Greatest Year Ever 101: 2017 Prep! (Behind-the-scenes :)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian with another behind the scenes video. This morning I was going to create a video for our genius designer who creates all of our workbooks to give her a sense of what I'm thinking for greatest year ever 2017, which we're going to be teaching live from our new oasis in Ojai on January 7 at 10am if you are in the Southern California area, come join us. If you are not, we'll be live streaming that to our members. Super fired up about it. And then every Saturday, we're going to teach a new class. The next week is Masterpiece Days. And then the week after that is habits 101. And then we're going to march through some great classes. So here's my creative process. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to teach. So I've got last year's class, which I really, really liked. And it was great at that time, but I like to keep things fresh. So I'm not just going to reteach this class. And I was literally doing my own planning. Right. So we've got my journaling from this morning. And then I'm sitting here thinking, okay, well, what's going to make my year truly astonishing? And I realized, well, that's awesome prep for the class. So, you know, journaling rough thoughts on what a top 10 would be. All of my classes have 10 big ideas, which is a nice constraint, which helps me. And I go through, you know, a bunch of iterations as I figure it out. And this is, sorry, I'm moving around here. This is the basic idea of what I'm thinking now. That will be our top 10 big ideas we explore to help you make greatest year to make 2017 the greatest year of your life period in an unending string of such years. So number one big idea we need to make our number one goal the same. Everyone has, I think, the same New year's resolution for 2017. It should be anyway, basically to be your best moment to moment to moment to moment. Of course you won't be perfect, but that's our number one target. Our number one goal is to live with Arete. I'm obviously going to go off on that in the class, but basically, if there's a gap between what you're capable of doing and what you're actually doing, that's where regret, anxiety, disillusionment, depression exist. I talk about this all the time, but we've got to come back to it all the time. This is the power of now. It's in this moment that our happiness, our sense of joy and well being is either present or not. And that's exciting because we have a choice of what we can do. Either stepping forward into our highest potential or back into some other version of ourselves. We need to close that gap. That's our number one focus. And that's going to be the primary way that we make 2017 the greatest year of our lives. We're going to deepen our mastery of ourselves, which is easier to say than to do, of course. So then the class is all about, well, how do you go about doing that? And then of course, the series of classes over the course of the year will help us unpack it more. So the second big idea is the fundies, right? There's no possible way you're going to live with arete, live with virtue, expressing the highest version of yourself, moment to moment to moment. If you are not eating, moving, sleeping and focusing your mind, period. We're going to go off on the fundamentals. We'll have a class on each of these. But it's funny for me to notice when I slip on sleep, that's my, my number one self care habit will help you identify yours. If I don't get a great night of sleep, which for me is like seven and a half hours, you know, seven, seven and a half, eight, nine hours, I'm a different person. It's actually shocking to me to observe and it's really funny for me at this stage. So I prioritize sleep. But again, we're not going to be able to be our highest version of ourselves if we don't have our fundamentals locked down. We'll talk about all the different ways that great teachers talk about that. And then the third big idea is Masterpiece Days. I'll go back to the fundies for Yasmin's benefit. So we're going to talk about the foundation again. You know that if you want to see how tall a building is going to be, you have to look at how deeply they're digging the foundation. We'll talk about John Wooden putting on socks. We'll talk about the fact that greatness is all about mastery of the basic fundamentals, consistency. The third big idea is Masterpiece Days. The next class is going to be exclusively focused on this. But basically we want to have a great year. It starts with moments, then it becomes days. That's how you create your great year. That's how you Create a great life. We're going to map out how you create a masterpiece Day your am, your PM bookends, your deep work time blocks, your deep love time blocks oscillating, etc, etc. Etc. The fourth big idea is going to be identifying your best self. So if you fast forward a year and you look back at today from the end of 2017, who are you journaling? That is a really, really powerful way to build your hope, your optimism, psychologists tell us. And I'm going to suggest you focus on three primary areas. Your energy, your family, and your service. We are going to look at how you're giving yourself to the world, your creative work, professional, etc. We're going to create a target for each of these. We're going to identify your wildly important what one thing in each of these areas, what one thing, energy wise, would make the year just ridiculously awesome? For me, it's to qualify for the world championships in Spartan racing. I want to be a world class athlete. End of 2017. There's my burpee alert family. I want to be an exemplary husband and father service. I want to take the next steps in being a social entrepreneur, a teacher and a community leader. And I've got specific things that are my goals for each of