Interview: The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am just thrilled to be chatting with Bernard Roth, who wrote the Achievement Habit subtitle Stop Wishing, Start Doing and Take Command of youf Life. Bernie has been a professor at Stanford for over 50 years, which I find just insane, astonishing, and inspiring. He is one of the founders of the D School at Stanford and one of the world's leading thinkers on creativity and applying design thinking to our lives. Reading this book was, for me, like hanging out with a wise, humble, playful mentor, and I just loved it. And, Bernie, I really appreciate you taking the time today so we can chat about some of my favorite big ideas.

Sure, My pleasure, Brian.

All right, well, let's jump in from the beginning. Let's talk about what achievement is. You, of course, define it in the book, but can you share with us how you see achievement?

Sure. It's a little different than most people would probably use the word achievement. In fact, as an aside, I have a friend, she said I would never buy a book with achievement in the title. And I had to calm her down, because what she thinks and what most people think, it means becoming the king of the universe. And I don't mean that. I mean having a good life and getting yourself in a good place for you and your friends and your family and all that. So to me, achievement is the whole idea of, you know, you're born and you're going to die at the other end, and you just want to have your life flow and be as magical and wonderful as possible, and you want to get rid of stuff that detracts from that. So achievement means, to me, the good life.

That's awesome. So kind of optimizing and actualizing our potential and enjoying the process.

Yeah. And what it means for us personally, not what we're supposed to do for someone else.

I love that. That's a theme you come back to often throughout the book, especially with the students you've seen of what do you really want to do? Right. What do you feel called to do and have the confidence and audacity and discipline to go out and do it, right?

Yes.

Okay, so that's part one of the title, Achievement. Talk to us about how we can make creating that good life a habit and what a habit means in this context.

Sure. Well, you know, most of our behavior is habitual in that we don't really consider every move we make in everything we do and every meal we eat and every conversation we have. So what I'm hoping is this whole idea of achievement or the good life, which will become a natural thing with us. And it's the default position. So I want to give you a certain number of habits in your life that when things come up, you don't think about them. You normally do the thing which is nurturing for you and for the people around you.

I love it. And we'll talk about some of those habits in a moment that literally we can apply today. Before we do that though, I want to talk about one more kind of high level framework, which is design thinking. So of course you created, with a number of other brilliant human beings, a design school at Stanford years ago. Can you tell us about design thinking in general and specifically how and why we can apply it to our lives?

Sure. Well, design thinking, the name comes from the idea that there were certain things that people design stuff in the world, use behaviors and things like that. And those behaviors were generally applied to architects and people who design furniture and design computers and things like that. And that kind of thinking can be brought over into everything. And specifically I brought it over into designing your life, meaning handling your life in an appropriate way. So design thinking comes, it's comes from that original notion of this is what designers did. Of course they didn't all do the same thing, but basically there are sets of, there's sets of frameworks that are important. And the first important part is something called empathy. And that's the whole idea of if you're going to solve a problem, you should be dealing with the person or people you're solving the problem for. And that sounds like, sure, everyone does that, but in fact nobody does that professionally or didn't years ago. Design thinking is about 15 years old. And before that people didn't do that. People would always talk to other experts. So if you're designing something like a medical instrument, most people never talk to the patients. They talk to other doctors, they talk to customer engineers, they talk to researchers, but they never talk to the person it's for. So the first thing is this whole idea of empathy. Talk to the people you're working for, you're solving the problem for. In my case it would be talk to your friends or your family or people around you and yourself. Also talk to yourself in terms of mindfulness and things like that. The second idea is once you have that, make sure you have the right problem. It's called defining it or framing the problem. And a lot of times we go about, we solve the wrong problem and even if we solve it, it's not going to go away. It's just going to be displaced a little bit and won't give us what we want. So the first, the heavy part of the design thinking framework is to make sure you get the right problem for the right people. And then you use what are standard techniques. Brainstorming is one such technique, although there are many where you actually ideate and try and get a bunch of solutions and then you test them and you eventually produce it. So the shift to design thinking is a big, heavy side toward the front of the process, as opposed to the backside of the process. But in addition to the process, the thing that's really important are the mindsets. And the mindsets are not to have a fear of failure. It's okay to fail if you can use the failure to help you get where you're going. So nothing has to be perfect. You just have to get at the end something that's really good. But in the process, it's okay to make a lot of mistakes. So we have what's called a bias towards action, which means don't sit around and think, but just start to do it. Once you've gotten the problem, start to do it, start to work, even if you don't know what you're doing. And you'll probably make mistakes, and that's okay because you're going to learn from those mistakes. So there's the idea of bias towards action. There's not getting rid of the fear of failure. There are ideas like that that are really important that go with the kind of specific steps that people use in design thinking.

