Community + Consistency + My love affair w/Calendars (behind-the-scenes)

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. Happy almost New Year. I'm very excited. I get to swap out old calendar for new calendar. It's quite an exciting moment as always. We've got the morning reflection and journaling. I busted out my prep for getting stuff done and stoicism 101 and unplugging 101. I'm looking for reading 101 Conquering Addiction 101. We sent out a survey the other day and thank you to everyone who replied. We had almost a thousand amazing responses in 24 hours, which was super helpful for me as we architect 2017 and what I'm going to be doing, etc. Anyway, this is my calendar that I used for December. Super simplified. What did I do? I optimized and focused on the business and getting the church and all that stuff. But I like to note like, okay, what's the number one thing I'm going to install this month and what's the number one thing I'm going to delete? Right? So I always talk about what's your plus one, what's your minus one? What's the number one habit that if you installed it, your keystone habit that if you installed it would have the most positive benefit in your life? And then what's the number one habit that you currently have that you need to get rid of that if you deleted it, would have the most positive impact in your life? I'm always playing with that. Literally every month. It's kind of. It's an important question for me. And anytime that I'm feeling less than optimal, this is what I come back to. What one thing do I need to start doing? What one thing do I need to stop doing to take it to the next level? So you may find that helpful. For me, this month it was a sunrise hike. Every single morning I went on a sunrise hike, said good morning to the sun and got a great workout in etc. Hiketrail run. I'm building up to being able to run consistently, super patiently, no rush, no injuries, etc. And then my delete was online time gone. I no longer spend basically any time online doing anything other than basic administration for the business, etc. And then just exciting around optimized nodes, we got the optimized oasis, etc. And then I was playing around with what goals I want to set for next year, how do I make it heroically epic, blah blah, blah, blah. So that's the December calendar, which I'll be rolling up December 31st here we are. This morning I keep track of whether I hit the sunrise trail or not, whether I hit the sunrise or not, whether I did a trail workout, whether I did a spartan little warm up workout, whether I did a high intensity interval training workout, and whether I hopped in the sauna. We have a little sauna at home. I like to do that once a week. So anyway, I'm seven for seven on all those that I wanted to hit. And every third day I do a hiit workout. So literally I just scheduled in my calendar, which I'll show you when we look at the next page. But then I still have my daily habits, right, which is my kind of fundamentals of what one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, 1,000 meters road, 10,000 steps. And now I also added I move my body in an actual workout 25 minutes a day, which is basically always a sunrise hike. So I've already done that today it's like 9 o', clock, mom's working out, Emerson's playing some Lego. So I get to bang this out really quickly before we start the rest of our day. But this is all checked off. So now I get to put this calendar, my little roll that I keep of consistent months and look at a fresh new calendar for a whole new year. This gets me giddy. New Year's is such a great time. And again we've got greatest year ever coming up. My question for you is what is it going to take for you to have an extraordinary year, what habits you're going to install, etc. We'll talk about all that in detail, but I'm actually going to keep my installation of the sunrise trail hike and removing online time. That's been so powerful for me. I'm going to continue to have that as my number one plus and number one minus. Just changes my life. And then I'm also playing around with themes. So one of the things we talked about in last year's greatest year ever was pick a theme for your upcoming year. So for me I'm playing around with two words right now, community and consistency. So for me to get out of the hermit mode I was in for a couple of years and really, really engage in community both online via the social platform. We're going to launch the kind of Facebook like website exclusively about optimizing and offline via the campus that we just bought the church on, the 5 acres, thousand person sanctuary, etc. I'm really excited to engage in both the online and offline community. That's very important for me in 2017. And then consistency, my theme for last year was turning pro. And that's actually the theme for the last two years. And I'm very happy with what I did on that. And now the word consistency is something that I just love. And the Latin root of the word consistency basically means to stand together, to stand firm, right? So when you're consistent, who you are doesn't vary from day to day to day. What you say is important to you and what you do is, is in integrity, right? So for me, showing up day in and day out with a level of flexibility, so I'm not too rigid, right? But being consistent is just paramount to me. As I see it, that's my number one attribute that I most want to cultivate and that I'm most proud of, is that I show up and I do what I say is important as often as I can and as consistently as I can. So that's kind of my theme. Think about your themes for 2017 again. We'll talk about this more in the class and then super fun goals. I'm going to continue doing my one plus 10 plus 100 plus 1000 plus 10,000 just because it's such a strong base for me. Right. When I draw my little Maslow's hierarchy and I look at my fundamentals, this just keeps me plugged in on a basic movement perspective. And then as I aspire to do some more stuff athletically, I'm really excited to kind of step up things. So some fun games I'm talking about with myself about playing that again we'll talk about in the class are 1 plus 10 plus 10,000 plus 100,000 plus a million. So my 1 is every single day I will do a sunrise, trail run or hike. And if I happen to be traveling like I was last, earlier this month I did that with my friend with whom I was hanging out, right? We just went on a walk slash hike together. I hit the sunrise. So I'm going to do that every single day. And, and as part of that I do other things, right. I want to get to the place of being able to hang on like a monkey bar kind of thing or a pull up bar for 10 minutes. So as I keep on talking about, I'm into Spartan races these days and to be a good Spartan racer, you basically need to be a trail runner with great grip strength. So my grip strength is pretty good. I can hang for 100 seconds pretty easily now. But I want to give it up to 10 minutes which is going to take me some time and incrementally get there. Right. But that's a fun goal for me. And then I want to bang out 10,000 pull ups, which is basically around 30 a day. I'm currently only doing like 15, so I'll build up to that. All good, Pretty easy and fun. Just a matter of being consistent. These aren't hard goals for me now. They just require me showing up on a daily basis. And then burpees. I did 35,000 burpees in 2016. 100 per day. So I did a little more than that. But I'm playing around with the idea of 100,000 burpees which would require me to get up to an average of close to 300. Right. So I've been systematically increasing the number of burpees I do by 10 per week. Right. So I'm at 130 now. So that's 13 sets of 10. I just do them in sets of 10 and then I got 14 and I got 15 and then I've got 16 and I've got 17. I've kind of mapped it out in this spreadsheet of how I'm going to ramp up to 300 and then run it through the year. Now, I'm not 100% on this one yet, but it seems fun to me. Obviously I'm not going to do it and be an idiot about it and get injured and all that stuff, but I think I can pull it off. So we'll play with that one some more. And then a million, a million steps on the trail, which is actually pretty easy. That's about three miles a day. Is it? Actually, it's a lot. Well, whatever. I've got the data on that. That's pretty easy for me to hit, but I just like the idea of being out on the hills and moving around. So there you go. Super fun. What else do we have? We've got my burpees that I do early in the morning. This +50. That +50 is another set of burpees. That's my thousand meters road. I do qigong every day. Just a simple one to three minute practice. Naps most days, digital sunset most days. A hug and a kiss with the wifey time, as in dad mode, family time. And then just making sure my day is filled with love. So that's the basic things that I check off the small wins. They create the momentum and the joy throughout the day. Anyway, there's a meandering look at my love affair with calendars and hope you're doing great. Let's make this year amazing.