Micro Class: How to Create Miracle Months

This micro class on how to create Miracle Months was originally recorded as a video. We hope you enjoy the audio only version, but if you'd like to watch the video, check out the ad free version in Brian's membership site at BrianJohnson Me or visit his YouTube page. We'll be launching our app and video podcasts soon to make it easier for you to enjoy this type of content. Now for the wisdom you're listening to. Optimize with Brian Johnson. More Wisdom in Less Time.

Hey, this is Brian. That is my calendar. I'm going to walk through how I use that calendar. I've been meaning to do that for a long time and I just referenced it in another video. So I'm taking a break from reading Angela Duckworth's new book, Grit, which is phenomenal. To walk you through some thoughts on how I use this calendar. First of all, that is a scheduled blood test I'm doing through Wellness FX. Check them out. WellnessFX.com it's my birthday in a few weeks and I'm committed to being healthier than I've ever been in my life. And one way to measure that is via blood work. So I have that posted there to remind me. That's coming up. Do the Right Thing Live with Arte. There's a little more Arte. Anyway, here we are. So on Sunday of this month, Hal Elrod's film crew came out to film me for the Miracle Morning Little Fuzzy documentary where I talked about my morning practices and stuff like that. I'm really looking forward to sharing more on that documentary. Guys like Robin Sharma, Jack Canfield. I think it's going to be awesome. But we can think of this as how to create a Miracle month. So if you want to create a Miracle morning, how do you create a miracle month? This is how I do it and how I've been evolving it. If we unrolled this thing of calendar sheets like that, this is, I don't know, maybe a year, year and a half worth of doing this. You'll see that I've just, I've tried to make 4% improvements and just get a little bit clearer and build better systems to help me have great days, which in aggregate lead to hopefully a great month and then great years and God willing, great decades. Anyway, long prelude when I start the month, I basically map out. So on April 30, I sat down and I created this calendar and filled in things like this. AM one, AM two, PM one. Right? I'll tell you what that means in a second and then naps digital sunsets, dad time, family time and love. And then my physical commitments every day, one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, a thousand meters road and 10,000 steps walked. And then what I do is I go through the day is I basically just check those off, which you can see through the last few days. And it's really exciting for me for a number of reasons. One, I've articulated what I aspire to do this month and on a daily basis. And then I celebrate the progress. So I usually write more things up here as the month goes on. But my number one compass is always arete, right? So can I express the highest within myself? Moment to moment to moment. It's the key to flourishing. The Greeks tell us. It's the one word that summarizes my philosophy. It's my mantra when I meditate, it's what I come back to. Moment to moment to moment. When I'm doing my work and actually living with arte. And then I want to celebrate progress. I've got huge goals and what I want to do with my life, but I really want to make sure I'm celebrating progress, right? So every single day throughout the day, I celebrate when I do these little things. So first thing I do is I meditate, right? So last night, went to bed at 9, got up at 5 with a happy face, right? And then meditated for 20 minutes. And then after meditating I immediately do a little opening series, right? It's like five minutes of stretching and basic yoga and one sun salutation, I mark that off and I, when I mark that off, I smile to myself and I say, you know what? That's like me, I haven't done a class on self image 101 yet. I just traded messages with a member. I need to do that. But one of the ways we cultivate our self images, we do the right thing and then we feast on it. And it doesn't need to be big things, right? So every single morning when I do my son salutation, I say, that's like me to say I'm going to do this and I do it. And that fires me up, you know, it gets me a little misty even as I say that. It's such a subtle thing. But when we affirm that we are the type of people who do what we aspire to do more and more consistently, that's amazing. Then of course when we don't do it, we don't beat ourselves up. We say, needs work. I talk about this a lot in confidence. 101 the masterclass, right? You mess up. Okay, well, don't get upset with yourself. Just say, okay, that needs work. What could I have done differently to hit my target?

Awesome.

