Brian Johnson (Heroic +1 #1,489) describes his daily fitness ritual—one sun salutation, 10 pull-ups, 100 burpees (now 101), 1,000 meters rowing, and 10,000 steps—emphasizing consistency and repayment for missed days. He details how he completes 101 burpees in eight sets of 11 (88) plus a final set of 13, linking the choice of 13 to Tim Grover’s book Relentless (13 chapters) and the idea that luck is what you make of it; the piece closes with a Stoic-style encouragement to turn interruptions into advantage.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our last couple 1s, we focused on the fact that some interruptions are actually the reason for our protocols. Today I want to get back to the plus one. I started riding before I got the opportunities to hit some respond to bid and micro moments of awesome target swipes with the kids. So as you know, if you've been following along, I do one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, a hundred burpees, a thousand meters of rowing, and 10,000 steps every day. I've missed very few days over the last X years since I started doing it, and I've always repaid any missed days. It's hard to put into words just how powerful this simple practice is for me. It's really hard to have really bad days when I dominate this simple routine. Now these days, I do 101 burpees every day because I'm obsessed with the number 101. But I don't do them all at once. I do them in sets of 10, remembering Henry Ford's wisdom that nothing is particularly hard if you break it down into small enough pieces. Only I don't do sets of 10. I do sets of 11, remembering Gym Aphromo's wisdom that champions do more. So every day I do my first eight sets of 11 burpees and I batch target swipe them when I'm done. That's like me, self image forging, celebrating with each target swipe, 11 burpees, swipe. That's like me times eight times through. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, boom. That's like me. Now of course, at that point I'm at 88 burpees. Then I do my final set of 13 burpees to hit 101. And I laugh every time I hit the 13th burpee as I think of Michael Jordan's mental toughness. Coach Tim Grover. Grover wrote a great book called Relentless. His book has 13 chapters in which he unpacks what he calls the relentless 13 traits of guys like Michael Jordan. Why 13? Because he doesn't believe in luck and definitely not bad luck. And that's today's plus one. Luck. It's what you make of it. Remember, as Epictetus and Harry Potter tells us, check out the plus ones. The wise hero can turn anything into gold. Let's do that today.
