Interview - Today We Are Rich with Tim Sanders

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Tim Sanders. Tim changed my life. How long ago did you write Love is the killer app, Tim?

It was published on Valentine's Day, 2002. I began writing it about three years earlier, 1989.

Okay. Well, I think I read it very shortly after it came out, and it just changed my life in many ways. I mean, a lot of what I'm doing these days with the philosopher's notes was catalyzed by you in that book, in basically telling us how to read a book and how to be a love cat and just be a good person, dropping wisdom bombs and all that good stuff. And so just love.

Fantastic.

Yeah, it's super cool. We connected for lunch, which I very much enjoyed. And then I loved your most recent book, which is a few years ago now. But today we are rich. Just packed with goodness, appreciate you and your style, and I'm excited to unpack some of those ideas now. All right, well, let's do it. So today we are rich. Subtitle Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence let's just start with what does it mean? You talk about forever kind of rich. What is that? Why should we care? And how does it directly impact our level of confidence?

So Dr. Stephen Covey Senior once said.

That the abundance mentality comes from a deep sense of self worth and the belief that there is enough to go around. And when I read that back in, I would say, 1996, 97, it awakened in me a philosophy that had been installed in my childhood by my grandmother, Billy. And what she taught me early on is that in our lives there are two types of riches. There's the monetary, material richness. And it comes and goes. Sometimes we earn it, sometimes it's given to us, sometimes it's just luck. And the second kind of richness is a spiritual richness, a meaning, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of contribution you have to earn, that it never comes by luck and no one can take it away from you. And she instilled in me the idea that as I would grow up, we would define ourselves in part based on our richness. That would really drive our motivation. It would in turn create our self image. And that I always have a choice. And the choice is to choose which kind of riches I pursue in my life. Accumulation of stuff or accumulation of merit. And that's been really important to me because in our life, there's so much you cannot control. But if you choose the right richness as the goal, you can control it 100%.

So good. And you share so many great stories about Grandma. How do you pronounce her name? Is it just Billy?

It's Billy. Yeah, it's Billy with an E on the end, which was kind of a.

Her real name was her God given name. Just joking.

Willie Mae was her name. And M A, E, really classic southern name. And at some point in her young adulthood, she changed it to Billy with an E on the end. B, I, R, L, Y.

That's so great. Yeah. And you shared the story about her sharing when you guys didn't have a lot as you're growing up and yet she had enough to give to someone who had greater need and just kind of having that. We're rich now, right?

Well, when I came into her Life, she was 53. She was in a very unhappy marriage. Her second. It had been going on 20 years. You have to understand that back then in the mid-60s, going on a second failed marriage is a really big deal in Clovis, New Mexico, west Texas. That's a really big social scar, if you will. So she took me in. My mother couldn't or wouldn't take care of me, so Billy decided to raise me. And less than a year later, her husband left and took her two teenage boys as well as the money out of the bank account and left her with a lot of debt. So we were really, really getting by day to day. But she continued the habit of giving every week. It was just an obsession of hers to find something she could do for someone every week. A meal she could make. She used to make food. We'd eat a little bit and then the rest would go out for hot plates. For people that were invalids, they used to call it Meals on Wheels. You volunteered for it, you supplied the food. She'd go do sewing. She really instilled in me the idea that every week you got to give because giving is a practice. It's not an occurrence. And I think, Brian, that's why years later, as I became an adult professional and I saw a huge field of merit. That's a veiled Buddhist reference. I saw a huge field of merit. All these people I needed to help in my business life. That's when I found that I needed to focus on giving away intangibles. My knowledge, my network of relationships, my compassion. That was something that kind of occurred to me because I watched how difficult it was for Billie to scale her weekly Generosity program in terms of things that cost money or required physical resources. But anyway, it was a habit for her. It was an incredible source of personal satisfaction for her. She was as focused on weekly giving opportunities as the average person these days is focused on, say, going to the gym or something like that. So that was just something she ingrained in me early on.

