Heroic Interview: Die Empty with Todd Henry

You're listening to Die Empty an Optimal Living interview with Todd Henry and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Todd Henry, who is the founder and CEO of Accidental Creative, a consultancy that helps organizations generate brand brilliant ideas. He wrote the book the Accidental Creative, which I actually have yet to read. I'm looking forward to reading that one. And he also wrote Die Empty subtitle Unleash youh Best Work Every Day, which is what we're going to talk about today. Phenomenal book. And his newest book is called Louder Than Harness the Power of youf Authentic Voice. Another great book that we're actually going to chat about separately. But today, excited to dive into Die Empty. Todd, I really appreciate your, your wisdom as a consultant. You being a consultant, I can see you've just thought through these ideas so clearly and articulate them in such a powerful, practical way. It's just a joy to read. And I appreciate you taking the time to unpack some of my favorites today.

Thank you. I appreciate that, Brian. Thanks for having me on. And I'm so encouraged to hear you say that about the practical slant of my work because really it is rooted in experience and quite frequently pain. Right. It's having to figure out how to navigate through the pain of being in, in really difficult situations and helping other people navigate through that. Inspiration has a shelf life. So if we don't act on it, then it's not going to be very useful to us. So thank you. I appreciate that. Kind intro.

Yeah, well, of course. And you just reflected another attribute that I really appreciate, which is your humility and vulnerability and your authenticity and just sharing the fact that this isn't easy and that we're going to have a lot of times when we fall short, especially those of us who aspire to do great things. We'll talk about that thematically I'm sure, as we explore some ideas. But can we just start from the beginning and talk to us about what it means to you to die empty and why that's something that's important for us to think about.

So about a decade ago, I was in a meeting and a friend was leading the meeting. It was a group of us in a room and he asked kind of an out of the blue question. He said, what do you think is the most valuable land in the world? And we were thinking this is kind of a weird question, I don't know. So we're sort of throwing out answers and guesses and all of this and he said, no, you're all wrong. He said, I think the most valuable land in the world is a graveyard. I said, the graveyard? He said, yeah, because in the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, all of the unlaunched businesses, all of the unexecuted ideas, all of the things that people carried around with them every day. And they said, tomorrow, I'm going to get around to that. Tomorrow's the day I'm going to do that. And they pushed it and they pushed it and they pushed it into the future until one day they reached the bookend of their life, as we all do. And all of those ideas, all of that value, all of those businesses, all of those unreconciled relationships, all these things people had carried around with them, saying they were going to do it at some point. They were all buried with them, dead in the ground. All that value was put into the ground with them, never to be seen by human eyes. I remember that day I went back to my office and I wrote two words on an index card. I put them on the wall of my office. I put them in my notebook, and those two words were, die Empty. Because from that point on, I resolved, I'm not going to be the person who takes my best work to the grave with me. But the reality is that it's easier said than done, because all of the forces of this world, I believe, are sort of conspiring against us, doing things that matter to us. Because so much of our lives are occupied with just pushing through, just getting the next most urgent thing off of our plate and then pushing on to the next most urgent thing. And if we're not intentional about how we structure our lives and how we approach our priorities, then those things aren't going to get done in our life. And unfortunately for far too many people, they take their best work to the grave with them. That's really the fundamental core message of Die Empty is if you want to unleash your best work, that doesn't mean doing your best every day and collapsing across the finish line. That's not what it's about. It's about making sure that you're getting your best work out of you every day. And your best work is the work that you know you should be getting around to, but sometimes you don't, because more urgent things come along.

So good. Of course, the book is essentially a guide on how to do that. In the subtitle of the book, Unleash youh Best Work Every Day, you have a ton of ideas on how to do that. I'd like to kind of step into the model that you've developed where you talk about the developer and the three aspects of the developer being mapping, making and meshing. Can you give us a quick overview on that?

