17 Dec 2025 · 6 min
Brian Johnson breaks down ten ideas for winning your morning: start before checking your phone, honor your own rhythm instead of copying someone else's, and focus your early hours on energy, work, and love. The core move is the AM bookend, a routine that protects your best hours from distraction.
You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize mastery series. Today we've got module four, part three, the AM bookends. As always, let's start with a quick recap. See where we've been, where we're headed. Where do we start? Module one, Eudaimonology. Coaches, I'm going to challenge you to see if you can guess what I'm going to say by the end of our work together. We want to help you have a really clear sense of the optimized protocol, then help you apply it to your coaching practice. So module one, Eudaimonology, the study of a good soul. That would be you and yours, Aristotle Seligman. How do we win the ultimate game of life? We close the gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being, which is the point of all of our work together. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon equals hero. Which was module two, Hero ology, the study of a good hero. That would be you. Three sessions here. Antifragile confidence, heroic courage and response ability. Before we move to module three, the big three times two. Energy, work and love, Identity, Virtues, behaviors. When do we want to engage in those behaviors that the optimist best version of us would like us to engage in? Today. Which is why we're spending six sessions on carpe diem. C is the day. Today's the day. We started with a big picture. Then what we say we said your day started the night before. PM leads to AM. Today. We're going to talk about the am. We're going to reflect the same basic ideas we talked about in the PM module, but apply them to the am. So we're going to start one more time. Today's the day started yesterday. And we want you to know that the quality of your day is going to be dictated by how you start the day. We want to see two bridges. The bridge from last night to this morning, then the bridge from this morning to the rest of your day. We're going to make a few connections one more time, make some decisions as well. Then we're going to honor our idiosyncratic rhythms as applied to the AM book. And we're going to bring our patron you back one more time. Universal, unique, ultimate. Then we're going to see our lives through our big three. This time on the am Energy, work and love. We're going to have some fun equations to look at in the work Session there. We're going to take three pills in the energy section, which should be fun. Then the eighth and ninth ideas will be our two practices. We're going to encourage you to create some pre input wins. That's going to be one of the big themes today. Pre input wins, we shut down complete. We have a digital sunset, right? And we stop the technology inputs. Well, we want to see how long we can go in our mornings before we allow those inputs in. So we're going to suggest you begin your meditation practice before you allow inputs into your life. We're actually gonna do the virtue meditation. Then we're going to encourage you to figure out how you're gonna have big three wins. Energy, work and love. Identity, Virtues, behaviors. What's the thing you could do, the number one thing you could do to make today a win? And can you do that before you allow inputs into your life? Because if you can, you're gonna have a really, really hard time consistently having really bad days. That emotional stamina. Going to talk about one more time. Our tenth idea. We're going to whoop it one more time. We're going to be artistic archers, honoring the process of making our lives a masterpiece. We're going to be in a lab coat collecting data as we run experiments. And we're also going to have that gion training like we mean it. Mastery versus going through the motions. All right, our first big idea. One more time. Today's the day. We need to get this. And I'm going to continue to repeat myself through this session and again and again and again over our time together. Why? Because if we want to operationalize virtue, which again, is the game we're committed to playing, right? Closing the gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being, we've got to get the fact that today's the day. And then we want to see that our bookends are what it's all about. Your pm, your am. You have more control over these. And when we talk about your emotional stamina, your ability to respond antifragile, wise to life's inevitable challenges, and have that deep sense of trust in yourself, such that the worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. This is your protocol. It's your PM and your am These simple little habits that are levers we can pull that have a huge impact in our lives. Therefore, let's get this fact that this is what it's all about. If we want to have higher highs and higher lows, we want to get the bookends locked in. There you go. It's common sense. We need to make common practice one more time. Today's theme is going to be Pre input wins. Hey, this is Brian again. I hope you enjoyed that overview of a Mastery Series session and got some wisdom out of it. You can apply to your life today. What was it again? You can learn more about our Optimize Coach program at Optimize Me Coach. And here's a fun little video we put together featuring some of our Optimize Coach graduates describing what they got out of our program and why they loved it so much. You can also check out hundreds of other testimonials at Optimize Me Coach. Have an awesome day and let's do this.
