Masterpiece Days 101: How to Create a Great Life One Great Day at a Time (Intro)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Our last class was on Greatest Year Ever 101. Well, if you want to have a great year and a great life, you need to create masterpiece days. That's what this class is, Masterpiece Days 101. How to create a great life one awesome day at a time. So as always, we have 10 big ideas we're going to explore to help you create masterpiece days. Let's take a quick look at them, then we'll jump in. Alright, here's a quick look at our top 10 big ideas. Number one, today's the day. If you wanna create masterpiece days, you need to create a sense of urgency that today's the day. Too often we think, oh yeah, I wanna do this and this and this and this and this and this and this. But today, well, I'm just gonna do that. Today's the day we're gonna talk about an exercise to take that abstract concept of someday and make it today. The second big idea, M +M ideals. We wanna create your ideal vision of a perfect day. A masterpiece day on a Mac level, kind of a template day. And then on a micro level. How is today going to be? Awesome? We'll talk about that in more depth. The third big idea is one thing. We talked about this in the last class, we're going to talk about it in every class. Because if you don't have a target, then you're not going to know what to do. The Greeks told us we are teleological beings. Telos is Greek for target. An archer who's just randomly shooting arrows is not as effective as someone in aiming at a target. So we need to get clarity on your target. What's most important for you? That brings us to the fourth big idea, which is to make progress. If you want to have a masterpiece day, you need to make progress in pursuit of that one thing goal. What's your number one thing for today that supports your overall number one thing? The fifth big idea. Fundies plus Waves. We talk about the fundamentals every single class because they're fundamental. We'll review that in the context of a masterpiece day. A masterpiece day has eating, moving and sleeping deliberately baked into it along with waves. You need to train intensely and you need to train your recovery on and off. 6th Big Idea we're going to look at is kryptonite. Again, if you want to have a masterpiece day, you need to have the Kryptonite locked away somewhere far away so that you are not being weakened. We're going to talk about how to play poorly well and control the kryptonite. 7th Big Idea AM +PM Bookend this is a big idea from Darren Hardy's compound effect. He makes the powerful point. You have the most control over your AMs and your PMs. Exert that control. We'll talk about some tips on how to do that and what to do when 8th big idea is you need to create time blocks for deep work. This is a Cal Newport idea Genius. Deep Work versus Shallow work. Most people spend most of their lives doing shallow work, doing a little bit here and there while they respond to email and social media. You need to do deep work. You need to shut that stuff off and do work that matters. And you do it in time blocks, which all the great time management gurus tell us. Time blocks are the number one power tool of time management. You've got to create big spaces of time where you can do great deep work uninterrupted. No Internet, no texting. You're just crushing it. Doing important work. We're going to talk about that in depth. 9th Big idea if you're going to create deep work time blocks and you also need to create deep love time blocks. If you want to have a masterpiece day, you need to schedule time with your family. And when you're with your family, you need to turn off your iPhone or whatever it is you use. And know that research shows unequivocally that just having a phone in sight diminishes the quality of connection. That's a big idea. Deep love the 10th big idea to wrap it up on our masterpiece days is the idea that we want to test the measure, appreciate and iterate. We're also going to talk about a worksheet. The class has a workbook, of course, to help bring these ideas from theory to practice. We're going to complement this session, this masterclass, with a worksheet that you can use on a daily basis to track everything that we're going to talk about in this class. I'll do a separate video, which will be fun, where I'll walk you through how I'm using the actual day to Day to Day Masterpiece Day worksheet, which I'm really excited about. So that's a quick look at our top 10 big ideas. Let's jump in and have some fun optimizing and actualizing. So if you enjoyed that quick overview, I think you'll love the full class become a member and get instant access to this class. Plus a bunch of other optimal living 101 masterclasses and over 300 philosopher's notes and a bunch of other goodness. 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