I love it. And we'll unpack some of those ideas because that's exactly what I had on kind of my short list of big ideas I wanted to chat about. So design thinking, the empathy, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, testing, and getting feedback applied to our own lives. And of course, in the book, you unpack that in details in a really cool way. Let's talk about the bias to action and how it's related to the idea of trying versus doing. You share some great stories about there's a big difference between trying and doing.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, to me, it's interesting. There's this Star wars thing where Yoda says, there is no try, just do. And I understand. But in fact, there is a try and there is a do, and they're both fine. I actually think they're okay human states. The issue is we confuse them. So the issue is we think we're doing and we're just trying. And if you're trying, you might succeed. If you're lucky, you know it will work out. But if you get some hurdles, you get some things that block your progress. If you're trying, you'll quit and you won't get there. Whereas if you're doing, it doesn't matter if there are hurdles, you will still get there. No matter what it takes, you'll get yourself around the hurdles and you keep going. So they're just two different states, and it's important to know what state you're in. And it's also okay to switch. It's just, to me, not okay if you kid yourself which state you're in. So I could spend my whole life having tried to write a book. And if I died without having written it, you know, so what? The world doesn't care. On the other hand, if I felt that in my sense of things, I really want to write the book, then I'm not going to let other things get in the way. I'm going to take the time and I'm going to put myself in front of the computer that it's going to take to get it done. So it's that way with almost anything. And there's an amusing thing that happened in my life. My wife and I were in front of a movie theater and I wanted to go, and she didn't want to go, but she acquiesced to my urgency about it. And I went to park the car, and when I came back, she wasn't in the line. And I asked her, well, why she wasn't in line. She said, well, they were sold out. And I so wanted to go that I went along the line and procured two tickets from elsewhere than the box office. And that was a really good example. She was trying, you know, she didn't really want to go, but she was humoring me. And so she tried. And she got to the first hurdle, the box office. They said she was sold out and she quit. And that's okay. It's reasonable. But I was going to do it no matter what. And I went along and I used some cash from some people and got some tickets that people had on the line they were willing to sell me. So it's an example of. It's a trivial example, but it really points out the difference between if you're trying something, anything can stop you because you're just hanging out.

That's great. I think you make the joke that she may have been right. In that case.

Yeah. Yeah, she was Actually. Right. It was a terrible show. She's always right. I should know that. But I still keep doing it.

That's great. But a great important distinction between trying versus doing. So I love the comment that it's fine, we can be either in trying mode or doing mode, but let's not pretend we're in doing mode. We're really just trying. Let's say that we actually do want to do something. We're committed to it, but we have a habit of trying and giving up early. What would you suggest we do to shift from trying to a doing state?