Yeah, really cool. Tell me about confidence. I want to hear kind of your definition of confidence.

So confidence is your belief that you're going to be successful in a given situation. I do not prescribe to the notion that a person has a general sense of confidence. That's like, that would be absolute and that would be foolish. Right? So if you'd say, well, I'm just a confident person in general, my answer is then you haven't had enough challenging experiences. Right. So there are things I have a high level of confidence in and honestly, Brian, there are things that I lack confidence in. The trick is to make sure the things I've got to be able to do that matter, I have confidence in. So if I'm going to be a parent, I've got to be confident about being a parent. And confidence is not just what we think we can do as an individual. I talk about this a lot in the book. We have confidence from three sources. We have confidence from within ourselves. Based on my knowledge, based on my skills, based on my character, based on my grit, I think I can do it. Then we gain confidence from our team, whoever that team is. Right. Team could be your family team could be the people that you work with. It could be your divisional team. So that's important too. And I believe it's really crucial that every day we review the quality of our team to instill in ourselves a team based sense of confidence. And then the third place that we gain confidence is, let's just call it karma. If you're a. Depending on your religious belief, depending on, you might say, well, I get it from God, I get it from Allah, I don't know. Wherever you get it from, there is a greater power in the world that flows to justice and that which is right ultimately. I've always had the belief, Brian, that when you see a bad guy that's highly successful, it's always the middle of his movie. The reality is the higher power always flows to that which is right and true. And it's important sometimes that when we've done everything we can and as a leader we've led our team to do everything that we can. If we're in the pursuit of the right and true. We need to have confidence. You might call that faith that things will still work out. And the reason it's important to have confidence is because where confidence flows, performance follows. When you are confident, you free up that reptilian brain that is aware of time and space and you can truly act in the moment. When you have confidence, you will attract other people to follow you and in turn build your team up. Which by the way, reinforces your sense of team based confidence. And it's like a virtuous cycle. And that's just a few reasons that confidence is important. But you know, in the book I document, you know, over and over again that when a person lacks confidence, they stop being successful. Because success is not a destination, it is a direction. And that direction is forward.

That's awesome.

And when, yeah, when we lose the confidence, we start to go sideways.

That's amazing. And you talk about, you know, when you stop doing certain things. You have a great story in there about a guy that you mentored who is really successful and he was having some tough times and you talked to him about, well, what were you doing when you were really crushing it that you're not doing now? Can you tell us about that and the importance of daily practices?

Absolutely.

So let me interchange for the moment.

Confidence with positive thinking. Right. So positive thinking is similar. However, positive thinking is not challenge oriented like confidence is.

Okay.

So when I say I have the confidence to go in front of those 5,000 people and give a speech about whatever that is very situation focused. When a person has a positive mental outlook, that means when I wake up today, I think good things are going to happen. But I'm going to interchange those two for a minute. Confidence or positive thinking, those aren't things that you prescribe to someone. You need to be more confident. You need to think more positive. That's like telling a person who's battling obesity you need to just think skinny.

It just work, okay.

A person becomes confident because of lifestyle design. It is the stuff they put into their mind, it is the actions that they put out into the world, from the conversations to the tasks to the things we finish, that creates a feedback loop. Bill used to call it the good loop. When you're doing the right things and feeding your mind good stuff and giving to be rich, the world gives you really good feedback that you're getting it right. And as you get that feedback, you keep doing more of it. Again, I mentioned working out earlier. It is very similar to physical exercise. When you do physical exercise, you look in the mirror and you say, hey, that's not bad.

All of a sudden you can pick up a 30 pound jug of water.

And you can sprint through the airport without losing your bre.

What does that cause you to do?