Sure, yeah. So there are really three kinds of work that we do is we engage in work every day and we often don't parse these out. And to be frank, they're not nice, neat compartments. There's some overlap between them, but they're sort of general containers we can lump work into. The first kind is mapping. And this is planning. This is strategy. This is the work before the work. It's making task lists, it's determining the projects you're going to do and establishing goals and those kinds of things. The second kind is what I call making. And making is actually executing what you plan. You check off tasks you do, projects you accomplish the things that you plan to do. And when most of us think of work, this is what we think of. I plan and I do. I plan and I do. Any graduate level business student will tell you the two arms of any organization are strategy and execution. Strategy, I plan and I do. But there's a third kind of work that we often ignore. And I think we do this at our peril because this is the kind of work that often positions us to be able to unleash our best work, to be able to ensure that we're getting the best stuff out of us. It's what I call meshing. And meshing is the work between the work. It's the little things that position us to be better at what we do, that allow us to align ourselves, allow us to sharpen our mind, to sharpen our spirit, to sharpen ourselves physically determine if we're living according to the right narrative. The little things that allow us to build relationships, that keep us aligned and focused and inspired. These are all the kinds of things that aren't going to to show up on any kind of strategy you might set for yourself or any kind of strategic plan. They're often the things that we don't do when we're making. We don't do these things because they don't seem urgent in the moment, but they're the very things that set us up in the long term to be effective and to ensure that we're not sacrificing long term effectiveness on the altar of short term efficiency, which is what so many of us do, especially when we're in the pressure cooker of the workplace. Mapping, making, meshing. Those Three things together. When taken together, especially under pressure, these are people that I call developers. Developers are people who are taking all of the circumstances in their environment and they're weaving them together. They're able to step back and identify patterns because they have those disciplines built into their life that allow them to step back, to think systemically, to recognize some of the bigger governing dynamics that are happening in the course of their experiences. So many of us just bounce from thing to thing to thing, but we never step back and look at the governing dynamics and ask, okay, what's really going on here? But developers are people who have disciplines in their life to create white space and allow them to have the base of knowledge. They need to be able to step back and analyze and then to act meaningfully, not just react in the course of the daily pressure.

So good. And I'll leave the reader or the listener to check out the book for the kind of alternatives to the developer when we kind of fall short in one of those domains. But I'd like to drill more deeply into. Let's talk about meshing a little bit more. So can you give us some practical examples of that? And if you. You often share examples in your own life, can you tell us about what you do to make sure you're in a position to take advantage of opportunities?