Sure. Well, you just. It's a matter of mindfulness, I think, just being aware. I do a lot of workshops for executive, for people from industry and stuff like that, in addition to students. And what I get, the feedback is once people understand the distinction, that kind of takes care of itself because they realize they're in a trying mode and they're going to handle it. I remember we had a team of three from some local Silicon Valley company and they got an idea and they were going to go back and do it. And when they went back, their manager was very discouraging. He said, among other things, we have no room for you guys to set up for your team and all that. In my workshop, I have someone take a bottle away from me as an exercise to show the difference between trying and doing. So. But they said, let's take the bottle away from Bernie. And what they ended up doing is they just put some chairs in a corner in the hallway and they set up a pseudo office and they started to work and they set up a board there, and they were just working, even though they wouldn't give them space. And eventually they got. The manager surrendered and they did the project. So it's just that idea which they got out of the workshop, the difference between trying and doing. So if they hadn't done it, probably they would have gone back. The manager had said, I'm sorry, can't do it. No space. They would have said, oh, okay, well, we can't do it. It's the manager's fault. You know, that's a good reason for not doing it. The manager won't let us do it. And they would have gone on with their lives. But because of the inspiration, they said, we're not going to be stopped by this one obstacle. We're going to work around it. And they did. So that's an example. And I get those stories time and time again. So I would say the answer is it's just mindfulness. Do you want to do it and do you want to stop kidding yourself? So a lot of us have pipe dreams. So if you have a pipe dream, you know you're probably not going to do it and it might nurture you to have the pipe dream. That's great. I have nothing against pipe dreams. I have plenty myself. But if you're really going to do it, then you're going to do it. In my case with the book, I decided because of sabbatical leave, I decided I didn't want to waste a year and my wife didn't want to travel. And so I know I was stuck around here. And I said, well, I'm going to write a book. And I talked to people for some months of trying to figure out which book. I had three or four books in mind and I couldn't get any resolution. And then the day one of the sabbatical started, September 1st, I got up at six in the morning, I put my butt in the chair in front of my computer and I started typing and this book poured out of me. And I got there every morning at six in the morning for about four months till I got a first draft. And it's just that idea of bias towards action. I could still be thinking, this is like four years ago. I could still be thinking about what book to write. So it's that kind of thing. If you're going to do it, you have to have a bias towards action and you have to be mindful that this is it. I'm just going to start doing it and I don't know how it's going to come out. I didn't know what was going to come out. I didn't even know which book I was going to write when I sat down. But I knew I was going to write a book and I did. And I think anybody could do it. It's just a matter of saying I'm going to do it as opposed to I'm going to try to do it. And if you try and do it, you know when a friend calls you and someone invites you to breakfast and all this stuff, you're going to not do it. You're going to go eat breakfast. In my case, I knew I was going to work every morning from 6 until my wife was ready for breakfast at 10am and I had four hours, you know, all to myself every morning.

So good. Biased action, just doing it. Butt in chair. You mentioned the fear of failure, which is obviously one of the reasons why people are more comfortable hanging out in the trying mode. Because if the boss says no and you continue going, well, wow, then it's on you, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Can you talk to us about fear and fear of failure and how that comes into the process and how you felt discovered ways to address that most powerfully?

Sure. Well, it's a thing that's really interesting because I and most people tend to be so self conscious and self concerned. We think everyone cares about us much more than they do. Most people care about themselves more than they care about others. So even if Bernie failed, nobody really cares very much about it, to be truthful. And it hurts me if I do something doesn't work out. I'm injured to the core and all that, but still in all I can survive and go on with it. So the point to realize is failure is actually a really part of life and if you don't fail, you're really not doing anything, you're not trying anything. So writing a book is a good example. I have no idea how well the book was going to be received. I'm really happy with the reception, but I don't know. All my work before this was very technical. I'm known in certain areas in robotics and science of kinematics as, you know, a guy who all equations and all hard kind of science stuff and none of this touchy feely human stuff and all that. So I had no idea how those colleagues would look at it. And it was sort of a risk on my part in terms of my reputation with them, but I just felt I wanted to do it and it turns out great. And if it had turned out poorly, who so what? It wouldn't matter. It really, it ultimately wouldn't matter. So the first thing to understand we all have in mind what I call the catastrophic expectation, that if we make a decision and we make a wrong one, something terrible is going to happen. In most cases that's not true. What happens at the end is you die no matter which decision you make. So you could make one decision or the other one, you're still going to die at the end and that's going to happen for sure. Okay. Everything else is kind of just filling in the notes on your drama. And some people are very uneasy about that and some people are more free with that. And if you look at the famous figures of Silicon Valley, like Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs had a lot of failures, you know, Elon Musk. Elon Musk has a lot of failures. You know, these people were on the verge of destitution and bankruptcy a couple of times. So it's. And they failed a lot. They all had failures. So that's part of life. And then they go on. So it's really the doing rather than the failing that counts. If you don't do anything, you don't have any experience. If you do and you have experience, that's great. I know some guy I worked with, he and his brother had a venture company, and before the bubble burst and they blew through like $5 million of venture company's money and then burst. And when it was all over, the venture company hired them because they thought they were great guys, even though the company failed. So it's that kind of a thing. You know, you never know what's going to happen. And there are a lot of. There are books written about it. I think I mentioned in my book there are books by very famous people, including Oprah Winfrey and all those that if they hadn't gotten fired, they would have never gotten to where they are now.