those. We want to help you identify that. Then we need to translate that big awesome vision into daily habits. So what one thing, the keystone habit that if you did it every day, would make this achievement of these goals inevitable. So for example, for me to be at the level I want to be athletically, I need to do a sunrise hike every morning, slash trail run where I do my little things that I do right every single morning. That's my number one habit that I'm going to. It's already installed. But I'm going to honor in 2017 every single day for me, right? So what one thing do you need to do every single day to make your target a reality? We're going to identify that. We're going to focus on simplicity and consistency. That's our daily habits. We create small wins, we create progress, etc. Number six is whoop it. So then we go back to our best self. We look at it and say, okay, but what's going to get in the way? Right? This is, as you know, if you follow my work, one of my absolute favorite concepts. Picked it up in 2015. Gabriel Oettingen studies the science of basically dreaming and visioning and goal setting and says we need to rethink how we do it. Her book is called Rethinking positive Thinking. And she tells us that we need to have a wish, a vision of what we want. We need to know the benefits we're going to get. The outcome then very importantly, and a lot of people forget to do this when they make their vision boards for the year. We need to identify the obstacles. She says we need to rub our vision up against reality. Why? Because then we can make a plan for how we're going to deal with the inevitable obstacles and actually achieve what we want. If you don't take the time to take that step, you won't achieve your highest goals. You'll just be stuck in vision land and you won't be prepared for the inevitable obstacles. So we're going to prepare us for that. Seventh big idea is tied to that Kryptonite control. There's no possible way you're going to have the greatest year ever if you continue to do stupid things. There's my alarm telling me I'm almost ready for my sunrise hike. Kryptonite control. You need to play poorly. Well, now you're not going to go straight up like this and make everything awesome just by snapping your fingers. You're going to have ups, you're going to have downs, but we don't want to have this where you're going up and then you're going back and where are you? I don't even know. Then you're coming, struggling and getting back and then you're sliding back. You need to remove the Kryptonite. We need to identify what's the number one thing in your life that needs to go that will literally change your life. I'll talk about some of the stuff that I've done over the last few years, etc. Etc. Number eight, we need to activate and we need to sustain. So we need to look at all this stuff and we need to get truly fired up about it. We need to remember our activation point. If you're rubbing two sticks together, nothing happens at 300 degrees or 350 or 400 or even 451 degrees. But if you can get it the heat to 451 degrees, you trigger activation energy. Boom. You have fire. Nothing happens until you hit that point. Same thing with boiling water. You can have 200 degrees, 210 degrees, 211 degrees. Nothing other than hot water. You want to boil the water so you can create a steam engine powered, whatever, 212 degrees. So we need to activate our life force in order to do what we want to do. You got to get fired up about these things, but that's not enough. You got to sustain it. It's easy to get fired up on January 1st or whatever, set all these goals and then pitter away. So we're going to talk about the science of motivation, sustaining it, building your grit, the science of that, etc, etc. Etc. Then number nine, my favorite concept. We talked about this a bit in goals as well. Love 2.0. None of this is really worth a whole lot unless we're coming from a place of love. So we're going to talk about the science of creating micro moments of positivity resonance. This has changed my life more than anything else. It's a cornerstone of my life and my commitment in 2017. We're going to talk about the different ways you can express love. Not just with people with whom you're intimate, but everyone. Ultimately, it's all about being a good person, but making it a practice again, moment to moment to moment. We'll talk about how to do that. Then number 10. It's all one big game. Have fun with it. When you're playing a video game, you want challenges. They're good. You don't go to the gym and to lift Styrofoam weights. We're going to reinterpret the inevitable challenges you face as good things. No big deal, nbd. You're going to be immune to obstacles. You're going to become antifragile. We're going to experiment. Everything is data. Put on our lab coats. And ultimately we want to plus 1% day in and day out, incremental optimization aggregated plus compounded over time equals. Wow, an amazing year. That's a very quick look at what we're going to unpack again. Greatest year ever. If you're in LA or Ventura or Santa Barbara, Orange county or whatever, we'd love to see you at the new Oasis. I need to give you a tour of that soon too. And again, if you can't make it there, you in person live. No big deal. Live stream it. Members, thanks for your support. If you're not a member yet, I think the URL is optimized me join get hooked up with this and everything else we've got going on. All right, Yasmin. Can't wait to see the workbook. Hope you all have a great day. See you.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do is something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break.

Down each great book into a simple.

6 page PDF, 20 minute MP and.

10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode.

Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson.

Me join.