#1: "Ugly but effective" + How to play poorly well (Hint: RUN THE ALGORITHMS!) (#37)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. Happy Wednesday morning. What is it today? We're gonna make today a quicker one. We've got a big day. Emerson's going to a nature school. Gonna have an early am. One deep love block with him. Fired up about it. Give mommy some time, train with the kids, maybe a little walkie talkie tag. But first, we recommit to being the best versions of ourselves. Today it is always day one. Excited about it. Today I want to talk about the 1, 2, 3 process, aura, style, and specifically playing poorly. Well than good, ugly. So I actually have a Pretty good readiness score. 85. Sleep was great last night. Although it quote, shouldn't have been. I ran an algorithm that worked. What we rarely see is my heart rate, resting heart rate being higher than my heart rate variability. I laugh with a wince when I see that. Resting heart rate 45. Heart rate variability 42.

Sad face.

Whereas yesterday my resting heart rate was 42. Heart rate variability was 63. The day before it was 42. Resting heart rate not 45 and 90. Heart rate variability not 42. So what contributed to that? Well, the stoic gods, as you may recall, challenged me by blowing up my computer an hour into some great deep work yesterday. Lost everything, couldn't turn it back on, shipping it out. That was actually easy. No big deal, right? But what the real challenge was, I realized, oh, how do I maintain focus on my seven hours of deep work on a day in which I'm now distracted and I'm a bit fragmented because I had to spend some time online and do some other stuff? Not a big deal. But frankly, I did not respond to that challenge as well as I could have. I wanted to work 3 hours of deep work. I only got 3.35 in sad face. I want to hit 5 minimum every day as I target 7. Perfect. It is what it is. And I simultaneously catch that ipod, simultaneously ate a little bit too late, right within my four hour window, which is shocking to me, how you stretched it out even to five hours. My data changes and I ate a little bit too much and then I wound up being online, business wise, a little bit later than normal. Again, not crazy, but a little bit later. And I had all those inputs. So I just kind of had a recipe for waking up in the middle of the night, which I did. So I woke up in the middle of the night and if I had run the algorithm of, oh man, I woke up in the middle of the night. Now it's going to be a bad night of sleep. Then I would have had a bad night of sleep. It was one of those a little bit hopped up. I knew my resting heart rate was high and it was just, it was one of those things, right. My mind was a little busy. But instead of doing that, I ran our algorithm and it makes me think of Jim Affomo's wisdom that the best golfers. Jim Afromo is a world class peak performance mental toughness coach. Check out our notes on the champion's mind and the champions comeback. We've got PNTVs on those, an interview with Jim, etc. So he tells us we got to play poorly, well, we got to have a good ugly. And he says the best golfers, like not the really, really good ones, but the ones that win and win and win, expect to have X bad shots. Then when they have a bad shot, they don't get emotional about it. They work their protocol, they run their algorithm, they can play poorly, well, and that's in fact what makes them so great. Right. I think he quotes Jack Nicklaus in that context. Right. So I expect to have X bad shots a day in a week. So when I do, and I didn't even have that many bad things, but it is what it is and I was a little bit hopped up. So then what did I do? Didn't shame myself, I didn't sit there and ruminate on all the things. I ran the algorithm. The algorithm is if I get up in the middle of the night, then I do a quick needs work analysis on it. Boom, boom, boom. Ate a little latent. Too much biz, a little late. Too much inputs, a little bit too much. This is what I could have done a little differently. And then I say perfect. I got more time to meditate, I got more time to hang out with God. Let's go. In the middle of my mantra was perfect last night. Perfect. This is perfect. This is exactly what I needed right now. I'm going to embrace reality, radically accepting reality, which was the theme of my chat with Phil Stutz yesterday. Radical acceptance, he calls it. It's like a surfer, he says, who rides out to catch a wave. The best surfer takes whatever they get. They know that they can't control the waves, but they can control their response to it. And they're going to radically accept it, joyfully use whatever is given to them in that context and not let their sense of what should be happening get in the way of what is actually happening. We want to ride Life's waves with the same intensity and the same joy. So anyway, I'm sitting there on what could have been a bad night of sleep and I wound up getting one of my best nights of sleep. This is probably a little overstated. Sometime I was just laying there, it was accounted as sleep, but I know that it was actually pretty good because the REM sleep, which aura usually understates. I've compared the aura score with something you put on your head. I don't know what it's called, wave or something like that. And it actually relative to that under reports both REM and deep sleep. But whatever, it's a close enough proxy as we've discussed. I really use it for basic times like time in bed and heart rate variability, etc. But it tells me I got over two hours of REM and I actually believe that. So I definitely was in, in a lot of awesome crazy sleep. Now right here, I was up for more than, than what they think I was up for. That's fine. But I still got two hours of REM and almost two hours, an hour and 47 minutes of deep sleep. So they gave me this, this rocking sleep score. And again playing poorly. Well, running the algorithms when we need to run them, we can do some extraordinary things. And I would offer when we're playing the margins and we're truly striving to be the optimized equals optimist equals best equals eudaimonic equals heroic versions of ourselves, we know that we're going to miss X shots. Then we have fun saying perfect. I get a chance to practice my philosophy. Let's go. This morning for curious souls shifted my attention to writing plus ones. I write them in batches, I film them in batches. We now have over 1200 of them. Today we started with the optimized food rules. There's a big three plus one, which you know, if you've gone through the eating session of our mastery series for our coaches. And then I talked about the purgatory of the idiot. Great idea from Ryan Holidays. Stillness is the key. And also numbing our souls. So more on all that soon. Let's go. What did you learn in your life yesterday? How can you. 1, 2, 3. What's working? What needs work? What can you do differently? Today I'm going to eat less, eat a little earlier. And I'm also going to really train my recovery. I might go grab some ice, do a little ice bath for fun. As a additional way to deliberately train the recovery. PEMF machine arrives today. I'm going to get back on that, which is exciting. But how about you? Let's go make today another awesome day. See you.

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Hi, this is Brian.

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