Go do that next time. Done. And then next time you do it right, you celebrate it and you groove that pattern into your mind rather than spinning out every time you fall short and then, you know, working against yourself. Anyway, I'll tell you a little more about what this means. So AM one for me is the time block that I'm working in right now. So I get up at 5am, my family's still asleep. They won't get up till like 7:30, 8 o', clock, which is awesome for me. I get to crank, so I get to do my meditation and then I get to do what I'm going to do, right? So this morning, what did I do this morning? I read Grit and then I realized I needed to do some videos to keep my streak alive. So I busted out a couple of videos, right? Plus videos times three. This is the third one I've done this morning actually. Right. And then I got this little target. So I'm all about targets in my classes. You know that if you've taken the master classes, we need to have a target, right? So every single morning I want to. I want to hit this AM1 target. I want to have a great day. I didn't get online, right? That's what this line is for. This line represents getting online. I didn't hit it yesterday. Getting online after I've executed an AM1, AM2 and PM one time block of deep work. That's how I'm going to achieve what I want to achieve in my life. Not by hopping online here and being reactive first thing in the morning. Taught a class yesterday on sleep Optimal sleep 101. 50% of people go to bed with their iPhones or smartphones next to their head in their bed, right? Or whatever next to their bed. And the last thing they do at night is check their iPhone and the first thing they do in the morning is check their smartphone. That's not smart. You're being reactive. You're blowing your consciousness up which whole other conversation. You're going to take longer to get into deep sleep and then you're going to spend less time in deep sleep than people that create a buffer between their activities in the night and their sleep time. Anyway, don't go online first thing in the morning. Be creative, not reactive. I'm committed to that. These are my deep work blocks. So anyway, that's part of AM1. And I do that every single day, every once in a while, being online and sharing some things with my right hand. Genius, Evan. Shout out. Thank you, Evan is my number one priority. I decide, hey, I've done some journaling on strategy and I want to share that. I'll get online and I'll do that. But it's a conscious choice and it's rare relative to the reading and writing that I've committed to doing another thing that I've little 4% distinction. So I do 100 burpees a day and I've done that for a really long time. And I just do them in sets of 10. These days I'm doing step back burpees. Not a big deal, right? I used to bang out the normal burpees. Got up to 300 burpees in a row. Okay, that was fun. And now I'm just in consistency mode. I'm not looking to do anything special with my burpees. I just want to do them consistently. It's more of a psychological practice for me than a physical one even. Anyway, I do 100 a day. But there were some days where I kind of dreaded doing them because I didn't do them until the end of the day, right. And yet I also noticed that I feel really great if I bang them out early in the day. So I realized, oh, I've got to make this a goal, that I'm going to do 50 of those burpees. Five simple sets. I never do 50 in a row. I do 10 and then I'll take 10 or 15 or 20 seconds off or 30 seconds off or maybe I'll take 10 minutes off or just go do much more work, right? But I do 50 of those before 8am and then I make the little hash mark here. I've done one, right? It's like six actually. I'll show you it is. I'll tell you, it's 7 o' clock in about 10 seconds because I set my alarm. There you go. It's actually 7 o', clock, 10 seconds. I set my alarm for 6:30. So it goes off every single morning. Which tells me do your first set of burpees, right? And it doesn't matter what I'm doing. I do my first set of burpees, period. And my game is I try to set it so that I'm resetting my chronograph literally at exactly 24 hours. It's pretty funny. Like I could literally set my watch to this. And that's again, it's a psychological Creative challenge for me. Just do what I say I'm going to do. So I do that and then I do these 50 burpees before 8am Right? And I hit this target and I feel great. So I go bam, bam, bam. And I cross that out. More progress. I celebrate the progress. And I've also stimulated my physiology. We know that exercise gives you a 12 hour mood boost and that's enough to do it. You do 50 burpees before 8am, you're feeling pretty great. And then I'll usually do a workout later in the day which I document. Hiit workout the other day I rested that day and I did a strength workout that day and I keep track of that over here. How many hiit workouts that I do, how many strength workouts, how many hikes, etc. Let's look a little bit more. So then what else do I have on here? Well, I like to make waves. There we go. So I didn't start making this little sign until later in the month, but there we go. Big part of my teaching in my personal practice is to make waves. I used to grind all day long and I'd