Hero Training 101 - Friday PM

Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential, including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs and even NCAA championship teams, two of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show. You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Please welcome to the stage Brian and Alexandra. You're not done yet, ladies and gentlemen. Please make some noise for Eleanor as well. Everybody.

Eleanor.

I'll take it. Thank you. I am just so thrilled to be here. It's such an honor and so fun to meet a handful of you already. I'm looking forward to connecting hopefully with all of you at some point this week, weekend and just at least having a time to say hi. And it's been so moving for me just to see families that have come here so father and son and we saw there's a father and a daughter as well. Any other parent and kid connection, no way. Oh, just moves me so much. What? It gives me tears in my eyes just thinking of you guys coming out together. I know we have some couples here as well and just means a ton for you guys to be here and to support us. And I'm really excited about this weekend and today's actually a special day for us. 10 years ago I picked Alexandra up at 10am for a hike and I had our first date. We had, the funny thing was I had scheduled, we scheduled a hike and a lunch and I was somewhat nervous as I was driving. I'm like, why did we do that? A hike and a lunch. As it turns out, 36 hours later. Rated PG13, perhaps R. PG13. It was a very sweet first date. So this is our 10 year anniversary. So. And I literally couldn't think of a better way to celebrate it. I mean our first date, this is what we were talking about was what do we want to do with our lives? And we're going to talk about our heroic quest this weekend, which is really what I want to focus on obviously is heroic living. But then specifically what are you here to do? What's the next thing that's most firing you up over the next 1, 3, 5, 10 years, whatever it is, and drill into that. So for us to be able to celebrate with you is just so cool. So excited about it. This is our little one, Eleanor. We've got our four and a half year old. You want to say hi? Emerson. Emerson and Eleanor. And my beautiful wife. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. So another question on the Oasis, which we just launched the Oasis for you guys yesterday. So we kind of did our ready, fire, AIM launch. Just ship it, get you guys to the name tag with URLs. It's been awesome to see you already coming online. And I want to see who wins the record for furthest distance travel. Who came from Germany? You guys came from Germany. You guys are awesome. I'm pretty sure that's the furthest. Is that. Is that accurate? We have another potential competitor. Yeah. Turkey. Yeah. Argentina. Say it again. Amsterdam. Amsterdam. Wow. And then we've got a bunch of Canadians as well. Right? From Madrid, Spain. Wow. Such a cool group. And I'm so excited, too, just to have you guys together. For me to be able to interact with you is just awesome. And for us to be able to create a space where you guys can connect with one another is really inspiring for me. And two people came up and it was like they were best friends already. Like, really? You guys just met two seconds ago. That's really funny. And then continuing it on the Oasis. So we're going to make my intro this evening pretty quick. I'm going to give you kind of a sketch of what I want to get out of the weekend. We're going to start the movie a little maybe around seven. Finding Joe. Pat Solomon. Where are you, Pat? Pat may not even be in here right now, but Pat, the director of Finding Joe, is here, which I'm really excited about. So he'll be here for Q and A after. And then of course, we'll be able to talk about it. I'm going to go to bed. I'm going home. Going to bed while you guys are watching the movie so you can ask me questions about the movie tomorrow morning because that's how I roll. So I'm hitting my AM Sunrise trail tomorrow morning and excited to see you guys. So we're going to try to beam this. It might be hard for most of you to see this. We're going to try to beam the little thing here. I'm not a big keynote guy, so we're not going to do a whole lot of slides, but I want to kind of walk through the three things that I want to go through this weekend. And the drawing that I've been doing in my own kind of planning is this idea of what's our peak. So the number one thing that I want to talk about, obviously It's Hero Training 101. We want to talk about how we can live heroically in general. But as I mentioned, I want to get specific. What's your heroic quest? So when you think about what one thing you would do if you knew you couldn't fail, what one thing you would do if you were guaranteed to succeed, whether that's over one year or three years or five years or 10 years, what is it for you? And I want to help you get some clarity on that this weekend. And I want to start with a little poll. I've already gotten some feedback from people that are pretty darn clear and some people that aren't. But when you think about that and the question that I asked in the little email we sent out this week, how many of you have a good sense of this is it. This is what I want to dedicate the next phase of my life to. I have a really good sense of what it is. I'm excited to hammer through it this weekend. How many of you are kind of in that category? Awesome. So what is that? Maybe a third. That's cool. How many of you are in the. I got a sense, but I'm not totally laser clear. I can't boil it down into a word or a phrase or whatever, but I'm kind of getting there. Who would fall into that group? Maybe a little bit more, but about another third and then who falls into the. I really have no idea. You're scaring me. Awesome. So we've actually got some pretty good clarity. That's. What's that? That's exciting. So that's our number one thing is I want to get clarity here. In our worst case scenario, for those who are feeling a little bit overwhelmed is your quest might be to discover what your quest is. And that's awesome. And we can use all the stuff we're going to do for that. For those who have more clarity, let's boil it down and let's get really, really clear on what it is and then committed to making it happen. So that's my number one intention, is to help us define that. The second one is here you are at the base of this mountain and you've gone through all. Whatever you've gone through to get to this point. But we want to plus one it. We want to hold the dynamic tension which you've heard me talk about a lot. That rubber band between your ideal and your current reality. The way we manage that is day by day by day. That masterpiece day that we've talked about in Masterpiece Days 101, et cetera. We're going to talk about how to have great days. And I got this arrow from. I started working with Phil Stutz. You guys have heard me talk about the tools a lot. So I loved Phil Stutz. And I worked with Steve Chandler for a couple years and took a couple years off and just kind of wanted to do my own thing and coach myself. And then when I started getting ready to go back in and start playing a different game, I knew I wanted to work with Phil. So reached out to Phil and we'll talk about a lot of stuff. He's got his five tools in the book, and he's got like a treasure chest of secret tools. We'll weave a lot of that into this weekend. But he had this arrow and he said, look, if you want something, then it's really straightforward. Get clear on your target, make this deep commitment, and then it's very simple. Plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one,. Put it on autopilot and get there. I want to talk about three aspects to that one. I want to convince you that before you do anything in the day, start with your deep work. Start with the one thing that you think is most important to get you from here to there. And line up these plus ones and be ruthless about it. Before you go online, before you do anything other than must haves, moms and dads may need to do some stuff with the kids, but before you go and do anything that you don't need to do, you do what you decided is the most important thing. If that's all we get out of this weekend is clarity on the quest and clarity on the number one thing you're going to do. Deep work style. We're going to do a ton and let that be be a natural byproduct of you committing to the process, committing to the system. We're going to talk about systems a lot, too. The second thing I want to get out of that plus one is figuring out what one thing you're going to install. So you hear me talk about what thing are you going to add to your life that would have the most positive benefit in your life and what thing are you going to remove, which is our third thing? I talk about that all the time for a reason. I think it's the way to build habits. What's the number one thing you could start doing today that you're not currently doing that would have the most positive benefit if you did it every day. What is that? I want to get laser clear on that, and then I want to talk about how to get good at doing that. Month in and month out, we're constantly installing a new habit and building on the last set we just installed and constantly chipping away at the Kryptonite. That doesn't work for us. So plus one and that, minus one and number one, plus and minus is a key component to our plus one. And then the final aspect of what I want to go through is our tools. And what I don't want is this. I don't want to get stuck between where we are, the base of this mountain and the peak. In Latin, they had a word for this, and literally they had a word for being stuck in the middle of a rugged mountain. Pop quiz. Do you guys know that mediocrity medias OCRAs. The middle of a rugged mountain. That's. This is, you know, again, what's our quest? How are we going to get there? But then we need to have the tools. And not just, you know, Phil Stott's the tools and the secret tools, but we're going to go through about 9,100 tools over the weekend. The best stuff, frameworks, perspectives. But I want to throw it all through this analysis. So we'll revisit some stuff that we've talked about, but I want to run it through this quest and not get stuck here. So one of the things I love about that whole mediocre concept was if you go to the thesaurus, at least the thesaurus I went to, and you look up mediocre, there are a ton of synonyms. You know, there's like, average, middling, run of the mill, whatever, right? There's literally over a dozen synonyms, but there's only one antonym to mediocre. Do you guys know what that antonym is? Nice. Yeah. Excellence. Orate. Right. It's living with that sense of virtue. But we need to live with that in the moment that we're challenged. And this is what I want to be able to create, is clarity on these tools. So I always do things in top tens. We're going to do it in top tens this weekend as well. But I want you to think about as we go through this weekend, think about your top 10 when an idea resonates. Wow, that's amazing. That's a tool. I want to make a more Consistent part of my life. And then ideally, we have your number one tool that's just going to be your kind of secret weapon, et cetera. Another little facet here. I thought about writing a book as kind of a companion for this workshop, and it. I. I like to do a lot of things, but that wasn't quite in the cards for what we were doing. But the name of it was going to be Handbook for Heroes, named after Epictetus. Enchiridion. Enchiridion. The Enchiridion is translated as handbook. But what it really means is ready at hand. So when Epictetus taught, he wasn't teaching ideas that were abstract. His ideas were ready at hand, more like a sword than a handbook. So we want to move from theory to practice. And these tools are like swords. They're like weapons we can use to face our challenges heroically. Tools is another way we can frame it. So think about that. When something lands, let's make sure we're moving from theory to practice as we go through the weekend. So those are kind of the three big things. Excited about to go back to the quest briefly. Then I'll share the framework I want to use as we go through the weekend. I have three rules for our quest. And as you watch the movie tonight, think about where you are in the hero's journey that Pat does a great job of outlining and finding Joe. And think about how you're going to bring yourself and your quest to that journey. But I have three rules for the quest. Number one, it needs to be epic. It needs to be awesome. It needs to be kind of something that makes you Goosebumps, giddy, just fired up. You think about it and you kind of laugh to yourself. Like, really, the thing that you're not even really willing to say to yourself that you really, really, really want. We want to put that on paper. It's got to be epic. It's got to be exciting. It's got to be, like I said, goosebumps, giddy, cool. Fire you up. The second thing is, it's got to be about more than just you. So I talk about plus one, plus one, plus one all the time, plus two. As I said in the kind of introduction to our weekend together, heroes have strength for two. The word hero in Greek, as I'm sure all of you guys have heard me say, means protector. It doesn't mean tough guy or killer of bad guys. It's protector. A hero has strength for two. Their secret weapon is love and compassion and empathy. So as we think about that, Epic quest. We're not talking about pure lifestyle design here. I'm all about having a great life, but it's got to be about more than just that. We've got to move from that extrinsic everything is awesome on that to the intrinsic we're truly giving ourselves most fully to the world. Then the third rule is it's got to be doable. You've got to actually believe you can do it. Now, that might sound obvious, but it's easy to get spun out into the really exciting, epically awesome, goosebumps giddy dream that you actually don't really think you can achieve. And that's a really good way to get stuck here. So a big thing we're gonna do as we walk through confidence and proper goal setting and looking at the science of how to get these things done is to rub it up against reality. You've heard me talk about whoop a ton. And the science of goal setting. We're gonna revisit that and look at this goal and make sure it passes that third test as well, that you truly believe it's doable. You can get freaked out by it often, but in your heart, you know you can do it. Then when we look at that 1, 3, 5, 10 year horizon, for me, if I want to stress myself out on the epic goal, I make the goal really short. I need to do it in this period of time, which is actually cool. I like a certain amount of pressure. But then we release that pressure by giving ourselves a little bit more time. So for me, if I want to have an epically inspiring goal of having a million people in our social platform, which is what I'm committing myself to, I can put some pressure on that by saying it'd be awesome to do it by January 1, 2020. And it would be. And that's exciting. No pressure, no diamonds, which will be one of our mantras. But that's also, if I need to do that, that can create an unhealthy level of stress. So what I do is that's fine. Three years would be sweet. Five years would be pretty epic. I turned 50 in seven years. Awesome. You tell me in seven years. I'm celebrating my 50th birthday and we're hanging out and. And we have a million people in our tribe and in our community out there affecting the world. Goosebumps. They say that done. I'll take it. 50 years. Awesome. Epic. Let's do it. So we wanna find a way to make that epic awesome, plus two more than ourselves. Goal Doable, which we'll do as we walk through the weekend. So those are the top three, the 10 principles that we're going to use as kind of our guide. We, we'll split it into mind, body, spirit, roughly tomorrow morning, then a break, and then tomorrow afternoon and then Sunday morning. But it's all going to start with antifragile confidence. So all the leading peak performance experts tell us that it's 90% mental. At least you get to a certain stage of skill. And even to get to that level of skill, it's 90% mental. So we literally could spend our whole weekend just on that. Let's get our heads right and we kind of pretty much will. But antifragile confidence, we're going to go back to that idea of being anti fragile, which you've heard me talk about before, but we're going to really, really get clear on that, of how we can engage in that. Look at the science of confidence, hope and grit. All the things that we need to do to get our minds right. And then we're going to get clear on that purpose. And when we have a sense that we can do what we want to do that then the question is, what do you want to do? That deep, deep dharmically driven sense of purpose which requires a deep level of self awareness. We'll do a good number of exercises on that, which will be awesome. Those are our first three principles. Antifragile confidence, purpose and self awareness. And then of course we need to. So there's our high level purpose, here's our mind, right? And then we need to set some kind of intermediate goals, right? We're going to go to Scott Adams, Dilbert creator. How many of you have read the note on how to fail at almost everything and still win big fair number of you. So you may remember he says goals are for losers, right? Which I just love. And he's being deliberately provocative. But the point is, he says you need to, at the very least, word glue goals and systems. Goals are awesome. You need to have targets, right? Apollo is our patron God of philosophy. He's an archer. An archer has a target that they're aiming at very, very important. But then the archer's primary goal is to shoot straight. So we're gonna set our processes, our goals and our systems together. When we have those goals set up, then we're gonna take action consistently. We'll look at some powerful ways to get those systems operationalized. And then I like to say you're gonna have a hard time getting out of bed. If you have a hard time, you're gonna have a hard time actualizing your potential. And if you have a hard time getting out of bed. So we're going to talk about energy. We're not going to go into it in a ton of detail. What we'll talk about eating, moving, sleeping. I'm really into breathing right now. Currently. Breathing is awesome and focusing your mind. And one of the most ridiculous things we wanted to add to your bag is this strip of tape. And it's being shipped. I'm told we might arrive. You think it's going to arrive this weekend? Yeah, so we're hoping so. And it's probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. How many of you have heard me talk about putting a piece of tape over my lips? So it's. I'm just really excited about this idea of training ourselves to breathe through our nose. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about breath. I haven't taught a class on breathing yet. I've done a class on Nutrition 101, Movement 101, Sleep 101 and Meditation 101. I haven't done breathing 101 yet. So we'll talk about that. But I'll leave a lot of the details to those master classes. But we have energy. After we have our taking action, then we have wisdom. Wisdom kind of envelops this whole thing. And again, wisdom is really, for me, all about theory. To practice moving from knowledge to actually embodied truth and lived truth. We'll talk about that. And then kind of enveloping this whole thing is courageous courage. The word comes from the Latin word for heart. So courage is literally the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. We can think about all these ideas, but if we don't have the courage to actually live them in the moment we need to live them, it doesn't matter. So we're going to talk about bringing it on. We're going to practice bringing it on with this big goal. We're going to talk about. I'm excited. We're going to talk about all the other ways to master your fear. And then we're going to move to love, which obviously envelops the whole thing as well. We'll talk about how to live heroically with and in love. Then we're going to wrap it up with entheos. So in theos, God within. At the end of the day, this is what this is all about. We talk about eudaimonia, right? Which literally means good soul. Well, the Greeks had it. Right. Right. Good soul. If moment to moment to moment, you're doing what your soul would most like to see you do, you're going to feel a sense of joy, you're gonna feel a sense of flourishing. And what happens? Well, God is within and theos. And then what do you have? Then you have radiant enthusiasm. Ultimately, that's what you want in this moment. Moment to moment to moment, enjoy the process. Because it's also really easy to get really excited about that goal and be what tall Ben Shahar calls that rat racer. We're never quite enough. We're never quite ready to start enjoying life. We want to be able to bring it back to today, stretch it out, be excited. But as he says, happiness. You need to have a goal. You can't just wander around the base of the mountain and be a hedonist. But you also can't be so obsessed about the end goal that you forget that right now is the time to actually enjoy the process. So he says the happiest people are the ones who have a very clear goal and they're going toward that mountain peak, but they're enjoying the journey. They're taking the time to actually look around and see what's happening and realize that as much as we aspire to be there, where we are is awesome. So appreciating that, really grounding ourselves in that is something we'll have fun with as well. So that's what we want to do. Quest our plus one, our tools, and those 10 principles. And I'm fired up, and that was quick. As I promised, We have our co teacher here. So tell me where you guys are at. Any questions at this stage? Anyone want to share anything? Anything I can offer some support on now? Yeah, We might have a mic. Let me get a mic. Yeah, we have a mic back here. So can you hear me? Perfect. I'm still struggling with the concept of entios in the divine within, God within. Can you help me wrap my head around how does that actually manifest itself? And you just said that this is what it's all about. So is that really the ultimate goal, is reaching this state of flow?