Cause you go back to the gym and work out more, right? And that's how thinking works. So a person becomes confident because of how they live their life. The things they do each and every day, the things they put into their mind, the conversations that they lead, the tasks that they finish. So when I was growing up, I learned that if you keep doing these things every day, confidence becomes the output, not just the intention, if you will. So I had a friend, Eric, who I knew for years. And when I got to know him, when I was still living in Dallas, working for Mark Cuban put us back in a place like 1996, 1997, 1998. He was working at another startup too, and he was an extremely confident guy. He and I had very similar lifestyle design. We read a lot of challenging books, we mentored a lot of local people about what we were learning about E commerce and the world World wide Web. We regularly gave to help other people become more successful. We spent the weekends recovering from the busy week. There's just all these things we did a good job of doing that added up to our supreme level of confidence. Well, I got connected with him again.

After the dot com crash, like around 2003, and he was really in the doldrums. And the reason why is because by then he'd moved on to Seattle and he was working at a leasing company office. Leasing, you can imagine. After the dot com crash, his territory, which was Silicon Valley, San Francisco, was crushed. So the work was really hard. And as a result, he stopped doing all of those little things for himself that added up to his positive thinking. So he stopped reading books.

Instead he just read his inbox.

He stopped giving.

He just tried to survive. He helped people that he thought could help him back. It was just really, you know, it just really disrupted his very careful personal growth habits. And so when I talked to him, you know, that's what I asked him. I'm like, okay, what are you not doing today that you were doing back in the day, five, six years ago, when you were completely on top of the world. And that's where he said, reading really good books to keep me on current edge, mentoring people, networking people every single week, helping other people succeed, even if it had no return to me playing with my kids on the weekend, going to the gym. I don't do any of those things. Anymore because I don't have time for it. And I explained to him, until you restore those habits, you will never regain that level of confidence which you need to become a leader.

And I remember, I don't think I put this in the book.

I quoted him, obviously translated from French, Napoleon Bonaparte's theory on the leader's role. Napoleon often said and wrote that the leader's role is to define reality and then give hope. And you cannot do that if you do not believe that you and your team and your cause will ultimately be successful.

Right.

No one follows a person who does not believe in himself.

Amen. So good and so much there daily practices. It's just such a good frame, right. Of what were you doing when you were on that you're not doing now. Love that. And it's again, that's directly impacted me and something I share often. You mentioned a number of times in there reading great books. Can you tell us some of your favorite books?

So, dude, like, that's like asking. That's like asking Beck, you know, what's your favorite record? You know what I mean? As his head explodes because he's an encyclopedia of diverse and commercially successful records. But I tell you what, I usually am more in the moment, right? So it's funny. It's easier for me to tell you over the last five years what books do I think are the ones that add the most value? So let me answer it, if you don't mind that way.

Love it.

Okay, so recently I would say that in no order of ranking, first of all, the book Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. Multipliers, great book on how to be an effective manager. She posits the question, you know, are you a multiplier or are you a diminisher? The multiplier stretches people to exceed their expectations. She desires to hire people that are smarter than her or that will leapfrog her and she will report to them someday. That's a goal of hers. That's a way that she sees personal success. The diminisher, on the other hand, thinks that he's the smartest person and he's surrounded by a bunch of people with a fixed level of intelligence. He is the brain and they are the hands. He tries to motivate them by pressuring them, sometimes putting them against each other. And he's known as a hoarder of resources and he's an empire builder, as she refers to it. So this is a book for the 70% of managers who fall in diminisher category for whatever reason, to learn how to become a multiplier and dramatically improve performance. I love this book and I love, you can imagine, I love the spirit of the book. Second book, Give and Take by Adam Grant. Another book that's very binary in its argument. There's two types of people in the world, givers and takers. And that givers are much more successful and much better leaders.

And.

