How to Optimize Your Life - The 10 Principles of Optimal Living!

Hi guys, how are you? Happy Saturday morning or whatever morning it is or day it is for you when you watch this. But it's Saturday morning for me as I record this a little before 5am Got up early this morning, meditated, did some yoga and started planning for my class that's coming up the next 10 days. First class I've taught in over two years. Optimal Living 101. Very excited about it. And then I thought I'd just kind of give you an overview of what we're going to do, these 10 principles. But also give you kind of a behind the scenes look at how I take a book, create a philosopher's note which leads to the TV episodes which then leads to a class. Ultimately what I'm trying to do is find the best big ideas I possibly can so I can distill them into really cool big ideas, philosopher's notes, these classes, et cetera that help you optimize your life so you can actualize your potential. But it all starts with these great books. I kind of imagine going mining for big ideas for you. The books include everything from Turning pro, Unbeatable Mind, the Art of Mental Training, Nonviolent Communication, Getting things done, Superhuman by Habit, Self Compassion, Mind Gym, Spartan Up, Wealth, Warrior Mindsight. Great book on neuroplasticity. The tools. Best book I read a couple years ago. Enough already. Alan Cohen's Amazing Mindfulness, the emotional life of your brain. This guy basically kicked off so much of the neuroscience movement. Play Winning in mind. Shockingly good book. Improv, Wisdom. Really really good. The Compound Effect. Take a nap, Change your life. Power, Sleep, Gifts of imperfection, Daring Greatly, Blah blah blah. The Obstacle is the Way. Now by the way, these are all books that I've basically read over the last 35 days. I've had the most productive 35 days of my life. I actually read about 19 of those books, but I've created philosopher's notes on all of those. In the last 35 or so days, I've turned pro. This is me 10 hours a day. This is what I do. So yesterday I read this book, the Obstacle is the way. Unbelievably good. And what I do is I go through and I basically identify the most awesome sections, the sections that you underline an asterisk and fold the page over on. I find those, call them big ideas, they're awesome. Amazing. What can I find that would really inspire you that you can take into your life immediately, give you more wisdom and less time? Take a book like that or Darren greatly or any of These turning pro. And then I create a six page philosopher's note. Well, there you go, there's a look at those big ideas. I'll capture them, I'll riff on them, I'll connect them to other teachers, etc. I've done 200 of these so far, literally cranked out 25 in the last 35 days. This is what I do when I start my days now. That's cool. Okay, so we've got a book. Then we've got a Philosopher's Note which is 6 page PDF and I also record that as an MP3, not B3P3. And then I've got a bunch of big ideas I can send out in newsletters and then I've got a video I can create. That's the basic process with Philosopher's notes. I've done that 200 times. The best books from Ancient Wisdom, modern science, positive psychology, etc. Across all the different domains I'm passionate about that, I think go into Optimal Living. And what I found is those are thousands of big ideas in these books and the other hundreds of them, thousands of big ideas. But all the teachers come back to the same basic principles again and again and again. And I've been working to distill these and here's what I've identified. I've seen that they come back to basically these 10 principles. Let's walk through them quickly. And this is going to be the basis of our class. So we're going to do a class, optimal living 101, five day immersion reboot, focused on these basic ideas that you can apply to your life. Now. Now, every single great teacher is going to agree that it all starts with your mind. I use the word optimism. You need to get your mind right. But we can call it mindfulness training. Our attention mental training, it's the heart, cognitive therapy. You need to get your mind right. That's principle number one, optimism. I've got a lot of ideas on how to do that thanks to these extraordinary teachers. We'll look at ancient wisdom, modern science, common sense. What do we need to do in order to get our minds right? That's principle number one. Now principle number two is purpose. As you get your mind right, you stop complaining, you stop criticizing. You say, well, what do I want? What do I want to do with my life? What's my purpose? Those are big questions. Who are you? What do you want? What's your one thing that's a big idea from Mark Devine's Unbeatable Mind. Unbelievably Good, we're going to talk about that in this class. What's your one thing? Who are you? What are you here to do with your life? Well, guess what? That requires a lot of self awareness. To answer those questions requires deep self awareness. That's principle number three. Sum that up in the ancient phrase, know thyself, not complicated, not easy, but it is simple. Fourth principle is goals. Happy people have projects and goals. Scientists say. All great teachers say, what do you want? What's your purpose? And how do you translate that into a specific meaningful goal? And not all goals are created equally. The great teachers tell us intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. We'll talk about that. Then we're going to focus on process being primary. We want to set goals that are focused more on the process than the outcome. This is a huge idea that I haven't unpacked that much in my classes yet. We're going to go into this in the immersion, then we'll go into it in more depth throughout the year. Next principle, principle number five is action. We got to get stuff done. Doesn't matter. All this stuff is nice, but if you're not getting stuff done done, what difference does it make, right? So we've got a lot of cool tips and