I guess.

Is that how I can understand it, and is it possible for that to actually happen? Awesome. Yeah. So entheos, two little Greek words, Entheos, God within, which form the word enthusiasm. And I love connecting it, as I briefly did to eudaimonia. So eudaimon is literally good soul. So I went quickly through that. But again, the Greeks word for happiness in the deeper sense of flourishing, not hedonism in the sense of enjoying yourself in the moment, whether it's through some sensual pleasure or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. But they distinguish that between hedonic pleasure and eudaimonic joy. Right? So eudaimonic again, good soul. And imagine that you have this little God outside of you watching you. So my whole philosophy, as I've said so many times, is you can boil it down to one word. Again, the Greeks, they said, if you want that eudaimonia, live with arete, live with excellence. Which for me is, here's what you're capable of in this moment. And if you're doing that, that's where regret and anxiety and disillusionment and depression exist. If you're doing that, there's no room for regret and anxiety and disillusionment and depression. That's arete, that's eudaimonia. And when you do that, I think you've invited the divine, or whatever you want to call it, the highest within yourself, to the party. And what does that feel like? That feels like radiant enthusiasm. And I know that exists because I'm feeling it right now. And to me, you know, Dan Millman said there are no enlightened beings. He didn't believe in that. But there are more or less enlightened moments. So for me, I think enlightenment is kind of a fixed state orientation. You either have it or you don't. We're going to talk about Carol Dweck today. Tomorrow in antifragile confidence. I prefer the growth mindset, which is. You know what? It's not an either or binary state in the general sense. Moment to moment to moment it is, but you can grow into a deeper connection to the light within you and be more enlightened. I don't really use that word often, but be more connected to the divine of the highest within and shine with that radiant enthusiasm. And with another word we're going to talk about this weekend, euthymia, my other new favorite Greek word, tranquility, where you simultaneously have this energized sense of life, yet you're also really calm and grounded and tranquil, and you trust that you're walking your path. And this path that we're gonna map out, everyone's is obviously going to be different, but the key is it's your path. This is euthymia, where you actually have taken the time to figure out what matters to you, what your gifts are, how you want to give them to the world. And as Ryan Holiday says in the Daily Stoic, and ego is the enemy. You're not looking side to side and second guessing yourself every two seconds and you're not comparing yourself to other people. We'll talk about this a few times this weekend. Social comparison and looking at what this person is doing and comparing yourself to them is one of the most toxic things you can possibly do. So again, we want to find the ways that we can integrate these ideas and why I say that everything is about entheos at the end of the day is is because it is. At the end of the day, we want to feel that sense of joy that I think only comes when we're in integrity with our highest selves again, moment to moment to moment. And when we fall out of integrity, that's not the time to shame ourselves. That would be a minus one. That's the time to say, wow, I fell short. And we're going to talk about this. Playing poorly. Well, never wasting a mistake. You have a bad day, don't get upset with yourself, but put on your lab coat. That's data. What you did that day doesn't work. Let's stop doing that then. That bad day is actually awesome. That bad day is actually what's going to help us have better days. And we realize that. I realize I've completely destroyed this thing, but I could use a new page. That's exciting that growth doesn't go like that. And again, I've shared this in so many different contexts, but we've got to really get this. Growth does not look like that to anyone other than a fact. Fixed mindset, perfectionist person who's suffering a lot. Right. Growth looks like this and sometimes like that. But what we don't want to do is make it like this. Oh, man, where did I go? I'm back over here. And this is why I'm so passionate about the kryptonite and identifying. What do you do? Like, okay, so you're going to leave this weekend and you're going to be on an up curve. There's no question about that. Right? This is why we're here. It's exciting. Ken Wilber says your state experience is going to be exceptionally high, like being shot out of a cannon. The challenge is that you're going to go back to the traits that you have and your sense of who you were before kind of quickly. Right. This is how it's going to work. And our job, as I like to say, is build the scaffolding. So these state experiences, you might even go up here. These state experiences, if you diligently and patiently and persistently do the fundamentals and remove the Kryptonites. You don't fall down, can become your normal state of being. We've got to realize that that doesn't happen like that, that it's a matter of showing up again. The plus one. Plus one, plus one chipping away at the Kryptonites and allowing more of the divine to come through. And Alan Cohen tells a great story, which is the intro to Finding Joe the Golden Buddha. That's what we're talking about. And you'll know what I'm talking about. Or if you've watched the movie, you know what I'm talking about. But you'll see that. So that's a long, meandering answer to how I see in Theos. Does that help? Thanks for the great question getting me fired up. Anybody else have any questions? Did you say that again? Yeah. What did I say? I have no idea what I just said. Did I say something? Yeah. Let's get you a mic.

Hi. Thanks so much. And so for those of us who.

Were that second group who said, we're almost, we have ideas, but we're not.

Pitched around them yet and we're not laser beam on them.

Like, what are some of the things.

Like tonight and tomorrow morning that would.

You know, that we could pull out.

Of or listen to harder to get to where, you know, we hope to go.

And congratulations to all those people who.

Know what they're going to do.