And what I really liked about the book is he injects a little social science, unconventional wisdom. So, for example, there's a couple of things he says that I really like. Like givers should shun the takers. And I've adopted that. And you see that in the pages of today, we are rich. I say this, I say that the takers, they spend every day plotting to take away what's left, that the givers have to give. And so it's our job to organize people that have the abundance mentality, that have the generosity habit, that have the expectation that things are paid forward and not reciprocated. Those are the people and only those are the people that we mentor. Those are the people that we connect with our networks. And so Adam builds on that and says what makes the world go round is reciprocity. And that's why the givers should shun the takers. There's nothing hypocritical about that. And by the way, the takers, by design, consume more than they put back and they're not aware they're being shunned. And there is no downside because they have no respect for the giver. So anyway, great book. Great book. Love the book considered as a follow up to Love is the Killer App. I would say from a trend standpoint, I really like the Big Bang Disruption by Larry Downs. I believe it was last year it came out. Larry Downs is the co author of Unleashing the Killer app back in 1996. That blew my head off back then too. And it really introduced how the world was going to change based on ubiquitous connectivity. So the Big Bang Disruption explains how the world is going to change because of digitization, specifically of functions, not content. So when Nicholas Negroponte wrote being digital in 1995, he was really focusing on content and information becoming digitized. But what Larry Downs looks at is he looks at the vaporization of physical stuff in our world by digital technology. Right. So the most obvious examples are the bucket of gear that I no longer use because there's an app for that. I don't have an egg timer. I don't have an alarm clock. I carry on the road anymore. I don't have a guitar tuner. I don't have a GPS player. I don't have a dedicated ipod. And the list goes I on and on and on. All of these things, Larry said, have been disrupted by apification, vaporization. And then he predicts into the future things like 3D printing will make that even more profound. And I like the book. It's one of the more relevant tech trend books of the last few years. And he's one of the great. So that's a third recommendation. If I were to give you a fourth recommendation. It is an extremely current book that's only been out for about a month. It's called Team of teams by general. I believe it's General Stanley McChrystal, but it's called Team of Teams. He led a very large force in Desert Storm. He learned that the secret to winning against a network, of which, of course, obviously the terrorists operate in networks, they don't operate like the military does. And he says it takes a network to beat a network. That's what he learned. So he took his huge fighting force and broke them down into small teams of teams. Very small, very agile fighting forces. And when he retired from the army, as he began to speak about his experience as a leader on the corporate lecture circuit and then to confer with.

A bunch of business people, it occurred.

To him that many corporations are competing against networks, be they app, cloud based, whatever, crowdfunded, whatever, that we're up against networks, as most businesses, whatever you do, and that if you learn to create a team of teams, as opposed to divisions and silos, you can absolutely win. It's a really contemporary view on leadership strategy. So there's a gamut of several books that I all find super interesting. And then I will pivot and I will tell you a fictional read that I love. It's very old. It's Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. I have to recommend that every fifth or sixth book, you want to cleanse your palate by reading literature that helps you escape. It helps you retain your love of reading, which is really important. So recently on a vacation, I finally read Dharma Bums, and I just thought it was lovely, lovely, lovely book. And Jack Kerouac is an interesting mind to crawl inside, especially if you've gone on to read Burroughs or any of those other guys, even Vonnegut, et cetera. They're all deeply influenced. Oh, there's one more book I'll tell you about. Okay, here's one more book. And this is for the listeners. This is a bonus. This is a very obscure book, but I swear if you read it, you'll thank me later. It's a book by Lee Stringer, the poet from New York City and Kurt Vonnegut. And it's called like Shaking Hands with God. Have you heard about that book?

I have not.

It's a little book. It's basically a conversation the two had in front of a small audience at a bookstore in New York City 15 years ago that was recorded and transcribed. And Vonnegut is as good as ever. So Vonnegut talks about the idea that as a writer you have to be a really good first date. That in those moments when you're able to put to paper thoughts that capture others imagination. The experience, he says, is like Shaking hands with God. And my favorite two quotes from it just to give you. There's so much good Vonnegut voice in it. And Lee Stringer is equally brilliant. Vonnegut says that we live in a world today where no one wants to read books, right? They want to watch 3D movies and they want to play video games and they want to do online video. They want to do anything, read books. He goes, so why do guys like you and I still write? And he goes, I write books because I know that there's someone out there that desperately needs to hear the following message. You are not alone. There's someone else in the world that has your perspective. And I am he and I just such a powerful perspective and I love that book. If you're an aspiring writer, you're aspiring communicator of any type of go find Light Shaking Hands with God by Vonne Gitten Stringer. And it's just brilliant.

