Ryan Holiday's, another one of his great books that I haven't covered. We've covered Stillness is the key, Ego is the enemy, Obstacle is the way in the Daily Stoic. But he's also written a book called Perennial Seller. It's a fantastic book on how to write a book that's not just a bestseller but a perennial seller. And in his book he's got a series of exercises, right? He says, hey look, you want to understand how you're going to write your book, then you need to answer some questions, starting with what is your mission? You got to choose one and go all in. So I reflected on that this morning. Who is this book for? Right, well, optimize this for people who are fed up with the viciousness in our world and want to play their roles in life as powerfully as they can to make a difference. Smart, ambitious, high performing individuals who know they are capable of so much more than they might be currently expressing. I said note existing optimizers include some of the top Navy Seals, best selling authors, Fortune 100 senior executives, Olympic medal, NCAA championship winning coaches and their teams and other peak performers who come to us to optimize and actualize their heroic potential. Then we've got a different list of people. Is your book, he says, extremely practical or very entertaining? Well, I answer that Optimize is extremely practical and a little entertaining. What's the ultimate problem you're solving? We're not bashful here. We're solving the most fundamental problem of human existence. How to be happy in the deepest, most eudaimonic sense. Then I talk about what we talk about in Eudaimonology and I say, look, we're all about integrating ancient wisdom and modern science and practical tools. And we talk a lot about the fact that if you asked Aristotle and Martin Seligman as proxies for ancient wisdom in modern science, they're going to give you the exact same answer about what the ultimate purpose of life is. And I go off on that. We talk about that a lot in different contexts. So that's the problem or ultimate. The ultimate problem we're solving. Boom. And then he asks, well, how are you bold, brash and brave? Well, we're unabashedly committed to changing the world one person at a time, together, starting with you and me. And then I say, we firmly believe that you can boil every single challenge humanity faces into three words. Vice versus virtue. And then how do we solve that problem? Well, we each need to be the change we want to see. And not in some woo, woo, oh, that sounds nice kind of way, but in a fiercely committed, heroic kind of way. Which is why the title of the book as it's currently envisioned is Optimize A Handbook for the Modern Hero. Then you've got a one sentence description, then you got a one paragraph description, then you got a one page description, and then you've got a couple other answers I didn't get to this morning after two hours of blowing my brain up deep work. So anyway, did that this morning. Already drafted the letter that I'm going to send to friends when the galley comes out, like three months, four months before the book actually comes out. We'll send out the galleys and get the testimonials and all that stuff. I've already written that letter summarizing that this is my life's work boiled into a book. So excited about the next steps. That's what I hammered today. Next up, you know, we've got to go out and find the agent. We've got to find the agent who's going to help us find the deal publisher, etc. So I'll keep you posted on that. Goodness. But I'll put that on top of the stack which is growing and then the other big thing that came up for me over the last like 72 hours is the fact that I've had some ambivalence in general and particularly about my relationship between the philosopher in me and the CEO in me. I've kind of gone back and forth over the last 20 plus years, part philosopher, part CEO, and made the distinction that, you know what, I'm 101% philosopher and CEO and just really recreated my identity, kind of the next level identity. This is my journal for this morning. I'm getting ready for a big binder clip here and here on the number ones we've been doing. But this is my journaling this morning. Right. So again, it looks pretty similar every single day, right? Athlete, philosopher, soulmate. Athlete, philosopher, soulmate. With the virtue compass, etc. Drawn in my top goals. Well, this morning I tweaked it after setting kind of the intention of I'm 101% philosopher and CEO dissolve. The apparent dichotomy, as Maslow would say, between work and play, in this context, between philosopher and CEO. I was trying to figure out, well, how many hours am I going to give to the philosopher and how many hours am I going to give to the CEO in me as I go after our wildly important target of 100,000 coaches by 2030, 2025, and in 10,000 next year? When I asked myself that question, I needed to put more energy into the CEO if I was serious about hitting that goal. I needed to put more energy into the strategy and the business growth as a social entrepreneur and CEO. I couldn't just be a hermit reading books and writing notes anymore. I've got to step up and do that more. So anyway, I was like, okay, what is it? 10 hours I put into the philosopher and then I wrote a zero. At the end of that, I said, no, no, no, you're gonna give 100% of your time to being a philosopher. It's just gonna be expressed in a different way. Yeah, you're gonna read books and do notes still. But we need to dedicate our time to fulfilling my role as the CEO of our organization. So that led me to my identity athlete. I'm still disciplined and I'm actually two Xing. So I used to do one sun salutation, ten pull ups, 100 burpees, a