Exactly. You can go. Great questions, and thank you for asking. So have you asked yourself the question, these questions that what would you do if you weren't afraid, if you were absolutely guaranteed to succeed? This is a Brian Tracy question I learned maybe 15 years ago, and it just blew my brain out when I first heard it. And I've come back to it another time, a number of times. If you were absolutely guaranteed to succeed, you could not fail. Now, of course, that's not actually the case, and we're going to talk about that this weekend. As Joseph Campbell says, when you go after bliss, there's always the chance of fiasco. So we've got to embrace that. When you're living heroically, you're not guaranteed success. But for the sake of our wishing and the sake of actually chipping away at the things that might be getting in the way, if you were guaranteed to succeed, you could not fail. Not possible. What one thing would you dare to dream? And I'm not saying you need to have an answer right this moment, but I do think that actually stepping back and asking ourselves that question is super helpful. And you can write down, and we'll do this tomorrow, and you can do this tonight. Write down every single thing that comes to mind. So write down, you know, I would do this and I would do that and I would do this and I would do that, then I would do that, then I would do this and I would do this and just get it all out. And then look at the list and say, okay, that's all awesome, but what do I really, really want? Or to go, Gary Keller, one thing style. If I could only achieve one thing out of that list, like what one thing would be most catalytic for my life that would just, again, goosebumps, giddy. If I fast forwarded my life two years or five years or 10 years and I did that, that would just be, to use the word again, epically awesome. And just kind of triangulate to it is what I would suggest is any of that helpful? And then again, we'll talk about this tomorrow morning as well. I think we need to get. I'll kind of share a little bit of it right now. Antifragile. The whole idea of antifragile, as you know, is you can be fragile, you can be robust, or you can be antifragile, right? And that the wind extinguishes a candle, but fuels a fire. So wind is fragile. A fire is not. A fire uses that wind to get bigger. So we need to allow ourselves to get excited. We need to allow ourselves to rub those sticks together and get to activation energy of 451 degrees and be on fire. And this is, you know, I mentioned it in one of the early plus ones, but this isn't a new idea. Joseph Campbell quotes Ramakrishna, who says, don't approach this stuff unless you approach it like a man whose hair is on fire approaches a pond. But in our lives, it's not appropriate to be super intense and to be super all in and super fired up and to be willing to go all in, yet maintain the stability. And we've all fallen short a number of times, which leads to a certain limp, you know, that goes in when we start dreaming again of, yeah, that's nice, but I've fallen short these times. But we need to step back and say, what do I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really want? Which parallels Ralph Waldo Emerson's Always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always do the thing you're afraid to do. And the death of fear is certain, but we need to get really excited about it and literally turn up that heat So I think that's another thing I hope to be able to support you with this weekend. Does that help? Cool. So I got kind of a two.

Piece question.

When I hear what you're saying about setting goals, doing what you want.

First of all, I think, well, I'm.

Torn between intrinsic and extrinsic goals.

Because the extrinsic goal I can play, put a mile mark around, be like, yes, I actually accomplished something.

And then the intrinsic goals, they seem.

To be more meaningful but not measurable.

Or like there's no mile marker, finish line.

Yes, that's where I'm going.

Maybe you could address. Yeah, well, so when I hear that, you know, there's kind of like that, if you will. Right. The kind of circles they kind of intersect. And then psychologists also call them concordant goals, where you don't want to set goals, where you're like, oh, yeah, I want to do that, but then it conflicts with that and you want them concordant. So I would say, you know, in the wisdom section, we'll probably talk about either or. Most of the time we make things binary. Either this or that. We want to get rid of that and transcend and include both, to use another Ken Wilber phrase. Yes. And so I would offer, okay, cool. We actually, we need those extrinsic. I talk a lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic. And the science is unequivocal. If you're disproportionately going after the extrinsic stuff and defined as the fame, the wealth, the hotness, and that's just kind of what you're doing. You're not even thinking about the other stuff. You will be less psychologically stable than people who are more committed to the intrinsic goals. The stuff like becoming a better human being, contributing to your community, creating autonomy in your life, et cetera. Right. But it isn't either or. And if I've made it seem like that, then I'll apologize for that. We want to integrate the two. So I would suggest. Okay, so what's that extrinsic thing that gets you fired up? That's pretty exciting and it'd be pretty awesome. How do you bake it such that it's actually challenging you to do all the things you want to do intrinsically and to your point, and we'll talk about this too. Our growth is asymptotic. We're just chewing through these. Our growth is asymptotic. You will never achieve your potential. That's the other rule is that we have this false sense that we're someday gonna make it right. So the tools guys call this being exonerated. So one day I'm gonna get to a point where I don't need to do any of this stuff anymore. Right. It's just done. I'm exonerated from all future work. And they laugh at you with that. Yeah, good luck with that. Again, that's a fixed mindset. Never going to get there. So it's asymptotic. Your intrinsic growth is always going to be. Your potential is always going to be out of your reach. And that's a beautiful, wonderful thing. But what we want to do is concretize your project orientation. So as Sonia Lybomirsky says, again, leading researcher, scientist on. Well, being happy. People have projects, heroes have quests. So what's our quest? And again, epically awesome. It's not just about you. You're giving back to the world, which is a way to weave in the intrinsic. Right. And you believe you can do it. Does that help? Yeah, that's great.

Can I just ask the other.

Of course, yeah. Yeah. I run into the conflict of what.

I want to do and then what.

I feel like I ought to do. You're the only one. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just kidding. Right? How do you work through that?

Do I just need to change my.

Desires, or do I need to somehow.

Escape from the pressures of standards that.

Are trying to get me to conform? Yes and yes. Yes to both. Yeah. I mean, this is another thing we'll talk about in purpose. I think it's the same thing, you know, the little circles that intersect. We need to simultaneously have that trust in ourselves that Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about. Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. Trust yourself. Right. Nothing is more important. He says, truly, it takes something heroic in one godlike. He actually says to trust himself or herself as his own taskmaster. So it's not hard to go a different path than the rest of society. Now, having said that, we also need to marry it with the wisdom from the Stoics of we're not 100% in control of our purpose and even of our epic quests. We all have constraints. And the Stoics said, play your role well. They say that you aren't the one who is the director of the whole show. There's actually something bigger than you. Right. And they're asking you to play a role. Your job is to play the role well. And your job is to unplug from all the Nonsense long enough to actually answer the question you just asked and to actually journal rather than respond to the latest push or TV show or whatever. To say, what is the difference here? What's a total should that I need to actually say? I'm just not interested in that. I don't need to conform and play that game. But you know what? I actually choose to do this. And the Stoics also said the wise person does nothing reluctantly. And Buddha echoed it. He says, if you decide to do something, which is a very important pre qualification, if you decide to do something, do it with all your heart. Sit or stand. Don't wobble. When you decide you're going to go in, you go in. But you're not doing it because you have to or because you should do it because you've decided that this is how you're going to be an integrated, compassionate, passionate human being who's dynamically figuring these things out. Easier said than done, but if you still have the mic. Yeah, okay.

Hi, Brian. Can you hear me?

I can.

Hey, it's Liz.

Hi, Liz. Anyway, just kidding, I.

Something you said actually really resonated with me. And I think what I'm struggling with right now is I feel like my concentration is naturally sensitive. So with all the things that are going on in the world, sometimes I get very overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed.

And I can't tell the difference between that, I guess, psychic overwhelm versus what I am trying to do, like my purpose. And so it's easy for me to shut down. It's easy for me to not blame.

Myself for shutting down.

And then it just goes on and on. So how are you managing the world we live in right now and the things you're trying to get done?