Nice. And like you said, we could go on on that trek for about a year or two.

Oh yeah.

Thank you for indulging and thanks for the awesome cross section. Let's bring it back to you and your wisdom and kind of the super practical how do we optimize? And I want to hear your thoughts on. You talk obviously in the book a ton about feeding our minds and being a healthy thought. Why is it so important we get our minds right?

So the content that you put into your mind becomes the fuel for your response system, be it physical, emotional or spiritual. There's a really important book that was published in 1921 I read as a child by James Allen called As a Man Thinketh. And where a thought goes, action follows and you cannot betray your thoughts. And he's right. I mean if anyone listening wants to challenge this idea, do the following experiment. This is like the guy who ate Big Mac every day for 30 days and got sick. Here's what I tell you to do instead. Every day for 30 days, I want you to watch two hours of Fox News cable and two hours of CNBC cable. I want you to read TMZ for 30 minutes, Huffington Post for two hours and Infowars for 30 minutes and that's it. Then online, I'd like you to read 30 minutes of Huffington Post, 30 minutes of Infowars and 30 minutes of TMZ. Then I want you to find the 12 most negative minded people on your Facebook feed and create a private list to follow just their updates on Facebook. Do this for a week and by Sunday you will have a negative outlook on your own personal future. By Sunday, you will find that it's hard to get motivated to finish projects with any kind of pushback. By the end of Sunday, if you could record the things you say, you would find that you were passing this negativity infection off to every single person that comes into your life. That's the creep and crud of not editing what goes into your head. You know, I really prescribe to this idea that we should be as judicious about what we put into our mind as what we put into our mouth because it has equal impact on our life. And you know where it starts, Brian, is really three things. Number one, you got to take your morning back. Don't go online the first 45 minutes of your day. Take your life back. Once you log on to your email, once you log on to social networks, it's there conversation, not yours, right? So spend the first 45 minutes taking in slow food for the mind, reading a book, reading information that improves your ability to perform or help other people as confidence building material. Piece of advice. Number two, you need to kick negative forces out of your life. Whether it's negative people. I unfollow a lot of people that I have connected with on Facebook. I don't unfriend them. I unfollow them. I generally unfollow people who spout negativity, display extremism in an argumentative sort of way. They're overly promotional, if you will, et cetera. I'm not afraid to click that unfollow button and get out of that. And quite frankly, if you're a leader at a company, Chicken Little must fry. You got to get rid of those people inside your company that are poisoning other people's minds with an unrealistically negative attitude about the future. And Then the third thing you got to do is create a mastermind group, which I've done several years ago. And a mastermind group is a limited number of sources for relevant information that you trust that have no motivation to scare you. And you have to understand most commercial media. I mentioned cable news, a lot of blogs, they're all link bait. This comes from Ted Koppel. You know, we used to teach broadcast journalists that a good television news story has the ladle dropper effect. That's where a mom drops her ladle in the soup to run in the living room to catch the rest of the story. That's the motivation. A mastermind group says, I want people who don't care about clicks. Right. So for example, I've always loved like for those reading technology, Pando Daily is great. Yeah, it's paid for. But you know, the motivation is good journalism. So you want to create a mastermind group to, to limit your sources of information so you can kind of purify the way that you educate yourself and prepare yourself to deal with the world. You do those things, you're absolutely going to not only have more confidence, you're going to produce more and you're going to have more energy.

Love it. I'm feeling it in that study or that little one week experiment is just so true and so nuts. And Kelly McGonagall, one of my favorite new books, the Upside of Stress. I don't know if you've checked that one out yet, but so good. And she says the number one way to predict someone's fear and anxiety levels is to count the number of hours they watch TV talk.