Yeah, that's awesome. And just embracing that fact that it's an inherent part of the process, an essential part of the design thinking of, let's just get to the market and see whatever that means for us and see what, you know, what experiments, what data we have to look at, rather than be emotional about its claim on our overall worth.

Right, Absolutely, absolutely. And you have to do that. We have examples. We have this class here called Launchpad, and the idea is, if you listen to the instructors, in 10 weeks you're going to have you come in with an idea for a company, and in 10 weeks you're going to start having income. If you listen to them, and if you don't listen to them, drop the class. They don't want you in it. And we had these guys who came up with an idea of a newsreader. And after about the third week, the instructor said, launch your app. And they said, no, no, we're not ready. It's not perfect. There was this big fight, and eventually the instructor said, well, launch the app or get out of class. And they launched the app and it took off. It got a shout out from Jobs and was the number one news reading app and all that. And it wasn't perfect when it was launched. But you fix these things as it goes. And most people don't want to do anything that's not perfect, but you'll never be there. Nothing is such that it can't be improved.

And the quicker you get to the point of seeing how we're doing.

That's right. Quickly. That's right. And you'll Improve it much more quickly. If you put it out for others, you get a lot of criticism. If you put it out there, that's great.

Let's talk about odds. You talk about failure and the importance of embracing it and it being a part of the life in the context of predicting our success. And you talk about greatness and the fact that if all we did was rely on the odds of achieving a certain level of success, greatness just wouldn't exist. Right. Can you talk to us about being willing to take risks?

Sure. Actually I just had one yesterday. I was talking to a student, we just started school yesterday for the quarter and I was working with this student one on one and his story is his parents are physicians, he's a senior and he was in pre med. He was, we have a bio program, sort of pre medish kind of program. And he realized about a year ago that really he doesn't want to be a doctor and really what he wants to be, he's not sure. He thinks he wants startups but as I probed and I probed and I probed it clearly he wants to be a musician, he wants to be a jazz musician and he's afraid that, you know, the odds are he's not going to make it and he's afraid to do anything. So he's trying to find something between medicine and startups and I try to encourage him to go for it, you know, because you'll never know. And the truth is there are a lot of musicians out there who are making it. And it's true, it's the hard way. It's not as easy a course as being a doctor in a sense of once you're in the system, you're going to be taken care of. But it's this whole idea there, you know, there are a lot of, we all know the names of a lot of famous musicians and all of them were kids on the street who didn't know what to do and they fell into it and they got the breaks. But if you don't do it, you can't ever get the breaks and you can't ever get to do it. So it's this whole idea of looking at the statistics and statistics are great for the group but they have very little to do with any one individual. And that's the point that's really hard for people to understand. You have to realize you're an individual and the statistics just means it may be harder or less likely but it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. You know, if it's one in a million shot, one guy is going to get it, so why not you rather than someone else? So that's the idea. And, you know, even if he doesn't do that, in my view, is his voyage into doing what he really wants to do will be good for him wherever he ends up.

And just building that muscle, building the habit of being willing to put himself out.

Absolutely, yes.