Such a good question. And this is really what inspired me to initially, you know, we were looking to acquire the campus and do this on our campus, which didn't work. And we'll talk about that. And it's all great and part of the process, but, you know, the state of our world has inspired me to step up and for us to kind of do what we're here to do. Several things come to mind. First, Michelangelo, he has a great quote. He says, criticize by creating. So I think the hero isn't saying, why is this happening in general? Why is it happening to me? Why is all this making a list of all the things that are wrong in the world? The hero doesn't do that. The hero said what needs to get done. And what am I going to do to create the world that I want to create. So making that shift, which we'll talk about tomorrow, from victim to hero is a huge part of antifragile confidence. And we live in the world we live in. But the reality is heroes want the bigger challenges. Heroes don't pull the covers over their head when things are bad. You look at the revolution, and I think it was Abigail Adams writing to her son. She basically said, this is what heroes live for. This is why it's your opportunity to be alive. And I think we need to embrace those challenges again as heroes, which is obviously not easy. And that's one way that I'm approaching it. The other way is the final idea. I forget which section I put it into, but it's Ryan Holiday's. I don't know and I don't care. So we need to get good at putting up gates to information. And I'm not saying put your head in the sand, but I am saying you cannot. You cannot possibly bombard yourself with every piece of news going on, in addition to every piece of entertainment that's coming at us in 2017, and have any sense of inner tranquility. Euthymia. It's not possible. The two cannot coexist. And one other thing that we'll talk about again to briefly touch on it, I think it was Alberto Villoldo who said that if you go back in the day and our brains evolved to deal with one lion in a jungle roaring at us, that's our limbic system and our amygdala. Boom. Wow. We've got a lion roaring at us. You respond to that fight or flight, you get out of there or you die, Whatever. Right? That's the situation. And you move on. These days, with the way we're so plugged into everything, both in our national environment and international environments, it's as if the entire jungle is rising up every moment of every day, and your limbic system can't handle that. So we need to discipline ourselves to say, what do I really need to know here? Right? And then I don't know that other stuff, and I don't care about that other stuff because I am so focused on criticizing by creating. And I know that if the first thing I do in the morning is wake up and read the news and the last thing I do before I go to bed is read the news, there's no scenario where I'm ever going to be able to do what I'm here to do. Which is why one of the big things I want to get out of this weekend is at Least unplugged an hour or whatever before you go to bed, and at least until you do an hour of solid, deep work on your heroic quest. Then we can deal with these things. But otherwise we're just kind of a ping pong ball. And one other thing to bring the point home, the Boston Marathon bombing. And I've shared this stat before, but it's worth sharing again. Individuals who watch something like six hours of news coverage of the Boston bombing had greater levels of Post Traumatic Stress disorder than people who experienced it. Think about that for a second. If you watch six hours, there's something small like that of this news coverage. The visual, your limbic system cannot say that's happening over there to other people. It just takes it in and freaks out. And if we're doing that all day, every day, greatest predictor of depression and anxiety is the number of hours people watch talk shows, like, and just all that stuff. So again, if we have a mainline into that information, we're screwed. To put it bluntly. I mean, that's this tough to navigate it. So for me, you know, I find my balance. I don't do. I don't do digital news almost exclusively. Just don't do that. Got that from Cal Newport. He doesn't do it. He opens an old school newspaper. My thing is the Economist, right? I got the LA Times for a while. It wasn't quite my thing. I get the Economist once a week. Cool. That's what I'll read. And I have conversations with people I admire and people who I respect their opinions, and I get caught up on different things and I kind of do that, but that isn't my thing. My thing right now is not keeping up on all the latest. I know what's going on and I know that it's not the world that I want my family to grow up in. Therefore, what am I going to do? And that's where I put all of my energy. So that's the. Hey, Brian. Hey. Hello. Hey, Brian, it's Art. How you doing, man? I feel like I'm like watching all of your videos. I dressed up for you guys, you know, it's so nice to hear everything. You get to see, like waist down, though, so you do wear those shoes. Nice Spanish. So I was going to ask you a couple things, but first off, just want to thank you. And secondly, so I'm in entertainment and it's hard to disconnect from Instagram and everything when all of those things are part of my world. And I want to. I want to, you Know, have a lot more intrinsic work going on. But it seems like I'm always getting pulled in that extrinsic world. Firstly, I wanted to ask about that, but also I think most importantly I wanted to ask because I hear in your videos you always talk about being a recovering perfectionist. And I feel like I identify heavily with that. And so I wanted to ask kind of maybe your blueprint on how you would get past that or recover from that. Yep. I'll start at the second part and then I'm going to need your help bringing me back to the first. But we'll talk about them. We will talk about the idea of perfectionism in the wisdom principle. Probably late tomorrow. Yeah. So there's the optimalist and the perfectionist. A model I use a lot. We just got to embrace the constraints of reality is my big thing. And we'll talk about setting goals. I mentioned it, the whole, you know. Yeah, if you need to do it in a year, good luck. I forget who said it, but there are no unrealistic goals per se, just unrealistic timelines. So that's been a big thing for me is just push it out. Two things stress me out the most when I make a goal just possible but ridiculous. Right. In the near term and all about me. If I'm able to stretch that out over a long term and make it about other people, my stress goes down dramatically. So that's one practice. Being willing to be good enough is another practice. But we'll talk about that more tomorrow. And then remind me your first question. So make sure I get it right. Being in entertainment and having to be. Yeah, yeah. So I think to put it very directly, I think we need to all face up to our addiction. I think it's nothing short of addiction, period. It's a compulsion to want to go online. And I took a year off of about a year off of my iPhone. Right. And then when we started doing the acquisition of the campus, I needed to do a little bit more. So I got a new phone. Hadn't had a phone. I used Alexandra's, if she's still here. Thank you, darling, for, you know, a few people had her number if they really needed to get in touch with me. Otherwise a couple other people had access to me via our online imessages. And that's it. Right. But when I got back on, it was amazing to me to see how quickly I could get back into that little rat like behavior. And so I think it's really important to step back and say, look, there are brilliant Brilliant human beings who have studied all of these things and know exactly how to hook your attention. And I'm simultaneously extraordinarily grateful for the opportunity to connect with you. I couldn't do it without that technology. But we need to realize that heroes aren't that, you know, And I would say if your job requires you to be on social media, awesome. We're building a social media platform now. I left YouTube and Facebook, and I have not been involved in those for months now because I've put all my energy into this. And my joke was, yeah, I'll be active again when we've built ours. And I'm going to be really active on ours. I can't wait. But I promise you this. I will never go onto that platform until I've done my most important work for the day. You couldn't pay me to do anything other than my deep work first thing in the morning. This is what I'm saying. Plus one style. I. I want to convince you that. Cool. Go to Instagram, go to all these places. If it's truly creative, professional work. I call that teamwork. Right. So there's deep work, there's teamwork, then there's monkey work, which we'll talk about in action. Right. Monkey work is just admin stuff you need to get done. Right. Teamwork is you got to engage with your team, whether it's your customers or your team or whatever. And then deep work is just you. It's you completely unplugged. So for me, and you've heard me tell this story before, but my. My days started the exact same way every day, and they start the night before I unplug. Digital sunset style. I'm done pretty much always when the sun goes down. My electronics are not on because I want a good night of sleep, which is my number one fundamental, which we're gonna help you get clarity on. Right. And then I wake up couple, two, three hours before the family gets up. And which is. Which is like a sport for me to see how early I could go to bed after reading the story and how early I can get up. It's literally like I get giddy. Like, this is how ridiculous I am. Anyway, I get up, I meditate, and the Internet is unplugged. So our WI fi is unplugged unless we're using it. We don't take a break from our WI fi. We plug it in to use it. It's a big distinction. And if you want to be creative, I would highly recommend you do that. And it's a very deliberate process of I am now plugging in and I'm gonna do stuff that involves me being plugged in. I am now unplugged. I'm not that 55% of the people are more. I forget the status. I think it's way more than that. Last thing they do, first thing they do, check their phone. Mostly social media, whatever's going on. And again, most of us, I used to do that. I mean, that's what I used to do until it got clear that that's not helping me do what I actually want to do. Which is why we got to get fired up about that truly epic quest. Do you really want it? As Scott Adams says, you got to get clear on it, and then you got to get clear on what's the price you're going to need to pay. And then GSP George St. Pierre, he was a garbage man and he decided, I want to be the best in the world at fighting. I want to be the best mixed martial artist in the world. And he decided that when he was a garbage man full time, that's what I'm going to do. And then he said he made decisions, not sacrifices. He decided to not party like all of his friends. He decided to not do that or do that or do that. He made decisions, not sacrifices. So I think we need to get clear and then make decisions. And I think that decision to say, okay, cool, Instagram lives here. It doesn't live here. I can't overstate the power of that. And again, if that's the only thing I convince you of this weekend, I'd be thrilled. I think that's huge. We've got one back here. We'll bring it up. Thanks, guys.

So, two quick things. You've given us a lot of information.

Today and we'll get a lot of weekend.

How do you best suggest to keep.

It all organized so we can go.

Home and apply it? And two, how do you remember all these quotes?

Sleep.

He gets a lot of sleep. It's the sleep. That's exactly right. It's funny, though. Let's talk about that for a moment. I've shared this before, but people who don't. Well, I should say this differently. Well, yeah, people who don't get enough sleep, you can test them and test their memory and you'll see that they actually don't have a very good memory for things they'd like to remember, but they have a very good memory for things they wish they didn't remember. They remember the bad things. It's A fascinating thing. And it's for me, I am a different person without an adequate amount of sleep. And I think Alexander has left, but she will attest to this different person. I mean, there's like Brian with sleep, there's Brian without sleep. They're very different people. So I prioritize it anyway. That's probably a very good answer to the slide sleep question. And then in terms of the ideas. So I'm obviously a fire hydrant. I'm going to share a ton of ideas and a ton of energy, et cetera. What we don't want to do, perfectionist wise, is think that we're going to come out of that cannonball and have it all rocked, right? So I've been. The reason I know these quotes is because this is what I've been living for the last 10, 15 years. And I saw someone with a composition sketchbook that I took with me in 2001 when I traveled through the Middle east. And I literally had written out and then had printed out hundreds of quotes. This is 16 years ago. That's just what I've always loved. But I would suggest when I was mentioning in my things, I wanted to do the tools. When you hear an idea that's just one of those lightning, wow, that just really, really resonates. I think it resonates because you already knew it. And maybe I articulated in a way that either reminded you of something or just, boom, broke through whatever little doubt you had about it. Like, when I work with Phil Stutz, I'm pretty comfortable with this content. But I work with him and he tells me something and I don't need to think about it again. It's like the idea that I thought I knew pretty well and had integrated in my life. When he and I converse about it like we are now, it just falls in. It's hard to describe it at a deeper level. So trust that. And then I would kind of have a side page going, maybe where you're like, I want to really remember this idea and make a word or two or three note of it. And then the only way to make something stick is to practice it. Which, again, is the theme of everything that I do is turn it from knowledge and ideas to practice. And as Michael Beckwith says, to quote again, you know, rudimentary spirituality is the theory. It's talking about it. Advanced spirituality, advanced philosophy is the practice. And the Stoics said that in why Epictetus book was called the Enchiridion. It was a sword, it was ready at hand. And these Ancient philosophers wouldn't recognize the modern version, you know, who were just talking about ideas and abstract theory, theory and the towers, white towers, he says. Or one of the guys who comments on them says that the modern philosopher is a librarian of the mind. The ancient philosopher was a warrior of the mind. They took these ideas and they took them into their lives, their life. So I think that's a key. And then recognizing that some things I say may not resonate at all, others will resonate, but kind of fall on the ground like seeds. And maybe in a month or two or three, or a year or two or three, that will germinate when the context is right. But trust those things that really, really resonate and make your own handbook. Like literally. It'd be awesome to have that one idea. The top 10 ideas that we'll reflect on in the last session, we'll actually look at it and say, okay, what were the 10 ideas that just most landed for you? Right. The same way I'm always doing. Hey, 1, 2, 3. That's how. I think it'd be pretty cool to distill it down into the essence. Does that help? We had.

I think.

Let's go up to the front and we're obviously going a little late. This is great, though. Did you want to ask.

Hi, I'm Kim Leung.

Thank you so much for being here.

And having this gathering of really excited souls.

So when you speak about your radiating.

Enthusiasm, I'm totally feeling it.

Very excited. And my mind goes straight to Sunday.

Afternoon when we all leave, and I.

Feel like I need a pat on.

The back, a little consoling.

How do I not leave Sunday Failing.

How do you not leave on Sunday failing?

Right.

Not being ready, not having tools. This is good. This is gonna be. We've got a good conversation going here with perfectionists, so I think we need to have. We'll jump into that really quickly. So. How to Be an Imperfectionist. Stephen Guise. Great book, right? He says that when you set your goals, most people have the. And we're gonna talk about this when we get into the detail. The epically awesome. He calls it a ceiling goal. Everything goes perfectly, right? He says, okay, that's cool, but you gotta have a floor goal too. Of the bare minimum. I gotta make sure this happens. Which is also part of the anti fragile strategy. You want to be super aggressive and you want to be super conservative. If you're super aggressive all the time and you're swinging for the fences all the time, you're exposing yourself more than necessary. We want to be conservative as well. So I would suggest that if you get one idea out of this, it's like, that's awesome. Boom. You won. That's fantastic. There's your floor. Make it really, really, really, really easy to win in life, which is another key way that I've dealt with perfectionism. When you're creating habits, which we'll talk about. Stephen guys also wrote mini habits. So microhabits, he says, create habits that are so easy, you can't fail. They're silly small. They're stupid small. Don't try to work out for 30 minutes a day. Do one push up a day that you can do on your worst day. So I would set your expectations. And he says if your floor is your ceiling that's kind of tight, like, there's not a lot of room to live in there. And you're going to have a lot of problems and a lot of challenges. So I think reset your expectations in terms of what's going to make this a success. And I'm personally just already so excited with what we've already done in the first 45 minutes of little distinctions that we can take and actually implement in our lives. So I would do that. And then also the humility of. It's not supposed to be easy. You know, a heroic quest, by definition, is not easy. And when we have a fixed mindset that basically says that we should be able to go navigate that path without tripping and without falling down and without getting scarred, then we're really going to struggle. But with the growth mindset and one of the ideas we'll talk about, we bear our scars like metals. So all those times that we fall short and that dragon gets us, and we get that scar from that dragon, we tried to fight it, and then we got this scar from over there, there's a healthy relationship to the dynamic of growth that I think is also really essential. Does that help? Let's get past that mic. We're gonna make our way over here. Oops.

I didn't know who it was for.