Yeah. So there are kind of seven traps that we fall into. And in diampte, I prescribe meshing practices for each of these areas. I call them the seven deadly sins of mediocrity, because that's what they are. They're the places we fall down. And it doesn't matter how accomplished someone is, doesn't matter how successful they are. We all are privy to these forces. And I've seen people who are very far along in their career, very successful in the world's eyes, people look at them and say, wow, that person's got it all figured out. And yet they have an outage in one of these areas. Nobody is immune to these. The seven areas are aimlessness, which is when we lack clear and compelling direction for our work. Boredom, which is when we're no longer mentally curious. We're not sharpening our mind any longer. We're not asking good questions. Comfortable, which is when we begin to settle in, we stop growing, and we begin to protect the ground we've taken rather than taking new ground. Delusion, which is when we're living according to a narrative that someone else gave us, not according to an internal narrative that is truthful and compelling because it's accurate with who we really are ego, which is when we become inflexible due to our self protection. We start protecting ourself instead of the outcome. We're committed to fear, which is when the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success and we become paralyzed. Then guardedness, which is when we become closed off to others, we isolate ourselves and we don't have other people in our life. There are specific disciplines in each of these areas that I would call meshing disciplines or meshing practices. I'll just start with aimlessness because that's the first one. I think it's really important for us to recognize that just because we have a clear set of projects that we're working on or a clear direction for our work, that doesn't mean that we're really doing work that matters. And it doesn't mean that we're accomplishing the things that in the end we're going to point to with pride and say, yes, that represents me, that represents who I am and the best of what I want to do in this world. In order to ensure that that happens, we have to really drill down on what I call a through line or a productive passion. That word passion, Brian, comes from the root word pati, which means to suffer in the original language. When we talk about passion, we tend to talk about anything I like, anything I'm sort of mildly interested in. I'm passionate about football, I'm passionate about ice cream, I'm passionate about my wife. And we all know those things are not equal. There's really only one of those things I'm truly passionate about, and frankly, it's my wife. Because when the rubber meets the road, I am willing to suffer on behalf of my relationship with my wife. I'm willing to go the extra mile. I don't always have to suffer. But passion means I'm willing to suffer in order to achieve an outcome. I think sometimes we lose sight of that in our work. We lose sight of that productive passion. What is it that I am wired for and how can I apply that in the course of my work? Not going out chasing work that I think I'm going to like, because I think that's what many of us do. We go out and we think by changing our circumstances we're going to change what's going on internally with us. No, instead I look inward and I ask, okay, what is my through line? What is the connective tissue? What is my productive passion? And how can I begin to apply that more meaningfully in my day to day work? Right now, wherever I am, approach my work from that perspective. So for me, personally, I have a practice in my life on a regular basis of asking, how am I bringing freedom to the people I'm serving? Because freedom is my core value. It's my core productive passion. I don't mean freedom. I want to show people how to go sit on the beach and sip margaritas and blog all day. That's not what I'm talking about. I think that's an incredible. Personally, I feel like that would be an incredible waste of freedom, because I think that freedom that's spent solely on yourself is freedom wasted. I think that what I mean when I say that is I want to free people up from the things that keep them trapped, the things that burden them, that keep them from being creative, keep them from engaging, keep them from seeing possibility and open them up to possibility. And all of my work is centered around that, whether it's with companies, individuals, when I'm writing books, when I'm podcasting, whatever it is I'm doing, it's centered around that. So I have a discipline in my life. Every single day, I ask myself, what am I going to do today to free people up? How is this meeting I'm having? How am I going to free that person up today when I meet with that person, this call, this interview I'm doing with Brian? How am I going to communicate a message of freedom to the people who might be listening to this? Because that, for me, is my core defining, productive passion as it relates to my work. I do that with my family. What is that for you? And how can you begin asking on a daily basis, how can I apply that? And what that does is it prevents us from becoming aimless. It prevents us from allowing our work to drift to a place where we no longer really recognize what we're even doing, because it's so far from the productive passion that's inside of us. So that's one example. Another one under the header of B under boredom. I think there are a tremendous number of people I meet in the workplace I call the Busily Board. These are people who are very busy. They've got a lot going on. Brian. You ask them and they're like, oh, I'm so. They get that constipated look on their face. I'm so busy all the time. I have no time for anything. But they're bored silly. And the way I know that they're bored silly is because the moment there's a lull in the conversation or a lull in Any kind of external stimulus. The first thing that happens is the phone comes out and they're surfing for anything out there that can quell the three seconds of boredom that they're experiencing from not having stimulus in their environment. These are people who are no longer leveraging the full capacity of their mind to ask questions, to be curious, to be in the moment, to notice patterns. They're always relying on someone else to feed them stimulus, to entertain them. And we sort of have this culture now where if we're not being entertained, we don't know what to do with ourselves. My wife and I always tell her, we always tell our kids when they say, I'm bored. Great. That's wonderful. We want our kids to be bored. I grew up in the country, surrounded by farms. I had nothing to do. And this was in gasp. This was in the pre video game days, pre cable days, pre whatever. And you know what? My parents would say, go out and figure out something to do. And I'm so grateful for that that I would have to go out and figure it out. We do the same thing with our kids because we don't want our kids growing up without an understanding of how to be curious, how to ask questions, how to be present, how to be bored. Being bored in a constructive way is actually a healthy thing. When you're bored, it means your mind is looking for stimulation. Instead of feeding it with whatever's on Twitter or whatever's on ESPN.com, why don't we instead learn to train ourselves to ask questions, to go deeper, to be present, or one step further, to fill our mind with stimulus that's going to inspire us and challenge us and cause us to think differently. Some of the most amazing business leaders I know carry a book with them. Everywhere they go, they always have a book with them. They're always reading, they're always sharpening their mind, they're always thinking. Or at the least, they carry a notebook with them. And when they have five minutes before a meeting, they're sitting down, they're jotting down their thoughts, they're looking for patterns, they're reviewing their notes. But they've got that something they're doing that's beyond just surfing for some kind of external stimulus. So if we want to put a cap on busy boredom, we have to have disciplines in our life of sharpening our mind, of communing with great minds, as Steven Sample from USC calls it, communing with great minds and allowing the great thoughts of people throughout history to inform our own thoughts. And as we do that, we begin to think more systemically, we begin to connect dots. We begin we didn't even see before. And we become more effective in life and in work. It only takes Brian, by the way, I'm like a wind up Chatty Cathy. I'll just keep going. Just cut me off three hours later. It only takes if you dedicate. Let's just call it if you dedicated three hours a week, okay? And you can divide it up. However, if you dedicated three hours a week to intentional study of the great thoughts of others and then intentional thought about how you're going to apply that to your work, you will be so far ahead of everybody else in your workplace. I mean, I'm telling you right now because people don't do that. People do not do that. If you only dedicated a handful of minutes every day, let's call it 20 to 30 minutes a day, to 20 minutes to reading something and then 10 minutes to processing. How am I going to apply this to my life and my work? Today you will be so far ahead of the busily bored masses. Again, a little discipline. And we all know that there's no big shocker here, but it's not what we know, it's what we do that matters. Without action, inspiration has a shelf life and it's going to wither on the vine. Awareness is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is applied knowledge. So we have to apply what we know. My challenge, anybody listening, is when are you going to feed your mind and begin to quell the busy boredom that often plagues us and learn to be present and learn to ask better questions. Those are just a couple of disciplines. Identifying your through line, applying it, and then making sure that you're asking questions. You're feeding your mind, you're sharpening yourself. If you do those things consistently over the course of time, you can't help but find that you're doing better work and more of the work that matters to you.