tricks just to get stuff done. And then also we want to use your willpower to create habits. Willpower is finite. We want to create habits you can put on autopilot, habits that change your life. This is going to be a big part of 2015 for the optimal living program is how do we change your life? By installing habits that are amazing. And again, you hear me talk about this all the time. Willpower is the greatest predictor of success. We need to use this wisely. We're going to talk about that in this principle action, which is the engine that drives everything. We're going to make today a masterpiece as well. I just did a video on that yesterday that's going to be part of this discussion in this class and then going forward now. Okay, all that's great. So you've got your optimism dialed in. You get your mind right, you're clarifying your purpose via self awareness. You're setting some goals that inspire you, that get you out of bed in the morning with inspiration and enthusiasm. Then you're taking action consistently. You're feeling great, you've got momentum now. We need to make sure your energy is dialed in. How you feeling? Are you taking care of yourself? Well, there's a big three that I like to focus on. Exercise, nutrition and rest. We're going to talk about those. It's not complicated. We're going to keep it simple. We're going to rock the fundamentals, but we're going to help you get your energy dialed in again. We're going to take a quick pass in this class, and we'll go into it deeper throughout the year. Next one is wisdom, the next principle. All the great teachers tell us that life is our classroom. Every moment gives us an opportunity to grow. We need to move from theory to practice. Theory is the basic stuff that's rudimentary. Practice is the advanced stuff. We want to take all these ideas and make it a more consistent part of your life. That's the wisdom principle. The eighth principle is courage. One of my favorite words, courage, comes from the Latin word for heart. It is the heartbeat of optimizing and actualizing our potential. So just as your heart pumps blood to your arms and legs, courage vitalizes all your other virtues. You want to put this stuff into action? Well, guess what? It's not easy. It's simple, but it's not easy. We need to cultivate the ability to do it consistently. Brene Brown, in her great book Daring Greatly and in Gifts of Imperfection, describes that as ordinary courage. Ordinary courage, yeah, sure, it's great to run into a burning building and pull somebody out. Those are heroes. We need heroes. But we also need everyday ordinary courage. To do the little things with the best of our ability to show up and to communicate authentically and to live a life of meaning requires ordinary courage. We want to cultivate that eighth principle we're going to go off on. That ninth principle is love. None of this stuff matters if we don't have love. Love starts with ourselves. It extends to others. We're going to talk about that. We can talk about self compassion. Great book. Where are you? Self compassion. Kristin Neff. She's awesome. And how that leads to kindness to ourselves and presence with ourselves and with others. And what I'm going to call and what the tools guys call active love. So we want to engage love actively in our lives. We'll talk about some ways to do that. That'll be a lot of fun. And finally, all that leads us to entheos. Two little Greek words. God within. That's our highest goal. We want to connect to the God, the divine, the highest, within ourselves, whatever you call it, more consistently, moment to moment to moment. We want to plug in and shine. So Those are our 10 principles. Optimism, purpose, self, awareness, goals, action, energy, wisdom, courage, love, and theos. We're Going to spend a week, five day immersion talking about them and how you can apply to your life again. I'm all about more wisdom and less time and super practical goodness. And I'm excited to share. If I can distill this entire thing into one word, it would be arete, the Greek word that directly translates as excellence or virtue. But it basically means expressing the highest version of yourself moment to moment to moment. So if we have one big funnel that this all leads to, it's that it's presence. It's the power of now being able to show up actively in this moment as the highest version of yourself. Arete. That's what we want to get to at the end of the day. That's the heart of optimizing and actualizing that. I'm excited to help guide you toward and help you do the things you already know to be true more consistently. So there you go. That was a fun look at how I arrived at this process. Books, Philosopher's Notes and ultimately these principles. This is all part of the Philosopher's Notes Optimal Living program. My goal is every single time I write something anywhere, I write this little lightning bolt. That lightning bolt for me represents astonishing. Astonish comes from the Latin word to strike with lightning. That's what I want to do with my work as I turn pro and serve you profoundly. So this class is available as part of our Optimal Living membership program. You also get every single one of the philosopher's notes, 200 philosopher's notes. This class, Q&As during the month and then monthly classes, 10 bucks a month. I hope that you find that astonishing. And I have dozens and dozens and dozens more of these books that I just cannot wait to read, distill, create Philosopher's Notes on, and then ultimately teach additional classes throughout the year. So There you go. Optim 101, five day immersion reboot. That's the overview. If you're feeling it, would love to have you join us. I appreciate everyone who's already joined. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I'm honored and appreciative to gets me emotional to have the opportunity to do what I do and I do it with all your support. So thank you so much and good morning to you or good afternoon and I hope to see you soon in the class. See you. Bye.