Hi, Shannon. I just wanted to comment on the last couple of comments, and it's maybe because I'm a little older, and I think that I've been on a lot of journeys and a lot of, I would hope, hero journeys. It doesn't mean that you go quit your job tomorrow and you're immediately that hero. It's. For me, it's been defining and clarifying what that journey is and just simply making more good decisions versus bad. Is that plus one? And you do make bad decisions. So as I listen to some of the perfectionists, which I've done a lot of in my life, and it used to be if I'm not all in and if I fall down once, there's no way you can fail. I mean, you're going to make bad decisions. And so it's not, I have to quit a job that I need to feed my family, and I'm going to be this hero tomorrow. It's five years from now. This is exactly what I want to be doing with my life. But for me, what I found is it's years of moving my job, getting a little closer to my home, getting the things I don't want done. And literally, I just finished one journey. I'm hoping to start another with this. And that's why I'm here, because I'm just starting a new journey. But I have to tell you, my last journey. Where I live, who I'm married to, my family, my children, the career that I have. I am astounded every day that I am where I am at. And there have been so many mistakes along the way. And I didn't just wake up there. It was years of making more good decisions, but very clear decisions about where I wanted to be versus bad. And there were some dark days. We were talking about the car, but it's. But I think, though, when I hear people say, well, if I leave here, I don't make it. It's like it's just starting. It's the first step up the trail.

I believe you're a fan of incremental optimization. I like it. Yes. Let's check in on time, too. 7:30, you guys are comfortable. Let's take that mic. If we can pass it or get some help. We got the long pass. So let's do two more questions now, and then we'll start the movie. Pat, are you here? There he is.

Okay, Brian. Oh, my gosh. I can't even believe that I'm here. And I have a million questions. My name is Maggie G. And what I have more than anything is this swelling in my heart of gratitude for you for creating this space, because I didn't realize it until I met my new best friends.

Today.

I have five new best friends that I met. We're sharing a room here. It's amazing. And I didn't realize that I wasn't breathing.

That you weren't what?

Breathing. I live in another state. I'm from California, but For the past 12 years, I've been living in a state which really Isn't that open minded? And I hadn't realized I wasn't breathing. And these new friends will attest that I've been kind of high because without having to connect for an hour, we instantly are on this vibration. And I'm high right now. I am literally high because I resonate with this group and I am giddy with excitement about what's going to happen. I already feel like I can go home because I have already gotten what I came here. So thank you everyone here and thank you.

Thank you. We'll do two more and you've been waiting, so we'll do three more. We're gonna. I can't. I haven't. You know, it's an addiction. It's an addiction.

Okay.

Hello, my name is Michelle. And one thing, I'm 22 years old. So I'm at kind of a crossroads in my life. And I guess one thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is how do I know that I'm walking my own authentic path, I guess, and not the path that I assume others want me to walk or I assume even that I myself want to walk. How do I know that what I'm doing is really what I'm put on earth to do?

I guess. Is it Shannon, I have an answer. No, I know you have an answer, but Shannon, right. It's. Her wisdom on the incremental path is so key. Michelle, right. Came with her dad, Derek. So this is one of our. So cool. So she shared that. Yeah. When she was sixth grade, was it you got the Seven Habits. The Seven Habits for Teens. In sixth grade. I read my first self development book was at 21, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. So you're way ahead of the game of where I was at 22. At 22 hours, graduating, about to start a career I hated. Threw up on my way home from work. What are we on the 405? Pulled over on the side of the freeway a week into my job and literally threw up into whatever sweater or whatever I had in the thing. Awesome story, right? So you're ahead of the game. Congratulations. And then, you know, went to law school and literally actually I threw up. When I moved into my apartment, I had this physical response. It's happened one more time in my life. That's a good signal, by the way. And then, you know, it's an iterative process. One of the things we're going to talk about is that Joseph Campbell says that the good life is one hero journey after another. And what's beautiful Is that as you are willing to embark on the new hero journey, which I actually think is the hardest part of the process, and we'll see it tonight, that the initiation phase. I'm sorry, the call to action. I actually think it's the hardest part of the journey. When the phone's ringing and your life is comfortable, your life is good enough. In fact, it might be amazing, yet you have this little niggle that something's more. And it doesn't mean that you need to quit your job tomorrow, but it does mean you need to pay attention to that ring. To go back to your question on the authentic life, Dan Millman says that we got to look at the word authentic. It has the same root as authority. So the exciting thing is when you're living an authentic life, you are the author of your life. So the same conversation around shoulds and have to's versus I choose to's, and just being willing to take that control of architecting your life, being willing to make a ton of mistakes, which we'll talk about this weekend. Try a lot of things. You know, if I remember once I shared a story of my first business with a guy who was getting his mba and I only had like an hour with him, but I shared different things. And then he wrote basically, well, he started this business and this was the idea. Then he did this, then he did that, and it was awesome, right? But he missed that. That's not at all how it went. It started, it was preceded by the most terrifying time of my life. And then I had no money and was it going to work? Is this a stupid idea? A year later, I didn't even want to come out to the business plan competition because I thought we sucked and almost didn't come. And we ended up winning it. And then we wound up doing this and this. And every single point, there was all this stress and all these questions that the hero faces. So I think the first thing to get rid of is the naivete that it's going to be easy and then roll up our sleeves and be willing to kind of struggle and suffer, you know, and try this and go, wow, that wasn't it. And that was the hardest thing for me was thinking that I had to get it right versus keeping a base, you know, and stability and all that, but also being willing to experiment and truly test things. Well, I'll try this. If it doesn't work, I'll try that. If that doesn't work, I'll try that. And each time, worst case scenario, you're checking A box. It's not that. That's awesome. It's not that. And kind of moving through that process. We'll talk about more ideas and I'll have you in mind as I do it. And again, just embracing that. As I said, Emerson, it's really challenging. And the fact that you're even here at 22, engaged in this process for me is just so inspiring. And it's a beautiful thing. And I'm excited to see where you are in 20 years looking back on this process. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. Let's go back.

Hi, Brian.

My name is Veronica. And prior to coming here, I made a commitment to not live my life in fear anymore. Because every single decision that I've made that I was conscious or unconscious was based in fear. And I want you to address that and support with all the wisdom. And I want you to see if you could recommend the best book on addressing that, because I know you've read about 100 billion books.

Roughly, give or take, roughly.

Thank you.

Yeah, this is good. I mean, there's so much we will talk about with that. We'll have a specific section just on courage. We'll talk about fear, the one thing to start with, and you'll see it in the movie, too. Fear's not going away. And the more that you actually commit to this path, actually, the more fear you're going to feel. So what we want to do is to get really comfortable being really uncomfortable and do it delicately and do it incrementally, but get a little bit more comfortable today. Being a little more uncomfortable today. And Phil Stotts, our first second idea in courage is going to be the reversal of desire. And rather than trying to get rid of the fear, we want to look at fear as a signal that we have an opportunity to grow. And then rather than say, make it go away, we say, bring it on. And that's not an easy thing to do. But every single time you feel a whisper of fear, the tools guys actually say, you need to shout it to yourself. Bring it on. It doesn't mean do something stupid. It just means get comfortable leaning into that discomfort and realize that again, the barrier between your infinite potential and your current reality and that comfort zone bumps up against your fear. By definition, outside of your comfort zone feels uncomfortable. Therefore, if we want to play in this game, we need to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Therefore, we actually don't want to get rid of your fear. We just want to realize that courage isn't the absence of fear. It's feeling the fear. Committing ourselves to something bigger than the fear and doing what needs to get done. And when we do that incrementally, it's just like going to the gym. You can't go out and again, quit your job tomorrow and go do this and go do this and just change overnight. We're talking about compounding these incremental gains that we aggregate and compound over time that leads to the magic, not the snapping of the fingers. The danger of this weekend is that we're all going to be so high and then we're going to go back to yeah, but what. And I really want to demonstrate that it's about building the scaffolding such that this state is the state we live from. But we got to honor where we're at and then kind of incrementally grow. But we'll talk about a ton of things, but let's not, I promise you now, I won't get rid of the fear.

Hallelujah. Yeah, Hallelujah. Thank you so much.

You've been super patient. There we go. Awesome. Thank you. You didn't know you're going to be working tonight, huh?

Hey, Brian Curtis. Actually it's kind of symbolic to have to be patient. You know, I think when you have, you have your epic quest and you know what it is, it's been around and you start working it and then you have the reality of you started out wanting to build a three story building but you only have a few hammers, it's hard to keep up with, keep the energy going. You've got a lot of what's you've got of answer. You may know those, you've got a lot of who's, who's going to be involved when you're going to do stuff, how are you going to do it? And then you discover you run out of energy because you can't do it all. But your vision is clear, your epic journey is clear. You know what you're supposed to do and it's clear. But you have the reality of there's you and everybody you see in the mirror when you're trying to figure out who's going to do what and that's you. So the thought that I have, I'm hearing you speak about goals and I'm hoping and anticipating that I'm going to find some magic pill inside of your council and direction and guidance to say let's break them down into these parts and instead of building that three story building, let's go build a couple of doors, a couple windows. I mean that sounds practical. But how to get there without keep tripping yourself up because you get impatient when you know what the vision is supposed to look like, you know what the missing parts are, you know exactly how they're going to work. But you still got to build it. So the reflection or the commentary I guess I'm looking for is anything you might have at least as a snapshot of what's coming or any direct commentary you have.