TV talk is just TV talk is again, it's bad. But I mean what we're seeing right now in the digital domain is a similar version of this, but I think it's even more disastrous and it's link bait. Link bait is a headline that said she was a really good person and when this happened all she could do is cry in a corner. And you have to click on it, right? You what happened? And you click and it's upworthy. One of those guys, Mark Cuban said something a few years ago and I've done research on this, he's right. Headline porn will make you stupid. So it conditions us to lower the level of intellectual requirement and deduction and to raise the expectation that everything is going to be immediately gratifying, that we will only click on, view and consume that, which makes an unbelievably high level promise. When you look at Facebook, you just see a lot of Link bait. And when you look at a lot of content that's being pushed out on the web, even from Yahoo and other places, it's just all link bait and it's really bad for you. And I'm not saying it's just it's bad for you when you click on it, but it's retraining your brain to be dumber and to be more easily influenced and to be pushed around by clever people that spend more time writing the headline than they do writing the body copy.

It's amazing. And that dovetails into one of the other ideas I wanted to touch on. It's that instant gratification pull to it too, that dumbs us down, right? It moves us away from something. You talk about a lot in your work of persistence and just showing up. So talk to us a little bit about persistence and then I want to wrap up with a little bit more on just your personal practices and kind of go from there.

So life isn't always fun, you know, the work isn't always fun. But persistence comes from being able to see beyond the horizon of effort. The results of our labor and persistence then is our ability to be okay with the sweaty, maybe stressful, maybe brain taxing work that we have to do to finish something. Because nothing gives you more confidence than finishing what you start. You know, if you want to change your self image, just fail to finish four or five things and let a bunch of people down. They don't even have to say anything to you. Your subconscious will tell you you are a loser. I'm showing an L right on my forehead as I say this. Your subconscious knows when you don't finish what you start. And that crushes a person's confidence, I think more than external conditions like losing everything that you have.

Wow.

Because when you lose your self respect, you lose your structural integrity and you can't finish. So I tell people, if you want to improve your level of self confidence, go finish something really hard you promised you were going to do. And if you can't do it, then be a man, be a woman, put your big girl pants on, put your big boy pants on and go tell that person why you can't finish it face to face, no excuses, and be willing to pay the price for letting them down. Accountability, you know, Brian is so critical. But the problem again is that it's one thing to talk a good talk, you know, about finishing, but it's another to maintain that level of persistence. And again, one of the hacks I've come up with is that you have to constantly remind yourself of the goal while you're doing the work, not in between.

Everything about that is awesome. Promise keeping ratio came to mind, and I think you quoted Norman Vincent Peale that one should carry out one's promises as quickly as a parent would carry out a screaming child out of a movie theater or something.

Immediately. Right? Mark Twain. Right. Promises are like crying babies in a theater. They should be carried out at once.

That's so good.

Yeah. So one of the. We'll give a little hack here before we wrap. So here's the little hack. When you're in a meeting with someone and you got your little. Let's say you still take notes in a notebook, which I do. The first page of our notes, I fold in half. I fold it vertically in half where it reveals the back of the first page. And on that little half page, that's called promises. So when I'm in a conversation with you, I might write a bunch of things down. You say, but occasionally during a conversation, Brian, I say, well, I'm going to go do this, I'll go find that out, etc. We stop the meeting. I write down my promise, the last few minutes of every meeting. I make sure we're clear on what I promised to do. And that's my follow up email to you. And I schedule those promises. If you create a system for keeping your promise, you'll do a better job keeping your promise. And again, that feeds your mental image that you are a person of your word. That's so important to your overall perspective.

Genius. That's good. So then I'd like to wrap with two questions. One, your personal practices. We've talked about a lot of them, but just if you can touch on what do you do day in and day out to stay plugged in Big part of my work, as you know, is that those fundamentals of optimizing our lives. So I'd love to hear what you do. And then I'll have one final thought.

