17 Dec 2025 · 6 min
John Wooden's UCLA basketball team won with one offense, one defense, one out-of-bounds play, all practiced to perfection. Brian Johnson argues simple routines beat complex systems. Pick one thing to remove from your day and one to add, then structure your time with morning and evening bookends.
Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize Me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential, including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs and even NCAA championship teams. Two of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize Me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show. You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on Keeping It Simple. It's inspired by Be Quick but Don't Hurry by Andy Hill with John Wooden, of course. John Wooden, coach of the UCLA Bruins basketball team. Go Bruins. And they ran the simplest possible basketball program you could imagine. You'd think, wow, they won so many championships. They must have had a really complex system. They did not. They had a simple system. They had one offense that they ran for 40 years, with six years that they did something a little bit different simply because they had two of the best centers ever, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton. Right? They structured their offense around them, but otherwise, for the other 40 years, they ran one offense. It was so straightforward that high school teams around the country ran this offense. They had one defense, man to man, didn't have a lot of other defenses. One, one out of bounds play, out of bounds play, right? One out of bounds play. Not three, not five, not ten. One offense, defense, out of bounds play. Other teams playing them knew exactly what they were going to do. The UCLA Bruins didn't care. Wooden didn't care. What he cared about was keeping things simple and then executing this as well as they possibly could. Could they run this to perfection? And guess what? They did. They did it so well that it didn't matter that the other team knew what they were going to do. They executed so perfectly that they won again and again and again and again. So the question for us as we apply this to our lives is, is your life more complex than it needs to be? And importantly, how do you decrease complexity and increase simplicity? What can you do? What's one thing, one thing that you can do to reduce complexity? And what's one thing that you can do to increase your simplicity? What can you remove? Right? And what Will that do to boost your simplicity in your life? We get confused sometimes when we think that more complex equals better. Doesn't run this as well as you possibly can. Figure out your offense, your defense, your masterpiece day. This is what your day looks like. It's simple. You execute your AM time block. You have your AM PM bookends. You rock that. You rock that. You have this time block and this one you work out here. It's a very simple life, but you execute it to perfection and you have more happiness, more fulfillment, more meaning and more success then you can imagine if you're constantly running different plays and this and this and this. Get really good at running a simple life and watch everything take off. I hope you enjoyed what can you do to reduce complexity, increase simplicity? Have fun. Look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See ya. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, Optimum Living 100 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 with 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. Check us out at BrianJohnson me join.
