Brian Johnson records a morning video reflecting on his daily routines, stoic practice, and energy management. He describes his journaling system (values, goals, daily "big 3"), recounts responding to a computer failure using stoic framing and his "targeted thinking" method (1) what do I want? and (2) what needs to get done?, and reviews Aura biometric scores (readiness 89, sleep score 88) plus sleep stages and heart-rate metrics. He closes with physical commitments (pull-ups, rowing) and a motivational flourish to practice philosophy daily.
Questions this video answers
89
88
2 hours 2 minutes
1 hour 20 minutes
46 bpm
Chapters
Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry, happiest of Tuesdays to you. Today I'm having a good morning. I got an opportunity to practice my philosophy. The stoic gods blessed me with the challenge I'll share today. We've also got the aura scores. 89 readiness, 88, sleep score. We'll do some quick 1, 2, 3 on that. But as always, we're going to start by recommitting to practicing our philosophy today. This is our optimized coach declaration. I left the cap off last night. Inks a little. Not great. It's day one, folks. Every single day we show up as professionals. Boom. Recommit. Now, I haven't been showing you my journaling every single morning, but I do it every single morning. I tell you, I like stacks of paper. Here's what my journaling looks like. I like to do it on loose leaf. I used to just throw these out. I didn't collect them. Just as a reminder of day started again. Boom. Day one. Day one, day one. But here's the last, you know, month or whatever since I started doing these videos and capturing them. I'm capturing the main sole goals and wildly important targets at the top. Then I've got my compass and I've got my big 3 times 2. Every single day it's a little different, but you'll see that it's the same basic ideas. Wisdom, self mastery, courage, love, hope, gratitude, curiosity, zest, boom, let's go. Celebration, etc. My destiny, goals, 101%. Hustle on energy, work and love. Athlete, philosopher, soulmate, disciplined, prolific, connected. I've got my behaviors, got my deep work, targets, got my what I'm going to do. Love, wise. Kind of a fun addition here. I've got my dad, am, pm, which is locked in now and then I've got wifey, AM and pm. We've got a new ritual that came out of our date day, the ABCs of intimacy. We're doing a loop together in the PM and I'm going to suggest this morning to her that we do one in the morning together. Excited about that. So shall we go to Aura first and I'll talk about my targeted thinking? My computer crashed on me in the middle of working on my note on Larry King. It literally, it's like a year and a half, two years old. Just, just blinked, gone, done, won't turn on, did all the normal things. All right, perfect. That was my response. That was surprised. Oh, that's interesting. Turned off, perfect. That's how we respond to Everything perfect. It is what it is. Thank you, stoic gods. I get an opportunity to practice my philosophy. I say that I want to live with these virtues. Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity to do it. If my highest goal, my ultimate goal, my summum bonum, is to high five my inner soul and to live with arete in this moment. Then I look at challenges like that, which, frankly, in you know, one sense, is more than a little annoying. I got some work I want to get done today. Stymied, but who cares? Big picture, not a big deal. And this gives me an opportunity to practice. It's like, as the stoic gods say, God has given you a young buck to train. You want to be an Olympic athlete. They say, boom. Train hard. You need to train against good competition. The Stoic Challenge. William B. Irvine wrote a whole book on this. It's awesome. Anytime something goes wrong, you laugh with the stoic gods and say, ah, very clever. Very clever. Let me see how I'm going to respond to this. Now, my approach is what I call targeted thinking. It's kind of an extension of neutral thinking from Trevor Moad, and it takes what it takes. But I like targeted thinking. Two parts to it. What do I want? So something happened. My immediate response is, perfect. Jocko Willinks got good. I say perfect. Our whole team, perfect. That didn't go well. Perfect. Obstacles make me stronger arms all day, every day. So then targeted thinking has two components. What do I want? And then now it needs to get done. So what do I want? I want a computer that works because Larry King and James Pulski are interviewing me on Thursday, which is why I've been hustling to get their philosopher's notes and TVs done. And, you know, I got a backup Macs, but they're a few years old and I need a new computer. So what did I do? Well, that's what I want. I want a computer that works tomorrow at 5pm when I'm being interviewed on Zoom. Important two, what needs to get done? Buy a new computer. Boom. What do you think I did this morning? Bought a new computer. Arriving tomorrow. End of discussion. Let's get back to work. Literally, that's my approach to something like that. And then I just have gratitude. I'm like, really? This is my biggest challenge right now. I've got a computer that isn't working, and I can appreciate all the times that it works perfectly. Get on with my life. No complaining, no criticizing ever. Is the standard. Am I perfect at that? Of course I'm not. But I'm going to practice. And today was, frankly, rather easy. And part of the reason why it was easy was because I was. I'm feeling great. Readiness is 89, which is excellent according to Aura's standards. My sleep was great. It's so funny to me to see the magic number for me is nine hours in bed. I woke up literally in nine hours and, like, 10 seconds. I start my stopwatch just so I have a sense if I wake up in the middle of the night and it was nine minutes, and I kind of laughed. Usually I lay there for like an extra minute or two and kind of, you know, cuddle a little bit with Emerson, then get out of bed. But I just hopped out this morning laughing. And then eight hours. Boom. Okay, 88% efficiency. Eight hours of sleep. Thank you. Thousand second stopwatch. Happy with it. Two hours of deep sleep. Two hours and two minutes. Hour and 20 minutes of REM. We'll take it. Readiness 42. Resting heart rate. We were bringing that back down. Remember how it started climbing? We're bringing it back down. I'm excited again to start testing the PEMF intervention when it comes back tomorrow. Heart rate variability was a little lower than it was the last couple days. It's interesting because this is a very subtle thing, but my heart rate lowered later last night. Heart rate variability. I'm sorry, that was yesterday. Last night was 63, max of 113. We'll take it. But my heart rate average was 46, but it lowered later than the day before. And again, this is a tiny little thing, but it got to my lowest of 42 earlier two nights ago. And the main contributor to this is we were working on our garden a little bit late last night. I learned that I used to train a little too hard later in the days, which is one of the ways to keep your resting heart rate up. And I used to do, like, rancher work. You know, I'd carve out our trail after work at night, But I found that that actually left me not as relaxed heading into the night. Now, last night, I threw, you know, a thousand plus pounds of gravel out of our car onto the ground to put into the labyrinth garden that Nam was making for us. And I don't usually do that, but that little bit of working out and then doing a little other stuff later at night led to a subtle change there. Is that a big deal? No, of course it's not. But it's fun to look at those little details and just to stress again, like, I responded to this little challenge this morning of my computer dying very, very well. In part because I train all day every day to do so and because my energy was great. Now, if I had stayed up all late, late last night blowing up my mind with electronics and whatever's cool show that the cool kids are watching on Netflix and I got six hours of sleep, how do you think I would have responded to something like that? First of all, I wouldn't even been trying to do deep work because I would have started my day like everybody else, blowing myself up with inputs, probably news, feeling less than inspired. And then it just would have been a circus all day relative to what I'm capable of doing. So anyway, energy drives everything. Get this right and the rest of life is rarely as challenging as it is when we don't do it. Well, I'll just leave it at that for today. That's good. Oh, finally. I repaid my my 10 pull ups in my thousand K row. And when I do stuff like that, I'm like, yeah, that's like me. I honor my commitments. Boom. The let's go another great day. What can you do today to make today awesome? Let's be happy together. Let's flourish together and make today another great day. Love to you and your family. See you.