thousand meters of rowing and ten thousand steps. I'm now committing to two sun salutations. That's not too hard. Twenty pull ups. Done. Still need to do one sense salutation today. Two hundred burpees. I'm like one hundred and eighty something in today. Two thousand meters of road, done 20K steps. I've got some work to do on that too. I'm only at 14,000 right now. Awesome. Strength for two. I love the number two because it represents that a hero has strength for two. So I'm stepping up. It's time for me to go all in on that. And then the identity work wise is philosopher plus CEO. Now again, you can flip through every single one of these. It's philosopher four, philosopher, philosopher, philosopher, philosopher plus CEO and then my virtue. And you can literally every single one. Prolific, prolific, prolific, prolific. That's just the virtue that I've been embodying every single day. Prolific, prolific, prolific. Now it's I'm focused on what's important now, which will involve again some level of prolific output. But it's really a soul force deal. I'm going to get my energy dialed in via my strength for two. I'm going to focus on what's most important right now and that's going to be different in this new identity than it was in the past one. I'm going to do that consistently. Soulmate stays the same, connected, etc. The other thing that really came to me was as we set our wildly important targets for our business, we always start with the sole goal and we talk about this a lot in the focus module, which actually is just coming out for our coaches right now. The focus module, we teach you how to figure out what's most important in your life. How do you set wildly important targets? Well, it starts with a sole goal. What is the most important thing in your life? And for me, and I would offer for all of us, it's the same thing. Become the best version of yourself and then you'll express it in different ways. But that's the universal ultimate purpose. Optimize equals optimist equals best equals eudaimon equals hero is the way that I frame it. And then it's literally, look, I'm committed to having the strength for two in being my version of a hero. And then I'm committed to training heroes via our coach program where again, this is the ultimate outcome. And then leading heroes again, having that army of virtuous heroes is something that inspires me to conquer and confront the viciousness in our society. So that's my sole goal. I'm all in on that. If you haven't noticed. Then what are my wildly important targets? Well, as we've discussed, the hundred thousand optimized coaches in the next decade is what it's all about. But then I circle the bliss out of that number. 10,000 coaches in 2021, and we've got some exciting goals there. Then that leads to some business decisions. We call our growth engine the flow wheel. Not a flywheel like Jim Collins, but the flow wheel, where we do certain things, you know, we offer a ton of free content, then we invite people to our core wisdom, and we're able to get them in our flow wheel of optimizing where everyone wins. That's our growth engine that demands a strong platform. We're investing deeply into our technology right now to uplevel all of that, which is why, by the way, we're offering a $250 lifetime membership right now. We rarely do that kind of over an extended period of time, but we're doing it right now, and we're going to use that capital we're raising via those lifetime memberships to finance the next step of our impact and marketing efforts and the platform that we're next leveling. You can get that at Optimize Me Lifetime. And then all of that leads to the handbook, which I, you know, I think it's going to be potentially a 10x multiplier to really get optimized out into the world with a simple thing like this basic handbook, which is why we're all in on it and why we're delaying the release of it. Current fun goal is we want it out for the holidays. So the Tuesday before Black Friday, November 23, 2021, is the current fun. Let's go hit that target. That's it. That's how my journaling has evolved. This one's getting long. Haven't even talked about Ora yet, so. Yeah, 76. Go easy. Heart rate was a little bit higher. You know what? I'm going a little harder, which I'm fine. I'm moving a little bit later at night. The sleep was pretty good, although I went to bed. This is the little distinction here. Went to bed 45 minutes later yesterday and got a little bit less REM. So that's something interesting to play with. But you know what? Frankly, I'm gonna need to create a new set of rhythms and deal with the energy that I'm gonna bring in with this new identity. So all the things I was doing, kind of philosopher mode, are going to take on a little different texture now. And one of the reasons why I'm doubling all of my movement exercise movement goals throughout the day is I'm also going to get back into email and use that as a way to connect with some partners in luminaries that I want to make deeper connections with and relationships with and all that stuff, which is going to force me to get up and move my body even more. So we'll have fun kind of seeing how that evolves. That's all I got. It's time for me to transition from deep work to deep love. I appreciate all of you and thank you so much for your kind words and support. It means a lot to me to see you. You know, I'm gonna get the book I want to pre order. It means a ton. So thank you so much for your support and giving me kind of the fuel to do what I do. Hope you have a great weekend. All right, look forward to sharing more. See ya.

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 Optymyze, 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.