So good ton of practical stuff in there. And I just love the idea of the three hours a week, 20 minutes and then very importantly, 10 minutes thinking about, well, how am I going to apply this wisdom? And then this simple discipline. When you feel that little rat like impulse to pull out the smartphone to go check the latest whatever, right? My indulgence when I'm in that addictive behavior is ESPN.com for sure. Like, how many times can I hit this today? It's like, really? It needs to go. And for me it was a bright line. I'm just never going there again. That was my decision earlier, beginning of this year, and I haven't hit it. And it's so liberating to create those bright lines. So the fun game of when you sit down and have that three minutes, can you do something simple like swap out checking out whatever you're going to do on your smartphone with getting a piece of blank paper and writing down some ideas or reading a book or whatever? Those simple shifts make huge differences.

Very simple. One of the other things I do is I keep with me. I carry with me a commonplace book where I just write down little quotes or little things. I'm reading quotes from books, things of that nature. And one of my favorite things to do when I'm waiting is just pull out that book and read through it and read through some of the things that have been inspiring me over the last year just to reinforce them, just to remind myself of some of the quotes that I heard or some of the things. Because we forget this stuff, but I want to keep them at the tip of my tongue all the time. I can't tell you how often I've been doing a talk in front of 3,000 people at an event, and all of a sudden, and boom, one of those quotes comes out, and I'm like, where did that come from? Oh, it came because I was sitting at a taxi stand waiting for a car or something. I was sitting there reading through it a couple days before, and it just sort of got into my brain. So those are the kinds of things that really make a difference in our life.

