A short podcast episode by Brian Johnson excerpted from his book Activate Your Heroic Potential (451 ideas). Johnson recounts formative influences—Stephen Covey (roles & goals), Tony Robbins (categories of improvement), and Sigmund Freud (work and love)—to introduce his framework of the "Big Three": energy, work, and love, arguing that optimizing energy first enables better performance at work and in relationships.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another arete One Degree. A micro chapter from our new book Activate youe heroic potential. 451 ideas in here. Here's one of my favorites from Objective 3, which is on optimizing the big three. Your energy, your work and your love. Here is the first chapter in that objective. The Big Three. An Origin Story. Covey, Robbins and Freud. Stephen Covey's seven Habits of Highly Effective People was literally the very first self development book I ever read. Quick story it's the summer of 1995. I'm a 21 year old student at UCLA studying psychology with a minor in business. At the time there was no such thing as positive psychology. I thought about getting my PhD, but I couldn't see how I'd study what I wanted to study. Then one day I found myself behind a one way mirror tracking the behavior of some kids. I was sitting next to the husband of the PhD student for whom I was working. Now this guy worked for the old Arthur Andersen. We hit it off. Long story a little shorter. They wound up recruiting me to join them and sent me off to a global leadership event at their corporate headquarters. And that's where I was introduced to Covey and the idea that we could, with wisdom and effort, deliberately change our lives. Now, as a first generation college student with hard working but very conservative Catholic parents, this was a revelation to me and my life changed that weekend. I could see that I had a lot more power than I used to think. Now, I didn't know what I would do with that awareness yet, but simply knowing that we could deliberately strive to become the best version of ourselves and in service to the world was an insight that profoundly influenced my life. Now, one of the things Covey taught was that we each have roles in our lives and that we'd be wise to get clear on the goals we have for each of those roles and then architect our lives around them. He captured this idea in the phrase roles and goals. I loved that idea, only at least for me. I found that it was really easy to get really overwhelmed by all the roles I play. These days I'm a father and a husband and a philosopher and a CEO and a friend and a teacher and an athlete. And where do I begin and where does it end and what should I prioritize and fast forward a few years. It's now 1999. I can still vividly remember driving a U haul from the east coast to Los Angeles while listening to Tony Robbins personal power two CDs. After winning the business plan competition at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and getting ready to raise $5 million. In the midst of the dot com boom of the late 90s, Tony had a similar framework to Covey. Rather than roles and goals, he called them categories of improvement. I diligently tried to master each of the categories of my life, but again quickly found myself overwhelmed. There were so many areas of my life I wanted to dial in. They were basically near infinite. Fast forward another decade and a half and I've dedicated my life to studying and teaching these ideas. I encounter Sigmund Freud's quip that a good life is essentially all about two Work and love. Now a choir of angels sang at precisely that moment. Work and love. Yeah, that's it. Only if we have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning because of poor lifestyle choices, we're going to have a really hard time giving our best to our work or to our love. Therefore, we need to start with energy and then focus on work and love. And voila. We have our Big three Energy, work and love. Get those right and we're at least 80% there. That's part one of the big three origin story. I hope you enjoyed that. Arete one degree from my new book Arete activate your heroic potential. The book will be shipped on November 14, right before Black Friday. In time to make it the perfect holiday gift, perhaps. I wanted to let you know that we have some special giveaways if you think you might like to pre order the book and and even more goodies if you think you might want to give the book away this holiday season. Here's the deal. Pre order one copy and get a free Advanced reader copy of the ebook today. Pre order three copies and get a free advanced copy of the ebook and the audiobook and a limited edition Arete coin that we'll send to you. Pre order 10 copies of the book. Bless you and get all of that plus an autographed Advanced Hardcover reader copy sent to you immediately inside the fancy Arete VIP box, which is packed with other goodies including this Arete T shirt, a Heroic t shirt and 10 free annual heroic memberships for your gift recipients. You'd be able to give them a book and a year's worth of Heroic 4 Free. If you pre order 25 copies, you'll get all that plus a free ticket to our launch event party in Austin November 10th through 12th, and you'll get a personal voice memo. Thank you and a high five from me if you're feeling inspired to order over 50 copies of the book. We've been blessed to have a lot of CEOs and corporations do that. We'll give you a huge discount. Just let us know all of this. You can learn more about at Heroic U.S. book Heroic U.S. book of course, you can order the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Independent bookstores will be everywhere you can buy a book, Hudson's airport stores, etc. And let us know, of course, when you've done that and purchased a copy or three, or ten or more if you feel inspired to do so at Heroic Us Book. I appreciate you and I hope you love the book. I'm super excited about it, super proud of it, and I hope it helps you and your families transform your lives.
