How to Journal Carpe Diem Style!

Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. Long time, no behind the camera video. I've missed these. I've missed you. We're getting ready for our Mastery Series launch. Super fired up. And this morning I was doing my daily carpe diem journaling, which is one of the important things in our Mastery Series. Part of a much longer conversation we will have in that Mastery Series. But I just felt inspired to put this on and kind of walk you through how I'm approaching it. So carpe diem. Today's Wednesday, 1 29. 2020. Can't believe it's 2020. The quest for a moral life is a theme of mine right now. David Brooks's new book, the Quest for a Moral Life, subtitle to the Second Mountain. I just think that's such an amazing line and really captures so much of what we're after. The quest for a moral life and the moral joy that David Brooks tells us we experience when we live with commitment. He has four of them. Vocation, marriage and family. Your philosophy and faith and community. Deeply, deeply resonant. I'm excited to share the philosopher's note and integrate that wisdom more and more into our work. So next up after I set the big high level intention for the day is the big three. As you know, if you've been following along, our big three is energy, work and love. We try to distill the most important aspects of our lives into something very, very simple. A framework we can come back to again and again and again. Energy, work and love. We get our energy optimized so we can show up fully in our work and our love. Then we have a big three times two, right? So the big three, energy, work and love times another big three, identity, virtues and behavior. So what we want to do is help us all understand what's our most fully expressed best version of ourselves, identity wise in our energy, our work and our love. Let's get clear on that. For me, it's radiant exemplar athlete was the theme last year. I'm still playing with that. And then work is chairman and philosopher in residence and teacher of optimized. And love is husband, father, teacher and leader. These are identities that are very meaningful to me and I can see them clearly in my mind when I write those down. The best version of myself. We have a lot of exercises. We'll walk you through to get clarity on your identity. Okay, that's nice. Then we need to get clear on. Okay, well, what does that version of you act like? What are the virtues that you embody as we discuss in module one of Mastery series. It's all about eudaimonology is what it's called. Again, longer chat, but it's all about operationalizing virtue. Who are you at your best? What virtues do you embody? Eulogy virtues. To use the way David Brooks described it in the Road to Character. Right. Well, when I'm optimizing my energy, I'm grounded, I'm strong, I'm calm, I'm confident, I'm dissonance, I'm radiantly alive. Boom. These are virtues I want to embody today in my work. I'm creative, I'm prolific, I'm virtuous, I'm wise, I'm kind, I'm generous, and I'm courageous. Again, these mean something to me as I write those. I want to embody them today. Move out of the abstract theory someday to today. Carpe diem, love. I want to be calm and confident. That comes up a lot for me, just having that energized tranquility, which I didn't write today, but I often do. Joyful, loving, present again, kind and generous. Important virtues for me. And then also getting clarity on my vocation as a teacher. Read, write, teach, repeat is one of my commitments to my vocation. Really getting clear on that and going all in on that. And then the behaviors. What am I going to do? Today's a recovery day. I've been training hard and going hard, getting a massage. It's my wonderful Timex letting me know that my 1000 seconds have elapsed. Usually I would bang on some burpees, but I'd just stand up right now, save you the burpees. But anyway, these are the behaviors. So what am I going to do? Do. This is my identity I'm aspiring to live as today. These are the virtues I'm going to embody. What am I going to do today? What behaviors we want. Again, drill this down into reality. Boom. I'm going to do this. What's my number one thing and the few things I'm going to do today? For me family, it's AM and pm. We've got certain things. This means stuff to me. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Won't bore you with those details, but anyway, that's the big three times two. As we've been framing it last year. At the risk of blowing your brain up, we have another. I'm playing with a ton of different models for carpe diem so we can keep it fresh. Been studying gratitude quite a bit. And he talks about Robert Emmons, gratitude journaling, how powerful it is. We'll be talking about that more this year. Note coming out soon. But you can get gratitude fatigue. You do the gratitude journaling every day, which he recommends, but you need to keep it fresh. So we're coming up with a few different templates for our big three. So here's another one. The big three times two. Identity, virtues and behaviors was the last one. This