So good. And then you mentioned the seven deadly sins of mediocrity. And I never knew the etymology of the word mediocre. Mediocre. Mediocrity. Can you share that with us?

Sure, yeah. So the word mediocrity in its original form, if you parse it, it comes from two words in the original language. Medius meaning middle, and ochreous, meaning rugged mountain. So to be mediocre. And by the way, this is a complete shocker to me on a lark, as I was writing the book, I'm like, mediocrity. That's a weird word. I wonder where that comes from. And I looked at the dictionary, I'm like, this is too good to be true. This could not possibly be true. But it is middle and rugged mountain. So to be mediocre means to stop halfway up a rugged mountain. It means to get halfway to your objective and say, nah, close enough. I'm going to settle in. So many people do that, and we do that in subtle ways. We don't even realize we're settling. We don't even realize that we're setting up camp, often until it's far too late. Because everything about the way that the marketplace and the world is structured is designed to keep us in a place of comfort, in a place of complacency, and in many ways to keep us to round off our rough edges.

And.

Cause us to settle. Medius Ochreus, which is really, really unfortunate.

Such a good image, though, right the middle of the mountain. Oh, no, it's tough. I'm going to give up right here. Mediocre.

Exactly.

One of the ideas that you share in the book on how to deal with that, I call it Today's the Day. The exercise that you described, that I'd like you to describe, but the one where you have somebody following you and taking notes as kind of a. A tool to help us live our best day. Can you share that with us?

Yeah. This is going to sound a little bit creepy maybe to some people, but I found it really valuable sometimes when people talk about these principles like die empty and seize the day and YOLO or whatever the thing of the day is. I think sometimes they say, live every day as if it's your last day. And frankly, I think that's terrible advice. Because if it's my last day, I'm going to eat whatever kind of crappy food I want to eat. I'm going to do. I mean, it's my last day, I'm going to do what I want to do on my last day. And that's obviously not sustainable. Just as a different kind of exercise. Several years ago, I started thinking, what if I hired a journalist who was going to write the story of my life today? That journalist was going to follow me around, was going to see every interaction I had with the barista at Starbucks or the random person on the street, was going to see how I treated my family, was going to see what I did when nobody was watching, was going to see how hard I really worked, whether I was really doing the things I say I should be doing, or all of these things. What if somebody followed me around, they took copious notes, and then they were going to turn today into the story of my life. How would I behave differently? What would I do differently today? I think that's a much healthier perspective because it reminds you that every interaction, every piece of value that you contribute, everything you do in your life is funneling up into a body of work, a delta that exists, a change that exists. You live because you suck there on this Earth. And that Delta is going to represent what you really believe, what you really care about, what you truly, truly stand for, regardless of what you say. You can say whatever you want, but your body of work is going to be representative of what you really believe, what you really did. I personally find that a really helpful exercise because it reminds me when I'm sitting here talking to Brian, when I'm interacting with my wife, when my kids come home from school and they want to tell me something and I say, I'm going to do something else right now, come back later. Those are the moments that matter. Those are the decisions that matter. How I treat somebody in business, maybe if I have a conflict with someone or if I need to have a difficult conversation or these kinds of things, all of these little things add up into the body of work and they all matter significantly. We look at somebody like, I don't want to point fingers or call names or anything, but I'm just going to give an example just because I think this is a really. We look at somebody like Steve Jobs and we say, wow, look at the body of work that this person built. And they did built an amazing company. But we don't know, we don't really know what his body of work really was because we only saw just the business part of it. No matter what we think about everything else, I don't know either. Nobody has a window into that. But we look at these amazing people who build these things, tremendous companies, and we say, wow, those people built great bodies of work. Look at what they did. That's incredible. But frankly, I've met many excellent janitors and I've met many mediocre CEOs in my day. I've met people who take, I'm using sort of janitor as sort of a catch all for people who do work that nobody really cares about. Nobody's going to pay attention to. Nobody's going to walk into a bathroom and say, wow, somebody really took pride in cleaning this bathroom. Nobody's going to do that. And yet I've met many people who do work like that, who beam when they're doing their work and they go home and their body of work is not that bathroom, but they do that with excellence. And then they go home and they build their body of work with their family or in their church or in some other capacity. They're engaged in their community and that's the part of their body of work that they point to with pride. And I've met many CEOs. Everybody would look out from the outside and say, wow, that person's incredible. But I know that their family life's fallen apart. I know that people around them don't like them. I know that they've made a series of compromises to get where they are. And deep down they're questioning, is this really worth it? I think we have to be really careful when we look to the left and we look to the right and we start to compare ourselves with other people, we have to be really careful to understand what it is we're comparing ourselves against. The only thing that we have within our power to do, Brian, is to choose how we're going to structure and engage our day today. That's all we have right now. How am I going to engage? How am I going to bring myself? How am I going to align myself around what matters? How am I going to be a person of integrity? How am I going to build a body of work in this moment that I will point to with pride in 10 years? The question I think that can really help us in doing this is to ask the question on a daily basis, how much work will I do today that I'll be proud of in 10 years? Not how much will I get done today. How much work will I do today I can be proud of in 10 years? Now, some of that's going to be really important work, some of it might be menial work, but will I approach it in a manner I can point to with pride in 10 years and say, yes, I'm proud of that day. That's a day that stands out. That is a stellar day. Nobody else saw it, but that's a stellar day.