I'm going to share a thought you have in this context. You talk about the Beatles and Elvis and the Grateful Dead, and you said they could have been scientific about the whole thing and chosen more reasonable career paths and what a loss for the world that would have been. And then I love this, you said if you succeed, the odds are meaningless. Any path may have a 2% success rate. Yet if you're in that 2%, there's a hundred percent chance of success for you. Then the long shots, of course, are often the most rewarding. I love that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's true. And, you know, I don't know how it is for you, but, you know, my career is. I'm not like Elvis or anything like that, but I feel I've had a very successful career. And again, it's just one step at a time doing what seemed to appeal to me next. And most people, that's what happens in their lives and those that, that don't follow what feels really good for them, even if they succeed, they don't succeed in a way that's satisfying. So if this guy went on and became a physician, even if he was a successful physician, he might not have had his achievement, what I call his achievement might not have been appropriate for him. And that's the important thing to realize. Just by playing the odds doesn't mean it's going to give you what you really want, you know, and that's an interesting thing you realize, and people realize it more when they get older, that really when it's all about, you have one life and you might as well live it the way that your achievement, in my terms, drags you, that's great.

And then you hold that with the fact that you're going to fail and that the odds are against your young friend succeeding. And that's part of the game.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's okay, you know, it doesn't really matter in a way, if you succeed or fail. Another thing, I know you read my book, so, you know, you give everything in your life its meaning. So you give everything around you the meaning. So someone. I read this thing, actually, my editor Pulled it out of the book, but I thought it was really meaningful. I once read a story which really was so sad to me. It was a young woman who was a successful scholar. You know, she was a high school athlete and all that. And she lost the race and she committed suicide. And that's so interesting, isn't it, that you know, this woman, who by all accounts was very successful in a big achievement, a standard way, because she had this one failure, she was humiliated, and she killed herself. And in two years, it wouldn't have mattered at all. Maybe in two days it wouldn't have mattered at all. And that's when you see it on someone else. When they take something which is so small and they magnify it to life and death. You see how ridiculous we are. And we have to just put these things in a kind of measure, you know, it doesn't matter. You failed. All right, I failed. Okay. Too bad. I feel bad today. All right, great. Tomorrow I might feel better. If not, it'll be a few days later. But for sure, the things that are important to you today will not be important to you in a few weeks or a few months. And if you think about that, when you, you know, who knows? Maybe when I graduated from public school, that was the most important thing in my life. And when I graduated from junior high school, that was the most important thing. And when I got my bachelor's degree, that was the most important thing. And when I got the master's degree, that was the most important thing. And when I got my first page date, it was the most important thing. And now none of those things matter to me at all. They're trivial. They're totally trivial in my life. So it's an example. And, you know, you can go through every part of your life when you had your first date, it was the most important thing and so forth. And, you know, we're funny, people are that way. What we're doing right this minute is important and earth shaking and all that. But if we step back and look at it, you know, we'll go on without a lot of that stuff that's so good.

And the quicker we can get to the point of realizing that, the more efficiently we can live authentically, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Therefore, be willing to challenge the odds. Be willing to fail. It's those failures that toughen you up to that truth which allows you to have the freedom to do what you're here to do.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So good. So one of the other themes that is through the book is the idea of Being the cause. Can you talk to us about the importance of approaching life with that perspective?

Sure. Well, you know, all of us are in a society with a lot of other people and all that, and we tend to think of ourselves as having a certain sphere of action or sphere of influence in action. And people say to me, well, what's your job in the D School? I say, well, I do the windows and the floors and anything else that needs to be done. And it's half in joking and half true. So my idea is my responsibility is the D School. You know, it isn't that someone's. My official title is academic director. And we have other people with other director titles. But it doesn't mean just because it's not in my title, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to handle it if I have to. So the whole idea is to be. If you. If you see something that needs to be done, just do it or make sure you're going to get it done. And my really trivial example, but I love it, was this. I was on this train, I was going across China on a long train ride, and I got on the train in Shanghai and waiting for it to take off, and the window is just totally dirty. I mean, you can't see out the window. And here I'm going to go on this long train ride. So I talked to. I had a translator with me, they talked to the conductor, and nothing was happening. And the train was about to take off. So I went out, found the bucket of water and washed the goddamn window. And I was the cause in the matter so I could see what was going on. So, you know, it wasn't my job and I wasn't supposed to do it. And they were a little horrified. But, you know, if I want it to happen, then I may have to make sure it happens. So that's what I mean by being cause in the matter. You don't. You could always blame other people. You know, I could have come back and said how terrible the Chinese were, how terrible is the system, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it wouldn't have handled my having a trip where I could see out the window. And the same thing is in my job, if I see something that's not right, I want it done. You know, I may ask someone else to do it or whatever it's appropriate, but I'm going to make sure it gets done.