is the psychological big three times two. So again, we want to operationalize virtue to experience the highest form of joy, which Aristotle called eudaimonia, and Martin Seligman calls flourishing, which is the translation of that. My battery just said it was getting low. I'm on an ipod right now, old school. I use it to check my aura. Otherwise I'm not using a phone these days other than Alexandra. Anyway, Big three times too. So we've got our energy, work and love. Again, that's our core big three. We organize our whole lives around that. We can get overwhelmed with all kinds of roles and goals or categories of improvement with Simplify, energy, work and love. Then let's look at the top three virtues that psychologists say lead to happiness. They've got their 24 virtues, but three of them are the most highly correlated to well being and happiness. Gratitude, hope and zest. Actually not in that order, though. Zest, or a high base of the sense of energy and life force, is actually their number one virtue, most highly correlated with well being, which is astonishingly powerful. And why, by the way, we make energy so central to all of our work. I am more bullish on this than ever before, having done another deep dive into the science of this stuff. Anyways, zest is the number one. The psychologists kind of arm wrestle on. Which one's number two? Hope and gratitude. Who cares? They're both awesome. I like to start with gratitude, kind of be present to what's amazing right now, then look forward with hope to the future, and then take disciplined action today to have my zest and my energy, my life force, as powerful as possible. So again, energy, work and love. Let's walk through it. Gratitude, hope, zest. When you do this a few times, this takes a few minutes. This is like three to five minutes, once you kind of get the hang of it, et cetera. So we're not talking about spending all day, 10 minutes, whatever. Same thing with this. So energy, my way of expressing gratitude has become a thank you, God, whatever you want to call it. But having the humility to see that I am part of something much bigger than myself and the antithesis of gratitude is entitlement. Where you think the world revolves around you. You're on what David Brooks would call the first mountain. Congratulations. But to have the humility to be grateful for what we have. So for me, I start mine with almost a mini prayer. Thank you, God, for my health, vitality. I am grateful and blessed to be alive. And I actually feel that when I write that down. I truly do feel blessed to be alive, period. So gratitude, energy, then gratitude for work. Thank you, God, for calling me to do what I do. I am blessed to be a teacher and I don't even know what I wrote and guide to help people on their quest for a moral life. Again, I feel that I'm grateful that I get to do what I do and flip this on and be able to share some wisdom with you. Thank you, God. What did I say here? For blessing me with a beautiful family. Alexander is my perfect wife. I'm going to get all messy just saying that. And wow. Our two little gems. I am blessed and cherish your gifts. Gifts is another really big word that Robert Emmons talks about that grateful people see life as a gift and everything in it is a gift. They don't take it for granted. For granted. They take it as granted, as granted by something bigger than themselves. Wow. What a gift to have you in my life, literally. So, yeah, I'm pretty moved after doing that. My heart is open. I feel truly grateful for what I have right now. And again, the science is unequivocal. Grateful people achieve all the other things we want to achieve extrinsically and they're happier in the process. So that's virtue number one, two, three, hope. Okay. Boom. Look forward. For me, this is super simple. I'm grateful for the energy I have right now. And ah. Oh, Obstacles make me stronger. At 75, I want to do a Spartan race easily B style. At 75, that's just a fun, creative goal for me of being in the this shape that I can do a Spartan beast. They're longer. Not crazy long, but longer form race any day. 365 of the year right now, I want to do that at 75. That's inspiring for me. Hope. Three parts to hope. As we're going to talk about a lot in Mastery series. One, you believe your future will be better than your present. You have a goal you're excited about. Two, you know you can do it. You have a sense of agency. Goal agency. And then what they call pathways. You'll take plan A, plan B, plan C. You don't care. That's hope. Truly grounded. Strong hope. Then my work hope today. Well, we've got a thousand plus ones. We've got 500PMs. We've got 50 plus 101s. I'm really excited. In 10 years, I'm going to hit 1000 philosopher's notes. Just chip it away. One a week, 50 a year. Give me another 10 years. Add 500 to our 570. We're over 1000. That's inspiring for me. So again, I'm grateful and I'm inspired about the future. We'll have over 101. 