find myself, you know, it's the easy way to get burned out. We got to make waves, we got to be on and then we got to be off, on and off. And naps are a great way to turn to flip the off switch. I do what I call napitations most days, not every day. But yesterday I did about a 20 minute nap day before I did a 6 minute nap. Research out of Harvard shows that even a six minute nap can boost your mood and performance. Six minutes. You don't need to go nuts. Just laying down and taking X number of deep breaths is a huge part of the practice. On Monday I took an hour and 40 minute nap. I worked hard on Sunday and this was kind of a recovery day for me because Sunday wound up being a work day and I literally took an hour and 40 minute nap. James Ma is one of the leading sleep researchers, says you want to take a 20 minute or less nap or 90 minute nap. You can get a full REM cycle in there. That's pretty restorative. And then on Sunday I did a 20 minute nap. I check that off as I do it. Awesome. And then another thing I check off is DS that represents digital sunset for me. As you know, if you know my work, digital sunset means the sun goes down and all electronics go off. In the Johnson household we turn on non blue light lights to let our melatonin do Its job. We don't need to jack up our cortisol at night by being stimulated by blue light, iPads, iPhones, TVs, etc. We go dark, right? Try to align with our circadian rhythms. Yesterday in Sleep 101 I asked the question, what percentage of your DNA do you think is connected to circadian rhythms? Right? So how much of your genetic code is tied to and run by really and dictated by circadian rhythms? What would you guess? It's 98%. 98% of your genetic code is driven by and connected to circadian rhythms. Meaning when the sun goes down, that lack of light influences your DNA. And it's only over the last hundred and fifty years, since the invention of the light bulb, in the last 10 years, since the invention of ubiquitous blue light in the form of smartphones, etc. That we've had the opportunity to jack up our consciousness via this artificial light. We were prey. We'd be eaten back in the day if we were out doing active things at night. So I set a digital sunset that's really important to me. This is the number one hack I've created and you got to know that this digital sunset, this whether for you it's 60 minutes before you go to bed, you turn off your computer, etc. For me it's hours, right? But that decision for me drives the quality of this. I would rather set an alarm here, right, then here. I don't want alarm to get me out of bed. I can't remember the last time I used an alarm to get out of bed on a regular basis. If I need to go to the airport super early, okay, cool, an alarm. But otherwise I wake up at 4:54 this morning, no alarm, feeling refreshed. That's how I want to roll. And I do that because I set the alarm here and then I check that box off every single day. Did I hit a digital sunset or not? Now I don't do that every single night, but. But pretty much every single night. And work isn't what keeps me up. Maybe I'll watch a movie or something, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm not going to be using digital stuff for work. After I've put in a good day, I don't need to go all day, I need to make waves, recover. Then I've got my little dad time here. I did have some dad time, actually. It was a little modified yesterday because I taught. But my commitment is I want to spend an hour plus with my son. An hour every morning. It's usually 30 to 75, 90 minutes or two or three hours on the weekends. But we go on an adventure, we go to the park, we have fun, we give mom time to do her meditation and journaling and all that kind of stuff. This is really important to me and I have it on a daily basis. A great day, a masterpiece day is going to be created when I spend time with my son. Boom. Done. Check that one off. And then time with my family, which is what I do after I shut down Digital Sunset style. And. And then love. I used to have PI positive interactions based on John Gottman's work, right? Creating a 5 to 1 ratio of positive to negative interactions. Now it's just love. Just focus on love and be positive and be sweet with my wife and with my family and with other people I interact with and be kind and generous, etc. So that's a look at a good part of the board now. It's amazing how quickly this thing gets filled up. And you can see the quality of my days. I want to actually measure my day. So yesterday was a great day. I taught Optimal Sleep 101. I prepped for Optimal Sleep 101 in my AM1, I taught it in the AM2 and then I had some business fun. And then I read Grit. It was a great day, right? I had a very good day. The day before that I had a good day, but it was more of a recovery day on Monday. I didn't even judge Sunday. It was a very good day. But there you go. That is a long look at my monthly calendar. Hope you got something there. And here's to stringing together moments and days and weeks and months and years and decades of getting just 4% better as we live our ideals and give our gifts to the world. Appreciate you. Have an awesome day.

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