So good being the cause, letting go of excuses, even if they're legitimate, as you say, and just get done what needs to get done? Again, trying versus doing. And what is it you want? How are you going to make it happen? And there you go. Well, this is fantastic, Bernie. Once again, thank you for taking the time. I like to wrap up these chats by asking if you could share just one piece of wisdom with an individual passionate about optimizing, actualizing their lives, actualizing their potential, achieving in the highest sense, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

That's a tough question. I guess I would say it's like, take it easy. You know, you'll get there. So just don't put too much weight on yourself and what you do, but just accept whatever it is and move from there.

So good to bring the lightness to this conversation. We're talking about a lot of doing and getting stuff done. But it doesn't need to be hard, right?

No, in fact, it's easy. Doing is much easier than trying. If you try, you can effort, you know, we can pull back and forth and all that. If I do, it just. It's like magic. It's whisked away from you. So actually doing is much, much easier than trying. I often say when you do something, you have power in the world, when you try to do something using force. And it's much better to be a powerful person than a forceful person.

Powerful. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you want to make sure we reach out about?

No. No. Well, we didn't talk much about reasons being bullshit, but. Oh, we knew about what?

About bullshit.

Reasons are bullshit.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

You want to share that?

Sure. You want to talk about that a little bit? We have time. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, what it is, is most people, you need reasons in this world to be a reasonable person. So if someone says, why'd you do something? If you say, I don't know, you're not a reasonable person. But in fact, it's a kind of hard thing because we don't really know the reasons we do stuff because there's. There's so much going on in our brains and in our history and our lives that to pick out one reason for an action is impossible. So we take something that seems most logical and makes us look good. So if I say to you right now, my mouth is dry, you say, well, how come your mouth is dry, Bernie? I say, well, I'm talking a lot, and that's reasonable, right? But I don't tell you I drank a bottle of whiskey last night or I'm totally dehydrated from biking. And, you know, 20 other reasons I never drink enough water and all that. I don't tell you those because they don't make me look as cool as talking a lot or something like that. So that's the way we all are. We just choose a specific thing. If someone knows a reason and what happens is it doesn't matter, who cares? You know, what's the difference? Where it matters is that there's a thing called excuses. Now, everyone knows excuses are not good things. They're kind of pejorative. You don't want to use excuses and excuses what prevent us from becoming doing rather than trying. Because you have an excuse. And an excuse is essentially a reason and drag. So my idea is you actually don't want to use reasons at all. You just want to do what you do and you just did it. That's all you know is what you did. You don't know why you did it. You just did it. You know, that's all you need to know. And not lie to yourself or what you didn't do, not lie to yourself. And then you can stop giving yourself excuses for not doing so. One of the ways to move from being a tryer to a doer is to just notice what you do or don't do and don't use reasons to justify it, because all reasons are bullshit. They're not in fact the reason for doing anything.

Then it's just a matter of learning from whatever data we got next time.

And saying, next time I'm not going to do that. So I say, look, I did that. Well, next time I'm not going to do that. So next time I'm going to come in with some water and a bottle of water before we talk so my mouth won't be dry. Now, of course next time I won't do it, but eventually I will do it. Eventually I will do it. So next time is always, not necessarily literally the next time. But if you keep correcting myself, I will at some point be a guy who always walks into a talk with a bottle of water and I won't have a dry mouth. Whatever the reason was, okay? It's irrelevant. The question is, is your mouth dry or not? It's not. Who cares why it is? Okay, that's great.

And then what are you going to do next about it?

What are you going to do next about it? And how are you going to change your behavior?

I love it. Biased action, dealing with fear of failure, achievement, design, thinking, the odds and breaking them. Whether you succeed or not, you're building that power and being the cause. We covered a ton. Thank you so much, Bernie.

Thank you very much, Brian. Nice talking to you.

Likewise. All right, well, I so highly recommend the Achievement Habit. And thanks for being here.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do is something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101. That sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern science plus Common sense plus virtue plus mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us.

Us?

Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.