101s. We're really excited to be recruiting some extraordinary teachers. We're putting together our 2020 event. Just talked to Cal Newport. Yeah, two days ago. He's on tall. Ben Shahar, Mark Devine, Anders Erickson, Roy Baumeister. We've got an incredible array of people. We're still finalizing the details of how we're going to approach it. But anyway, our 101s will be growing with some world class teachers in addition to the 50 I've produced then I'm excited. 25 years from now, right around the time I'm banging out that Spartan, I'll be 70 years old. In 25 years on 8 hours, 22 minutes and 44 seconds, Dale Valente. God willing, I'm going to wave and say, hey, this is Ryan. Welcome to another optimize plus one. And boom, we're going to go from 1,000 to 10,000. Now again, it takes me way longer to explain it than it does to write this, but that's really inspiring for me. I'm grateful now I'm hopeful. And I'm a teacher and I remind myself of that. I'm a teacher. This is my vocation. I'm committed to. I'm also the chairman and philosopher in residence, empowering our team to go out and crush it. Feel blessed to have our team doing what they're doing so I can do what I do. Super inspiring. And then love. What's my Hope for love? 50th. That's all I need to write. It takes me two seconds to write down 50th. Doesn't take me two seconds, one second. 50th anniversary with Alexandra. We're celebrating our 13th this year. So on April 21, 2057, Deo Valente. I'll be 83. Alexander will be 78. Emerson will be 45. Eleanor will be 41. We're celebrating our 50th. It gives me, tears of eye again. That's awesome. Wow. Thank you, God. And let's do this. And then what am I going to do today? Such that that becomes a reality and I demonstrate my gratitude by giving back. Right? And then what am I going to do today? And again, Love, work, energy, energy, work and love. Well, that leads us to zest, Gratitude, hope, zest. You want to have a strong sense of energy and life force. Energy in the deepest sense. Life force, soul force as we call it. Well then you better take disciplined action today. As we see it, zest is a byproduct of a commitment to the fundamentals of which, by the way, gratitude and hope are two of our core seven fundamentals. We spend two months, two and a half months in our Mastery series crushing the fundamentals. You want to optimize and actualize your potential, right? You better start with your foundation. It all starts there. Michael, our head coach has got a much better visual representation of that. Anyway, gratitude, hope, zest, what am I going to do today? It's kind of parallel, right? To the behaviors from the other big three. But what am I going to do today to be in integrity with this vision and optimize my best self? Well, it's a recovery day again. But I'm gonna do my 1 10, 100. It's gonna be easy. Massage. I'm gonna eat by 2 or 2 30. Already did some homepage stuff. Working on 2020. Then am giving Alexander time, spending time with the kids. Pm getting Emerson a new bike today. He's super fired up. Outgrew the other one. Anyway, there you go. Good to be back. Big three times. Two operationalizing virtue, moving from theory to practice to mastery. Mastery series launches February 11, Tuesday, less than two weeks away. I'm so excited. I've got my stack of notes here. That is the Mastery Series. Basically taking every single thing I've studied in all of those books. Five hundred plus philosopher's notes. Thousand plus ones. Ones. There's that stack. Here's my stack of a thousand plus ones. The next stack is growing and then 5101s boiled into one program that helps us operationalize virtue and leads to our diploma if you want to become a coach. And what we're really excited about that we're just announcing is the fact that this Mastery Series, which used to be exclusively available through our coach program, is now going to be part of our $10 a month program. So you can get access to everything. A thousand plus ones, 500 and whatever philosopher's notes, 50 optimally 101 classes and the mastery series for 10 bucks a month. Super fired up about that. Teams put together a two week free trial so you can try it all for free. But February 11th is go time. We're going to go through this live with people from around the world. Me 9am Tuesday. Specific time sharing each of our seven modules plus one. We've got eight modules but we call it seven plus one. It's like 250 day program. I think I'm going to give 25 or something like that. Lectures followed by Q and a coaching with our coaches. All part of our general core wisdom program. And I'm just so honored and so inspired because I know it changes lives. I've got. I'm getting a cork board but for now I've got this blackboard and I've got some of the people who deeply move me. Wendy. Check out her video on our homepage. We've got our army rangers, special forces guys at the finish line of the race we did together. Yeah. So many cool optimizers that just fire me up so much. Inspire me every single day. Join us. Let's do this. 2020is going to be the greatest year of our life. The start of the greatest decade of our life. There's the woman I want to celebrate my 50th with. Love you babes. Us at the finish line. Me ripping off your right front tire.