Yeah, I mean, this is it, right? Is how do you take that big expansive vision and line up the dominoes? This metaphor I like to use, we're gonna use that. My thing I'll just share with with you how I'm framing it. So a million people in a social platform, it's simultaneously possible. It's been done. I'm not saying I'm gonna send someone to Mars. That's pretty awesome, right? It hasn't been done, but yet Elon's going for it. Right. That's pretty exciting. But if that's all I was thinking about, where do I start? How do you get a million people on a social platform? Wow. No idea. Well, I have some ideas, but that quickly becomes overwhelming for me. Now that's my epic heroic quest. But that's not what I spend most of my time thinking about. I'm excited about that. What am I thinking about? Well, what I think about is the first domino I need to get. What's the most important thing I need to do if I want to get there and I ruthlessly focus on it. Well, for us it was get one person in a social platform. Let me log into a platform and make a post. So our team ruthlessly focused on one get to a point where Brian can post something on our social platform. However, Nason minimum viable product, basic stuff. Then if we can get one person, we can get 10. Boom. Our team's on. If we can get 10 people, we can get 100. Boom. Heroes are on. We hit 100 yesterday. It was awesome, right? Tiny number, 100. We're gonna get to a million. But wait, if we can get one, we can get 10, we get 100. If I can get 100, we can get a thousand. We'll hit 1,000 very soon. We get 1,000, we can get 10,000. I know that. And we'll hit that relatively soon. Now I gotta roll my sleeves. 10,000 to 100,000. Okay. I gotta get creative. We have some ideas of what we'll do. We know we have to have a world class product and we're gonna take elapsed time, etc. Then 100,000 to a million. Well, if we've got from 10,000 to 100,000, then yeah, we're gonna do some different things, but we can get there. That is how I chunk down everything I do or dominoes it and then I ruthlessly focus on, on that next step. And that's what I do in my morning AM session. It's actually not what I do right now. I'm actually writing my plus ones because for me, I've got to finance this. I tried to summit this peak twice. I did it with my business. I sold to a company called Gaiam. We got to whatever it was, couple hundred thousand members or whatever it was, and then it kind of petered out. Ten years ago, we sold that business, right? And then we had a first version of this or in Theos Oasis, and we were doing a bunch of things we just didn't have the resources to put put into it. So I spent two years building the business. So we actually have the money to build it, because that was what I didn't have. I didn't have the oxygen tanks, to use your metaphor, the hammers or what the team to do it. So I spent the last two years building the oxygen tanks and getting the resources to have the Sherpas help us make sure we can summit the peak this time. Still not guaranteed, but we've got better resources. So I think that's a big thing we want to focus on this weekend is we have this huge, expansive goal, but we need to remember to be simultaneously super aggressive and super conservative. Nassim Taleb calls that the barbell strategy. You want to be anti fragile, you can't be just super aggressive or just super conservative. You need both. So we want to approach that and we'll talk about it in goals and we'll talk about it in systems and in action. And look at all the different metaphors we can apply, from the dominoes to the huge rock that you hit with a sledgehammer and little pieces fall off. And you carry away that piece today. Right? Ton of things we can do to kind of get there. That's some of how I'm approaching it. The thousand plus ones. Thousand plus ones. How am I going to do that? Well, same thing. We'll talk about the systems I have around that. And then it's just showing up every single day having the humility to say I'm going to do this little thing. But I know that if I do that little thing over an extended period of time, I have a pretty Good shot at achieving what I want to achieve. So scratch the surface. But we'll get into it, and that will be in my mind as I think about it, you guys. So check in 7:45. You guys don't go to bed as early as I do, you guys. All right, let's go. Pass it back. It's usually measured by minutes after I tuck my son into bed. It ranges. I mean, with the time change. Time is kind of arbitrary, you know, like in the winter, it's like seven o'. Clock. Like, the sun set at five. And we have our nighttime routine. Now the sun doesn't set till 7:30, so I stay up till, like, you know, 8:30. Real party. I write down every night when I go to bed. I just write down, after I do my nighttime thing what time I go to bed. Like, I hate writing down nine. Yes. I'm ridiculous. Yeah. My name's Cal. Hi, Brian. So a lot of us are here.

Because we love learning from you and love learning from other sources. But something I deal with is not putting other things into practice because I'm busy trying to learn certain things.

So I guess if I look out and there's a goal I want to.

Achieve in 10 or 15 years, I.

Don'T know what it is.

I don't know if I'm better off starting each of my days just learning, taking in the next two, three years just to learn as much as I can and that will evolve into something else. Or if I'm supposed to be setting this goal already and working towards that through the trials instead.

How old are you again?

23.

23. Gosh, I wish I was sitting here at 23 years old. That's so cool. I know a lot of people who are not 23 years old wishing they were sitting here at 23 years old. I think both you and Michelle at 22, you guys are in a really great position where you just have the opportunity. You don't have the constraints that we have, you know, and that's. That's a beautiful thing. It's also challenging because you can do anything right? So that presents its own challenges. The constraints are actually really good. Like when you're a husband and a father and you're committed to doing that. Like, I'm committed to being a great husband and a great entrepreneur and a teacher. Therefore, I can't do certain things. It's easier for me. When Emerson was born, I suddenly had more time than I had before because I refused to do stupid stuff anymore. That used to kind of soak up some of my time. But for you, ultimately, you're obviously the only one who could answer that question. But I like framing things in the context of projects and in concrete, measurable goals, both because I found that it works for me and because I've seen the research points to that. So even if learning is your epic quest, what do you want to learn and what do you want to do? You want to get a broad spectrum of a bunch of things, or do you want to go deep into mastery? Like, what fires you up? If you look forward in a year or two or three, what could you look at and say, I did that. Like, that's how I materialize this? Or do you want to operationalize your goal in a different way? We'll get more clarity on that and we can revisit it with questions and stuff. But I think that's part of the question for this weekend and for next weekend and the weekend after that is contemplating it. But again, even if, let's say you leave this weekend, you're like, I just don't really know. I would strongly encourage the whole Instagram conversation of that's what you do when you wake up again. Joseph Campbell, who we're going to again watch is, he said, you have to have a quiet place where you go and you sit and you don't know. He said, you don't know who owes you money, you don't know who you owe money to. You don't know what's going on in the news. You just sit there and you think and you connect to yourself or you do whatever you do by yourself. And he says, you may not get anything for a long time, but if you do that, something will arise. And that, again, is. I think what's the most heroically challenging thing is to actually unplug ourselves long enough from all the entertainment and all the news and all the other things to plug into what we really want. Is that helpful at all?

Yes.

Thank you. Hi, Brian, Frank. Thank you, everybody. So if life is a series of heroic journeys, how do you know when your journey you're on is complete? Like, so for entheist, how did you know to move on from enthus and to do that was hard. I mean, that was really, really hard. Incredibly hard. For me, the hardest part, because the hardest thing within theos was it was working. There was enough parts that were working, but there was just a deep intuition that it wasn't it. It wasn't going to be it, you know, and it's very difficult to describe. And all of us Know what I'm talking about? You can't really put into words, but you just have a sense of. But for me, we had so much momentum that the hardest part was actually slowing down long enough to listen to that little niggle and to step back and to even open my mind to the possibility. So again, this is the whole hero's journey and Easter. I wrote a plus one for next Easter, so I'm going to. Spoiler alert share. Next Easter is plus one. Joseph Campbell says that one cannot have a resurrection unless one has a crucifixion. So there is no resurrection without a crucifixion. And I'm going through it right now too. I went through it after we did the deal for. After we didn't do the deal to acquire the campus. I changed some things and I kind of got going. Now I've done 430something philosopher's notes, right? And I kind of got in a different zone. We were going to bring on a team to do different notes and I felt a little behind. I needed to catch up. And it lost its magic for me. Like the idea of creating another 600 philosopher's notes lost its buzz for me. It wasn't it. It was like I had shedded the skin. As Joseph Campbell says, quoting Nietzsche, a snake that cannot shed its skin must perish. He said, right. It's a powerful thing. And I felt like I had shed some skin and it was like I was trying to go back and crawl into it, you know, And I can do it and it's still cool, but it just. It lost its. Its thing, you know? So I went through a couple weeks there of what is it? And out of that came the plus ones. And I might do some more, but this is it now. Like, this is what's exciting me and finding new ways to serve via the Oasis, etc. But my point with that is that is what I think is the hardest part of the process. And the way that I describe it in that plus one is it's really, really hard to nail yourself to your own cross. To say that's not gonna work at all anymore. And to actually be willing to die to that version of yourself such that you can enter that resurrection. But guess what? There's a three day lag there in the Easter story, right? You got to be willing to do that without absolute clarity. And again, it doesn't mean you go out and you blow up your life and you do all those things, but it means that you pay attention to it and then you're Simultaneously aggressive and conservative. Right? But that's a, that's. That's only you can know. And you will only know if you're actually connecting to something deep within you and not distracting yourself all the time. Realize I'm repeating myself on that. To what ruler?

Hi, Brian.

I'll say one more thing. I gotta drop in one more line there. Carlos Castaneda. Carlos Castaneda said that anything is one of a million paths. Anything you can choose is one of a million paths. And he says you need to follow the path with heart. One path has heart or multiple paths have heart, but your path needs to have heart. And then he says, yeah, but. People say, but, but how do I know if my path has heart? And he says, you know, you just don't have the courage to ask yourself. And most people don't have the courage to ask themselves until it's too late to actually do what they want to do. So part of that dance is to actually be honest with yourself. And I actually shared that quote. I mentioned my. I apologize for the vomiting history here. I threw up the night before I met with one of my old mentors who was recruiting me to be the CEO. He invested in my first business. He wrote the first, basically the first million dollar check in my first business. He led a syndicated round. He was a very big angel investor and he was creating, after I sold that business, he was creating a syndicate of this cool thing for other angel groups to come online and he wanted me to run it. It was a pretty cool idea and it was pretty exciting and we were pretty far in the process. And literally the day I was supposed to finish the deal with him, the night before, I had one of my episodes, right? And I literally told him of wake up in the middle of the night throwing up. And I told him that quote. I read to him that Carlos Castaneda quote of this path just doesn't have heart. So I think that's the question that we need to ask ourselves and be willing to answer honestly and again, play the role we're assigned well, as we figure out what the next best incremental view is.

Brian. Justin, I know a guy that's probably not happy in his current career path, but I guess my question is, I know we talked about like not going out and quitting your job tomorrow and things like that. Do you kind of have, I'm guessing some of it's fundamentals, but do you have any advice like if you're in a career and it feels like the career itself is kind of draining Taking a lot of that energy or drive that you should be putting something else. I mean, what, I guess, at what point do you take a leap? And I mean, should you kind of try to get away from that or should you focus? I mean, where do you put that focus?

Hopefully we'll shine some light of clarity on that. And again, that's going to be a fun thing. I don't know if that person, you know, is sitting in your chair. Let's talk to that guy. He's sitting right next to me. You know, for some people, the path is you do quit your job tomorrow. The point that we're making is that that may or may not be the path. Right? And in any case, one of the things we're going to stress is one of my favorite new phrases is emotional stamina. And I've always, I've always professed that fundamentals are key, right? So as you're going through this and you're trying to figure it out, now's the time. The more challenging the opportunity and the commitment, the higher your commitment needs to be to your basic fundamentals. Now is the time to lock them down. And as we're embarking on this, and again, we're going to talk about this a lot, we just need to ratchet up our game. You cannot afford to be this all in and not grounded. You have to be aggressive and you have to be grounded. And the metaphor I use a lot is if you want to see how tall a building is going to be, you have to look at how deep they're digging the foundation. And there's no possible scenario where a construction crew is going to dig a foundation for a three story house and then try to put a skyscraper on it. That's insane. So to go after these big goals and to have a shallow foundation is equally insane. We got to go deep. The eating, the moving, the sleeping, the breathing, the focusing of our minds, all the stuff you already know. I'll share some new stuff maybe, but you guys know all this stuff. The question is, if you're really going to go for it, are you really going to dig deep? And that's what I wish someone told me when I was in your position of dude, now's the time to get a good night of sleep and to do all those little nutritional things you've wanted to do and to start exercising a little more consistently. Not shaming yourself when you don't do it, or as one big chore, but as a fun game to see just how clear you can get. And maybe you Stay with your job for another month or a quarter or a year, or a decade, I don't know. Or a day, I don't know. But I do know that that foundation is going to be essential and you don't want to go into this path without that because that's when it gets weird. And we don't even get to the middle of the mountain. We get to next weekend. Yeah, we'll talk more, but I feel you. And let me just say one more thing on that. Start asking what you do want so you're clear on what you don't want. The real question for the hero is what do I want? And again, a shift from victim to creator. The victim is, this sucks. And they have a list of all the things that are wrong. The creator says, what do I want? It's the dominant question in any moment. The question exists. If I'm having a challenging time with my son. The question is, what do I want? Period? The victim question is, and I'm not perfect at this at all. And again, my wife was here, she wrote a test. I can complain, I can get wrapped up, but what do I want? And can we pull ourselves out of victim into hero, victim into creator or hero consistently? So start taking the time that you have. And again, I would suggest if you really don't like your career, then get up earlier, go to bed earlier, get up earlier and spend the time thinking about what you really want. If you could wave that wand and you can create your ideal, what would it look like? Because guess what, you can create it. And it may take you a certain period of time. Fine. You know the price, you're willing to pay it or not. This is another thing we're going to talk about this weekend. Some people you might not be willing to pay it. That's cool. But be honest about it and don't complain about it. Say, okay. I chose not to put in the 3, 5, 10, whatever years it's going to take to do it. If that's what it is. I'm going to stay up until 7am it's going to be awesome.