That's awesome. And I love the distinction too, of it's not just about what everyone can see on the outside, you know, that body of work that great businessman or woman or CEO or whatever can create. But what are we doing for our family? This morning I spent an hour with my son. So this morning we cruised around and we spent our hour on our adventure. He's cruising around three years old on his little bike. And we talked to Ray, the 87 year old guy who drove into town so he can see where he's going to volunteer in a couple of weeks. And this type of lens that you offer is now kind of, I had it in my mind in different ways, but it's a really cool, explicit way to look at it and say, look, if someone was watching me right now in documenting this as who I am for my entire life, how would I show up? And that's as Part of as significant a part of the body of work that I'm creating, that I will be proud of in 10 years, you know, that I think is as integrated human beings and fathers and mothers, we forget how important it is to appreciate that part of our work, even though no one else is going to be impressed by it, you know, in an extrinsic way. So. So love that.

And the beautiful thing about that is that your body of work is going to live on in your son.

Right.

And that's the beautiful thing about it, is that when you invest yourself in a body of work that is resonant, that's deep, that goes beyond yourself, it lives on beyond you. And people become carriers of that body of work. And your body of work amplifies. And I think at the end of the day, that's what we all want. I think that's the kind of impact we want. But if your body of work is centered around you and what you want and building something that points to you, it's going to fade away. It's not going to stand, it's not going to last. So the more we focus our body of work on serving others, pouring ourselves into others, standing in the gap for others, the more resonant it becomes. And also, I personally feel like the more we do that, the more impact we're going to have and the broader our reach is going to come because it's going to extend beyond our immediate sphere of influence. Other people are going to become carriers of that work and transmit it to others as well.

That's awesome. And we're going to have that intrinsic joy that comes when we know we're living in integrity with what we actually believe in, which then of course, fuels the virtuous cycle up of better and better work that we're more and more proud of. So much goodness in there as well. So we're running up on our little 30 minutes here. Talk to me about optimism versus wishing and the difference between the two.

