Creativity 101: How to Create Cool Stuff and Do Your Life's Work (Intro)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting about Creativity 101, how to create cool stuff and do your life's work. Our last Masterclass was on purpose 101, helping you discover what you're here to do. This class is all about helping you create what you're here to create. Let's jump straight into our top 10 big ideas and then we'll have some fun. Alright, so our first big idea is to remember our number one project. Our number one creative project is our life. How do we make our lives a masterpiece? We're going to talk about that and that's really the through line, the theme of this entire class. The second big idea. What's your life's work? What are you here to do? Who are you? And what do you want to create with this one precious life of yours? Again, we talked about a lot of the details and journal exercises and all that good stuff in purpose 101, but we want to know that we have a seed of potential within us. We want to discover it, nurture it, protect it and go live it. We'll talk about some of my favorite ways to make sure we're clear on that. The third big idea is true love. True love. The word amateur comes from the root to love. But Steven Pressfield tells us if you really love something, you turn pro. You don't do it as a hobby, you go all in. We're going to talk about that true love and then we're going to talk about becoming so good that they can't ignore you. We move out of the pure passion mindset where you're just trying to create the optimal lifestyle design and you think about how you can give yourself to the world. That's another extension of true love being of service. The fourth big idea is the three laws of mastery. This is from Dan Pink's great book Drive. He says there are three laws to mastery and of course, if we want to create powerfully, we want to do so as masters of our craft. He says we want to think about one, our mindset. Two, the fact that mastery is painful. He calls it a pain. We're going to talk about the 10,000 hour rule, deliberate practice, et cetera. And three, mastery is an asymptote. If you remember your statistics class, an asymptote is a curved line that never quite reaches a flat line. Asymptote. You're never going to truly become a master. It's always going to be one step beyond your current reach. And that's a good thing. We want to embrace that. The fifth Big idea Legos Astronauts plus Lunch pails. My three year old son has some awesome Legos and I might have borrowed two pieces. One an astronaut's helmet and two a lunch pail from one of his construction guys. That's how we want to approach our creativity. We want to dream big, like an astronaut en route to the moon or to Mars or whatever. And we, we wanna carry a lunch pail day in and day out. We'll talk about that. Managing that dynamic tension between our ideal be willing to dream what do you really want and your current reality. What do you need to do today to move in the direction of that ideal? The sixth Big idea is probably my favorite. Write down or imagine or look at the screen and see that word reactive. Reactive. Same exact letters as creative. But notice the C shows up a little later in reactive than it does in creative. If you do one thing out of this class to boost your creativity, do this. Move that C from the fourth position to the first position. Go from being reactive to being creative. Create systems where you are not constantly responding to life. Hopping onto email first thing in the morning, but actually doing your deep work and and creating. I'm excited to unpack that. The seventh big idea is yes plus no plus very big trash cans. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi literally wrote the book on creativity called Creativity Studying the Science of Creative People. One of the guys he invited to participate in his interviews, he interviewed hundreds of great creators was Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker declined to participate in his study and he sent him an awesome note that we're going to talk about. The short story there is Peter Drucker said if he said yes to all of those invitations, he wouldn't actually create anything. He says one of the keys to his creativity was to have a very big trash can and be willing to say no to things that are not the most important. Yes plus no plus very big trash cans. Our eighth big idea is 50 pounds equals a and start, finish, ship, repeat. We're going to talk about the importance of focusing on your process, on showing up and doing the work day in and day out. £50 equals an A. We'll talk about the cool study and the reason why. I have that written on my little dry erase board that I do my micro classes on. It's often on my whiteboard as well. £50 equals a judge yourself on what you do, not how well you do it. Key aspect of creativity. And you need to start, you need to finish, you need to ship, you need to introduce the world to what you're up to. That leads us to the ninth big idea. When you do that, when you share your creative work, you're gonna get some feedback. Not all of that's going to be positive. Our ninth idea is troll poop. Troll poop. There are trolls in the world. There are critics, and then there are trolls. People who really don't have your best interest in mind who are, you know, gonna take a dump in your creative living room. And you need to learn how to scoop that up. You all seem to realize that you are your number one troll. If you look at who really trolls you the most, it's you. Which is related to our 10th big idea, which is get your mind right. When you get your mind right, you can deal with all the inevitable challenges that arise. We're gonna go into detail on that. And then our 11th big idea to bookend with our first one and is to remember your number one project. Your number one project is to create a masterpiece life. To create the circumstances in which and through which your genius, your ultimate seat of potential, can express itself. Figuring out how you can go all in on your life's work is in itself an extraordinarily creative act. We're going to talk about that. We're going to go into the fundamentals again. Can't skip that in any class, especially this one. That's a quick look at our top 10 big ideas. Creativity 101. How to create cool stuff and do your life's work. Let's jump in. So if you enjoyed that quick overview, I think you'll love the full class. Become a member and get instant access to this class. Plus a bunch of other optimal living 101 masterclasses and over 300 philosopher's notes and a bunch of other goodness. It's only 10 bucks per month. I think you'll love it. Join thousands of other cool peeps at BrianJohnson Me Membership. It's BrianJohnson Me Membership.