No, thanks for staying up past your bedtime.

We are officially approaching. This is great.

So I work in the corporate environment, Brian, and one of the most frustrating things on a day to day basis is seeing senior leaders in this fixed mindset and not adopt the growth mindset where they see people who maybe haven't succeeded, whether it's me personally or the people I'm working with. And oftentimes I'm trying to convince senior Leaders that, you know what, they took a risk and maybe they didn't succeed according to X, Y and Z, but they've already begun to learn from the experience and apply those learnings. But yet the senior leaders are saying, yeah, but, yeah, but, and, and how do you suggest or what's the most successful way you've seen to convince people of the power of growth and development in the corporate, potentially risk adverse environment?

My wife is here, by the way. She could have attested to all of that. So we're going to talk about In Love, we're going to talk about leadership and we're going to talk about a lot about hope this weekend as well in the Science of Hope. So to me, when I hear that you can obviously talk about it in a lot of different ways, I think that leadership ultimately is all about hope. And hope is defined as believing that your future is going to be better than your present. So I think that just instilling that sense of this is where we're headed as a company and as individuals on that path, I think that's it. And creating that vision of this is why what we're doing together is going to make our futures better than our present or than if we weren't working together on this project. And I think within that frame, then it's from my perspective easier to have the growth conversations. And then ultimately leadership is all about and kind of being in that position. I don't ever like talking about them doing something and that if they change then everything would be cool. Anthony Demello has the joke about that. He says, yeah, you know, imagine going to your doctor and saying, saying, I've got this issue and that issue and this issue and him saying, yeah, that's cool. I'm going to prescribe medication for your neighbor and he's going to take it and then you're going to be fine. Right. And you know, making the extreme point that it's never about them, it's always about us. That 100% extreme ownership of, well, how do we really, really engage and embrace these ideas and kind of be that exemplar of the ideas, you know, which I'm not saying you're not doing, but that idea of like, okay, well how could I do that even more. Yeah. So I'll leave it at that and wish you luck. This is where I'm very happy to work on a very small team of completely aligned individuals who are unbelievably proactive. I'm waving at you guys now. And all in probably should put a cap on it. Let's do these two and then we will wrap it up. So two on this side. Hey, Brian.

Suki.

What's up, Suki? Good to see you over there.

I have more of a personal question for you. You know, for me, the past 16 years, setting that next domino at North Star, crushing that, moving to the next, it's not been an issue. You know, I'm same age as you, similar phase of life. I have a four year old, one year old daughter, amazing connection to them, amazing wife, supportive wife, great relationship. And this is not the world I want to raise my girls in. And I'm doing a lot to change that. So my question to you is, how do you balance being on your hero's path, crushing your North Star goals, yet being in balance with being with your family, being with your wife. And I constantly battle this thing, which, you know, I'm a former ultra endurance athlete. You know, when I used to train 25, 30 hours a week, I retired two years ago because I got to a place where I was missing my wife and my daughter while I was training. So I get to a place where I'm doing this work and I'm making a difference. And on the front lines of the part of the world that I'm impacting, yet a part of me begins to.

Feel.

Like I'm not being the father and husband that I can be. So any insights with that for you in your life?

Well, first of all, I appreciate your authenticity and expression and of course, any ambitious person. And as a man speaking to you as a husband and father, I know that, I mean, this is it, you know, I mean, this is. David Data says, in the way of the spirit of man, if a man, ambitious man, is honest about it, their purpose is just more important to them than the relationship in many ways. And there's a level of like that drive to do things is just, it's a powerful drive. And yet for us, being committed to being, for me, there's the being committed to being both an exemplary teacher and entrepreneur and leader in that regard, and father and husband, it rubs up against reality. And this is again the perfectionist conversation of Tal Ben Shahar's conversation of he wanted to work 16 hours a day, he wanted to be in ridiculous shape, he wanted to be a great father and husband. And he realized, wait, when I do the math, I can't do all of those things. And I never did a note on McKeown's essentialism, but I love that book. And he made the really, really good point that life is all about trade offs. And when I really got that, and I really got the fact that yeah, you can have it all in one sense, but we can't have it all in every sense, I started framing things a little bit differently. And for me it's been, and we'll talk about this too, in the love of. You do all these things. So I mean, I'm not going to say anything that you don't know, but I think the first thing for me is recognizing that tension and feeling the need to be willing to make some of those trades. And I make the sacrifices. You know, I don't travel, I don't do certain things so that I can be home and do certain things on a schedule which for me works. And one word I haven't used yet that I want to throw out right now is idiosyncratic. I love the word idiosyncratic. So I am both idiosyncratic and eccentric in what I do. And what I do is what I do. And the root of the word idiosyncrasy is awesome. Basically, we all have our own style and we've got to own that. And again, that euthymia of what is it for you? This is my way. As Nietzsche said, what is your way? There is no the way. Right. So for me, as we look at architecting our masterpiece days, it's very important for me to have dedicated time with Emerson. And I got to figure out, because we have a two month old, how I'm going to do that with Eleanor. And that's the thing that I fall short on the most of. Did I do that? Did I do the 30, 45, 60 minutes of one on one time today? I didn't. Right. And that's my biggest growth edge. I'm good at being done at a certain time and shutting in. I'm getting better at having good energy at those times rather than being, oh, I'm done with the day and what. Right. But that to me is the iterative process of getting clear on what is that standard. And we're going to talk about that in what I call the big three. So energy, family and service of how do we optimize our energy? And again, I want to be a world class athlete by certain standards, which is more like the junior varsity version of it. But I'm not willing to give it more than an hour a day but of focused training. And I'll do little micro workouts and stuff that cost me no time, but that's my constraint. Right. And then family and then service so we'll look at that big three, and I think that'll be a really cool place to start articulating. Well, what would you look like when you're on with your energy, with your family and with your service? Right. And what that ideal is, the benefits you're going to experience from it, and then the thing you're going to do every single day, little baby tiny thing you're gonna do to be on path to make that ideal a reality. I think you might find that healthy, helpful. Then the final thing that comes to mind is a great frame from Osho. So Osho says there's no such thing as balance. So part of where I struggle is I want to be balanced. At times. I actually don't want to be anymore because I know that that isn't it. And. But he says that balance is a verb, it's not a noun. It's balancing. And he says it's more like a tightrope walker. A tightrope walker. Even if you're like a world class 10,000, 25,000 hour tightrope walker, you're actually never technically balanced when you're moving over the tightrope walker. Tightrope. No matter how good you are, you're a little bit too far this way. And then you correct and you're a little bit too far that way. And there's this dynamic equilibrium which I think is important for our conversation as aspirational, exemplar husband and fathers. I mean, for all of us as we look at how we balance the learning and the goal setting and the creativity, et cetera. Yeah. So we'll explore some more. And I'm sensitive to it and excited about it, and we're bummed that we weren't able to see Kate this weekend.

She's here in spirit.

You brought me instead. Yeah. Right on. So we had, I think, one more behind and then we're gonna.

Hi, I'm Jane.

Hello.

So nice to see you.

Brian. Nice to see you.

My question is this. So when I started listening to you and following Oasis and reading your materials, watching you, I saw all these people doing things and I thought, well, I can't do that. I already have this life over here that I created and what am I going to do? But then that voice inside of me really wouldn't stop. So I found the thing that I love. I'm doing it. I think a couple of your people are part of it. And it lights me up. Like I could literally probably do it 20 hours a day and not sleep at all. But I almost have to deconstruct the life I have in order to create the new life I want. And do you have any advice on that?

I'm smiling because I'm thinking. Yep, exactly. I think it's the same transition. We'll talk more details about it. Yeah. Again, there is no wand. I mean, someone said the wand or the pill, and they were joking, but. But I think that's the other thing, is just to get rid of that myth and just be willing to actually step back and realize that, again, it's not easy. Let's do it. But I think we'll have fun crafting some things, and I'll have that in my mind. Thank you. And great to see you. All right, well, there we go. Right on time. Pat, sorry about keeping you up late, man. You want to come on up? I'll introduce you. So Pat Solomon reached out to me. Let's get Pat up here. So, Pat Solomon, I'm living in Bali nine years ago or so, I get this email from Pat. I was still in email at the time and says, hey, man, I'm doing this movie on Joseph Campbell and I'd love to come up to Topanga, which is what my address said, and shoot you for the film. I'm like, I think he just said, I just want to come up and shoot you. And I'm like, yeah, dude, that'd be awesome. I'm in Bali.

His website said he lives in Topanga and I live in Venice Beach. I was like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to zip right up there and be done.

18 hour flight later or whatever it was, Pat came out and, you know, such a joy. I think I was one of the earlier interviews.

Brian was the first interview, so his.

First interview, which was an honor and.

My favorite.

Thank you. And I just love what Pat did with the film. I don't know how many of you have already seen the movie. Cool. For those of you who have seen it, I'm sure you enjoyed what Pat did. And for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm excited for you to enjoy it. Basically, just a great. Well, you tell us. Kind of the quick story on the.

Quick story is, you know, it's so odd. I've watched this film thousands of times now, and every time someone says, hey, man, what's your movie about? I'm like, hero's Journey, following your bliss kind of stuff. It's really. It's really about the hero's journey, as Brian's described it. And if you guys are followers of Brian, I'm sure you are well versed in the hero's journey, but it really kind of breaks down what the hero's journey is in relation to following your bliss. So Campbell really recognized that when you're a person in the world, when you're following your bliss, that's really when you're on a hero's journey, when you're sitting on the couch, you're not, you know, you're in the village or you're stuck in and career that you hate, you're not really on that journey. So it's about following your bliss and bringing.

One of the things I loved about it, too, is that I don't know if you guys have seen the Bill Moyers interview series with Joseph Campbell. If you haven't watched that, watch it. Like Joseph Campbell. I fell in love with Joseph Campbell, I don't know how long ago. His energy of just. You can feel the vitality. You talk about radiant enthusiasm. It's just leaping out of him. And one of the things I love about Pat that he shared with me when we were discussing was the idea of modernizing that, of how would you bring that wisdom to life in kind of the 21st century? And bring in people like Deepak and Robin Sharma and Tony Hawk and Laird Hamilton and have them tell some of their stories about how they lived their hero's journey in this arc that you'll learn about more, but just awesome. So, Pat, appreciate you. Yeah.