Yeah, I think a lot of people sit around wishing that their life could be different, wishing that they had more opportunity, wishing that circumstances would conspire to give them what they want. But there's a difference between optimism and wishing. Optimism is active. Optimism has one foot out the door, while wishing is still sitting on the couch conjuring up. I think that we have to be really careful in today's culture not to obsess with people. Not obsessed with dreams, not obsessed with, oh, if this would only happen, or visualizing what we wish would come into our world. Instead, start moving and start focusing on making it happen. There's nothing wrong with thinking optimistically about what you want and making sure you have a clear mental image of the direction you want to go. But don't think that something is going to make you happy either, or some set of circumstances is going to make you happy. It's sort of the chase. We see this over and over again. It's the chase, the pursuit, the process that actually is often the thing that makes us gratified in the end, not the achievement of the thing that we think is going to make us happy. And so I think for optimists, I like to define optimists as people who have a clear sense of what it is they want, but they're also actively moving in the direction they know that they're going to have to go in order to get it. I would encourage people to think about, what are those wishes, maybe that are in your life, those passive wishes, and how can you turn that into active optimism and start moving in the direction that you know you want to be going?

Love it. It bringing action to our positive thinking equals some strong mojo and optimism. Again, we can talk about that for a weekend. I like to wrap up these chats with, and I appreciate you sharing such a broad array and depth of wisdom that we can apply today. If you can only share one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives, it might be something we discussed, might be something outside of what we've discussed thus far. What would that one piece of wisdom be?

So I think, and this is funny because this actually leads into our next conversation, I think that we're going to have here in a week or so. But we live in an age where it is so easy to be aware of what everyone else is doing and to look to the left and look to the right and peripheral vision can be a blessing and a curse. I think for many of us, it's really easy for us to look to the left and see somebody running in the lane next to us and running a different pace than we are and look to the right and see somebody else running a different pace and to compromise our race because we're so obsessed with somebody else's race. And the thing is, when you start looking to the left or looking to the right, your body wants to follow where your eyes are going. So my encouragement to people, my strong encouragement would be, run your race, don't run somebody else's race. Know what it is you're trying to do, understand your productive passion, and then Structure your life day by day, little by little. Structure your life around bringing that value to the world, serving other people, standing in the gap. Run your race. Don't let peripheral vision draw you off course, because it's a blessing and a curse over the course of time. Build your body of work. Make sure that you're staying in your lane, that you're focusing on your thing, and design your life around that. It doesn't happen by default, it only happens by design. Whatever that takes for you. Make sure that you're structuring your focus, your assets, your time and your energy around that thing, that outcome that you're moving toward. And run your race. And don't let peripheral vision draw you off course.

Awesome. Well, that's a great segue into our next chat. I'm looking forward to that. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

The best way to find me is toddhenry.com that's my personal site. I also do a series of podcasts called the Accidental Creative. Been doing them for 10 years. There's quite a bit of stuff there. You can find those@todhenry.com or just wherever you listen to podcasts or on the Twitter. Todd Henry as well.

Right on. All right, Todd, thank you so much.

Thank you. Brian.

Hi, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube. So I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. Ten bucks a month. Join the Optimal Living Membership program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best optimal living books out there. Old school classics, positive psychology, modern stuff, mindfulness, peak performance, purpose, neuroscience, wealth, etc. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell. You want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big idea, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas, and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again, we have 250 of these on all these different great books. And then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to optimal living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from Habits101, Confidence101, Getting Stuff Done101, Meditation101, instant access to all those classes. And then Future classes include Relationships 101 Energy 101 Purpose 101 business goals, etc. Those are our full length classes. And then I create micro classes. Two to three to five minute little bursts of wisdom on my favorite great ideas from these great books across the domains that you want to optimize in your life. So we have dozens of these so far. I created create 50 new micro classes every month and 10 new philosopher's notes every month for 10 bucks a month. So we're blessed to have thousands of members who are enjoying the program and sharing some incredibly kind words with us. And super simple. 10 bucks a month. Cancel anytime. Would be honored to be a bigger part of your life and I appreciate your support. And here's to optimizing and actualizing.