I spring out of bed, I drink a glass of warm lemon water that my wife Jacqueline makes for both of us every morning. I take my dog and we walk for 15 to 20 minutes and I rehearse the coming day that way. I've been up 30 minutes or 40 minutes. I come back in the house, I sit down, I read for another 15 minutes, but not online. And then I face the world. And that little 45 minute hour period is rocket fuel for me. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is that I'm always in the middle of reading a book, and I'm at the pace of maybe three quarters of a book. Yeah, let's say like a couple of books a month that I read cover to cover. I'm currently in a writing project, so that's wrapped me up. I probably read, no exaggeration, Brian, a hundred books in the last six months on innovation, collaboration, creativity. So I've been a little bit of a binge on that. But generally, my advice is to always be reading a book. And here's the last thing. Every week, there needs to be a moment of mentorship, usually a half hour or more. I was just doing it earlier, before I did a podcast with you, and these are private things, so I'm not going to try to be a humble brag and said, I accomplished this for that person. That's not the point of it. Every week you have an opportunity as the mentor to give a gift to the hero who's going somewhere, but just a little bit too fast. And she needs what you have as knowledge to get to the next stage of her journey. And I do that. And I'm telling you every single week, if I don't do it every single week, it's like I'm spiritually thirsty. I find myself grasping for an opportunity by Friday. So that's been a really important part of optimizing my life because it kind of brings us full circle here. Nothing makes you more humble than attempting to mentor someone who's going places quickly in life, especially if they're a lot younger than you, because the reverse schooling happens every single time. Or as Stanley Marcus Jr. Taught me when he mentored me, if you get the process of mentorship right, and then you empower the hero to give back, he said, you will never get dumber by making other people smarter. So that's a really important part of the formula for me. And I hit the gym. You might not know this, but I go to the gym three, four times a week. And, you know, Norman Vincent Peale says, you are a mind with a body. So I think a lot about that. And I've been trying to live much healthier over the last few years.

That's awesome. One of the things we didn't talk about, which I appreciate you bringing us back to, is that helper's high. I mean, that's basically what you described, right? The mentoring and that feeling you get, and it starts to wear off, you know, three, four, five, six days in, and give yourself that opportunity to get it back.

For those of you that would like to Research this concept of helper's high. Go to TWA. 420 every April 20th, I celebrate helpers high, the idea that when you are generous with a person, especially in service, especially to those that cannot help themselves, you can look back on what you did two weeks later and experience a rush of dopamines and endorphins. And there's really good research behind it. There's just no drug or alcohol that can possibly possess the high and the.

Longevity of the high and the high.

Memory like giving can.

It's a wonder drug.

So good. Thank you for sharing that such good practices. And brings us to the last question I like to ask. What's the one thing, if you could only share one piece of wisdom with people passionate about optimizing their lives and making a difference in the world, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Everywhere you go, bring a gift. In my case, I'm effusive with tips, advice, recommendations. Everywhere I go, that's my gift. What is yours is your gift. Encouragement is your gift. Sympathy, is it. Empathy. Whatever it is, Billy. My grandmother used to like to have a couple of pieces of butterscotch in the front pocket of her dress for little kids because she felt like everywhere she went, she was someone's guest in the world. And so she always brought a gift. And you'd just be surprised what kind of programming. Always bringing a gift to a conversation, always bringing a gift to a meeting of some sort. Hopefully intangible. It'll change you as a person to do that and to follow that advice.

Amazing. Tim, thank you so much. I appreciate you and your wisdom and you taking the time today and just who you are, just awesome. So thank you. And where can people go to find out more about you and what you're up to?

So I'm Sanders says, just like Simon says, but Sanders says on all social Networks and also SandersSays.com is my blog.

Right on. All right. Thank you, brother.

Thank you, Brian.

Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that interview. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson.

Me.

Two basic things. One, our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And two, our Optimal Living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. Ten bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there, philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my optimal living classes. This is where I take all the ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Relationships 101, Habits 101, etc. You'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish, and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson ME membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.