Hey, thanks for having me, and enjoy the film.

Yeah. See you tomorrow. So excited. Thanks, guys.

Thanks. I have a really captive audience here. You guys are here for hero training. This is a perfect movie. The short genesis was. You know, I've been a Joseph Campbell fan my whole life, and I started shooting when I was very young, shooting things I was into, so skateboarding and snowboarding, and I did a lot of these videos, and I graduated commercials. But in the back of my mind, I always had thought to myself, man, it'd be really great to do a movie about Campbell in some form. So he was really the inspiration.

I'm Sam. This is actually the second time we've met.

Hey, Sam.

Yeah, we actually met in New York six years ago when you screened this at the.

Oh, my God. You were at the New York screening.

Yes.

That was such a great screening.

Yeah.

And your son still looked like the kid in the movie, you know?

Did you see him over there?

No.

Oh, yeah. He's over there now.

Hey.

Yeah, you can stand up. Come on, Declan. Come on.

So Much taller.

I say that every day.

Yeah. This is one part thank you and one part a couple questions. So I'll just say the thank you first.

Thank you.

There's a little more to it than that. I can't tell you how many people in my life you've impacted because you made this movie for me and just this incredible transformational document that it is. You know, when I met you the first time at the New York screening, I was going through this really crazy call moment, you know, phone call moment from God where I knew I needed to leave the job that I was in. It was making six figures, good money in New York, the whole thing. And I knew I had to do something beyond what I was doing, otherwise I was always going to be stuck as an iOS developer making digital like the most sophisticated digital billboards that were completely forgettable. And you know, when, like the following year when I left, I did leave that job and, you know, I went through like this amazing trial just to get through the separation stage, which finally I guess happened, you know, conclusively when I was here for a course in Los Angeles and Sandy hit and wiped out my first floor apartment. And I knew like, oh my God, that's the call. And then just everything that happened since then was really exactly like the movie. And I just want to say thank you for this in. I just can't tell you how many times the insight that you had, especially like in the first 30 minutes to edit the movie in such a way that the journey was really about each person's occurring world as a compass and not as a map.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And to be clear, honestly, while I was making it and editing it, there was often times where I just felt like I was being guided by other hands. I felt more like a puppet than anything. You know, I really felt like I was on this path. It was really an amazing experience.

Yeah, I mean, I remember you talking about that in New York and how like it was a real, like the real leap was for you to go from the six hour other documentary version that you had to this and you know, injecting the kids as like the center. The axle of the movie, the visual axle of the movie. Movie. Yeah, I remember all that. And so, yeah, I just want to say props. I mean, it holds up. And for anybody who doesn't think the movie doesn't hold up, just start your journey.

Thanks.

So that's the thank you part. And I definitely will meet Mrs. Solomon here in a little bit. But the second thing, the questions I had first is did you ever hear from Obama's body man at all about this?

So, yeah, what he's referring to is that prior to the movie's release, somehow the Obama administration got ahold of it and went, hey, we'd like to see this thing. And I got an email from his regieluve from Reggie, and we exchanged a couple emails, and then I sent this FedEx out. And then shortly after that, Reggie left. So I never really got anything back. So, yeah, that's actually the end of the story.

Well, maybe not.

Yeah, maybe not. Thank you. Yeah, hopefully not.

So that's the first thing. Second thing is, how did you, like, how scary was that for you to abandon the first version of the movie?

Movie, like, so that was actually really scary. So to abandon. Because, you know, I had mapped out this film, and when I made sucked, it was horrible. I was like, oh, my God, what are we doing here? So. But I had planned it, you know, so you guys have all heard this quote. You have to be willing to get rid of the life you planned so as to have the life that's waiting for you. And so that became the story of the film at that moment, only it switched to, you have to be willing to get rid of the film you had planned in order to get the film that was waiting for you. So I literally just had to kind of abandon my plans and go, well, what are we gonna do now? And then at that moment in time, you know, I always knew we were gonna use the kids for something, and people told stories, and I knew I was gonna use the kids to recreate those stories. So. Well, the only thing we had left was to shoot that. So we shot the first one as a test, and we edited together, and it was like a lightning bolt. Like, oh, my God. That's how we're gonna do this movie. We're gonna use these kids, and we're gonna tell a grail story, and we're gonna weave it throughout the whole thing. And it was like a lightning bolt went from like, I want to jump off a building to Woo. This is the greatest thing ever.

Thank you.

Thanks. Sorry. More questions.

Yep.

Wait, you got one back there? Sorry, over there. Yep. No, no, I had. I had most of them. I had most of them, but not all of them. And really, we had cut this. The film was like five hours at one point, and it was just horrible. And it really encompassed everything that Campbell had talked about. You know, it was like, you know, a lot of religion and the mask of God, and it didn't have any cohesion and it was, it was at the point where we went, what is this film about? We can't just say. We just can't do a movie about everything Campbell said. So as soon as we went, okay, hero's journey, follow your bliss, it just clicked. How long did it take for the first interview, Tom? Oh, my God. So Brian's was the first interview? Almost three years. Almost three years. Not quite three years.

Just wanted to say thank you because this is my favorite movie in my life and I've given it to people as a gift and it's changed them. I call it a life changing movie. So thank you. But my question would be, how did you select the participants?

Oh, this is a great one. So. And I know this is great because all of you are kind of embarking on a journey right now and you're probably thinking about the steps you're going to take. And I intentionally, I intentionally did not have a plan to get interview subjects. I just went, I trusted. I had faith, Faith in the process of the hero's journey. I just went, I'm gonna go into the forest and bounce around and one person's gonna leave me the next. And whoever I run into is who was meant to be in the film. And so my first interview, this is an example. Not to say that I didn't have a hit list, like Deepak Chopra was on my hit list, but I didn't, you know, and I made a phone call, got rejected, and went, okay, that wasn't meant to be. But my first interview subject, as you know, is Brian. And I talked to Brian after the interviews were over and he was like, hey, you should talk to my friend Robin Sharma. He's in Toronto. And then I went, interviewed Robin Sharma. And then he went, oh, you should interview my friend Deepak Chopra. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, this is the way it's meant to be. So I really feel like is part of the process of journeying. There's kind of a letting go of the process, I guess, you know, or you have to have faith in the process and a letting go of the plan. And that's. And I did that intentionally just because I thought it was true to the Campbell spirit, I guess. Yep.

Hey, brother, just want to say thank you. First of all, I've watched it probably.

10 times to see something new there.

Something new resonates.

My question is your personal hero's journey?

That's a good question, actually. So right now, the next film I'm trying to bring to life, another film. And I Haven't really got a lot of traction yet. We've been dealing with other issues. But this year, I'm gonna start a film about money. And it's not really. It's about the idea of money. It's like a thing I can't get out of my head. A lot of questions from Finding Joe were about, hey, following your bliss is great and everything, but I have to make money. I have to support my family. I have to. And so that idea really stuck with me. Like, what is this stuff? It's like a piece of paper with some paint on it. It's about symbolic thinking. And anyway, it's going to explore that subject. The why is really in the genesis of the film. At the moment I decided to make the film, I was having a terrible midlife crisis. The fact that I'm still married actually still shocks me to this day. And both of my parents passed away very close to each other, about three weeks apart. And so out of these crisises, I think with my parents passing something along the lines of, oh, my God, like, they're gone, and you're gonna be gone soon, and you better figure out what it is you were put here for quickly, before you're gone. And I had just been. This film had just been in me for a really long time. I think probably before I realized it was in me. And the answer to that question, what were you put here to do? This film kept coming up. So I think I really jumped on that. And it was also kind of a way to get out of the crisis. You know, I was really in a lot of pain at that point. And going. Taking the journey of making the film helped alleviate that pain.

I just want to tell you that I've been on a hero's journey, and a lot of it's had to do about money.

Do tell.

I went on a journey, and I learned an awful lot about how the hero's journey works with money.

And I need your card.

We can eat your.

No talk.

For sure.

Yeah.

That's all I really wanted to say.

Okay. Yeah, that's actually really great because. Yeah, it's kind of coming together now, so we definitely need the talk.

Yeah. I didn't want to tell anybody because we're all getting tired, I think so. Thank you.

I was wondering, as an artist, I guess, how do you go about balancing what you want to say as your own creative voice and creative, like, something that also impacts other people. I'm a composer, so I sometimes have issues with kind of, how do I create something? Am I Creating this for myself, or am I creating it for someone else?

It's really difficult, man. It's really hard, right? Yeah. I mean, I would say that on the one hand you really have to be true to yourself, but you do have to gauge your audience, right? Because it depends on what you're doing. Actually. If you're making a piece of art, no matter what it is, and no one's ever going to see it, or you're going to hang it, or you don't really care about what people think about it, you're in great shape, you can create a piece of music or art or whatever and it doesn't matter. But if you have to sell it, or if your goal or interest is to change someone's opinion, then you really have to be mindful of your audience, right? Who's your audience? What are they going to think? And. And so that creeps into your art. And that's such a tough one, man. Like, I don't really have a good answer for that. It's difficult. It's really. And I can say from this experience of finding Joe that to be quite honest with you, I really wish I would have thought about that more. I did get a lot of comments when the film came out, like, hey, it's very male centric and it is. And that's. I didn't plan it that way, but in retrospect, I probably should have thought about my audience more and went, wait a minute, how am I gonna get this message to a broader audience? So learn from my mistake, I guess. I feel like each step in the journey kind of gets you ready for the next step, you know, like, if you went from crossing the first threshold to battling the dragon right away, you'd probably get crushed. But through a series of steps, you build your way up to that kind of biggest battle, right? And I think in practical terms, it's about being uncomfortable, right? It's about being able to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in small ways and then in bigger ways. And in bigger ways, I think, from my experience, anyway, it really has to do with just recognizing, I guess, just recognizing exactly what it is that I'm afraid of and being able to admit that. And that kind of takes the power away from it for me.

I think too, when you realize that it's never going to go away, you kind of get to that point of surrender and you decide, okay, this isn't going away. I get the same issues every time I'm faced with this, okay? Now I either decide it's going to start to conquer me or I'm going to accept it. And then with that acceptance kind of comes a sense of, okay, I'm going to work.

That's a great point, what you just said about surrendering, you know, because that has a lot to do with it, too. I mean, I think in a lot of situations, if you just kind of surrender to the experience that's happening, whether it's good or bad, especially if you're having some negative feedback from the universe, it's really. It really puts you in a place of clarity.

At least.

It might not feel good, but at least you're clear on what the issue is and what the problem is. Cool. Well, wait, one more. Nope. So, sorry.

I just have a really simple question.

What led you to Brian?

That's so funny. I was doing all these Internet searches about Joseph Campbell, and I was kind of making a list and then. But Brian's name just kept popping up for some reason. And then also he said he was in Topanga, and it was so close to me. I was like, this is the perfect first guy. Like, he's right up the street. It's like a 20 minute drive. And he lied. He's in Bali. But. And that didn't suck either, by the way. I was like, I went from, oh, man, he's in Bali, to oh, man, he's in Bali. So anyway, listen, thank you guys so much for having me and thank you for being fans of the film.