My morning journaling and strategy thinking (+ Top 10 Books) (behind the scenes)

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. It is bright and early. 5:52. Got up around 4:00 clock this morning. I am. Where are we? An hour and five minutes into my first deep work session. Keeping track of time again. Peter Drucker working on this philosopher's note, the effective executive as I Prepare for Productivity 101 which I'm going to be teaching next week. Also working on the progress principle, etc. Anyway, Drucker is big on keeping track of time. So here we go. Time. Tuesday October 3rd. Went to bed last night at 7:38 after tucking in my little man reading some Harry Potter. Got up at 4:01. Meditation, my morning stuff, little bit of movement. 4:46. Started my deep work session at 4:47 and here we are. Anyway, I'm mapping out kind of our next step. We've been testing a ton of things business wise and I've been wanting to do behind the scenes for a long time. And a lot of you ask for kind of insight into my thought process and creative process and all that stuff. So I thought I'd invite you in. Warning it's messy. One of the books I'm going to be doing soon is Wired to Create. Unbelievably good book. There's a page in there that I will share at some point about how messy the creative process is. So I think it'll be fun just for me to share the inelegance at times of me figuring out what the next best step is, etcetera and being willing to experiment and all that. Then I got my stack of philosopher's notes that's I don't know how many hundreds, over 400 of them I think in that stack. And then I'm always reading a new one. So that stack on the top is the one. The ones that I've read recently. Stick with it. Coming soon. Getting ready to teach breathing 101 as well. So there we go. Anyway, here's my journaling this morning. Do it every day if you follow my stuff. You know I do this. But anyway, we've got. Here's my little mountain peak, right? Our big goal is a million people optimizing with us as premium members at 10 bucks a month. So how do we astonish that number of people? Help people optimize. That's our purpose. It's very simple. Our mission is very simple. Change the world together one person at a time and create an exemplary business that shows that virtue wins. Right? So it's all about profound, astonishing service. We passed the 10k mark of premium members, which is really exciting for us. We have some really, really cool members as well, which I won't get into right now, but honored and excited to have all of your support. Thank you. And the whole game from the beginning was, look, when we launched this, if we can get one person to pay us 10 bucks, we can get 10. If we can get 10, we can get 100. If we can get 100, we can get a thousand. If we can get a thousand, we can get 10,000. And if we can get 10,000, we can get 100,000. If we can get 100,000, we can get a million. Now, that wasn't easy. I worked really, really hard to create as much value as I possibly could and to serve as profoundly as I could to help people optimize. And we were blessed to hit this milestone. Now this is going to be even harder. In some ways, it's easier because getting from 0 to 10,000 wasn't easy. And we have a lot of momentum now. So, you know, the next domino is this. But I don't take that for granted. Our business is service is a great quote from Peter Drucker as he was doing a case study. And then this little X here represents. I'm not going to get stuck in the middle. My pursuit of this goal. This is my life's work. I'm all in. I have some timelines. I'd like to hit that by the time I'm 50, which is six and a half years from now. And I've got some ideas of what I can do to do that. But I'm not stopping in the middle. You might remember that mediocrity is medius ocras, which literally means the middle of a rugged mountain. That's what mediocrity is, is when you start something, you're a hero in the beginning. A rhomboschura. It gets tough. And then you're like, oh, whatever. I'm just gonna go over here. Not an option for me. I am not getting stuck in the middle. Ohms. You might have heard me talk about that mantra. Pardon the little sniffle. I went a little too hard a couple weeks ago. Tested caffeine. Does not work for me. Reminded again. So, anyway, whole nother chat there. Ohms. Obstacles make me stronger. Obstacles make me stronger. Ohms. That's my mantra. Every single obstacle we face makes me stronger and antifragile. Use it as fuel for the rest of our growth. As Phil Stutts, my coach, one of the things in my honorary godfather that I did this morning was review my notes from my chat with him. I meet with him every Monday and been doing that, I don't know, for almost nine or ten months now. Astonishing. So relentless forward motion. That's how I approach it. Then I look at my virtues, right? I check in. Self affirmation theory says you're going to be more powerful and grounded and happy and flourishing if you remind yourself of what's really important to you. Well, these are my core virtues from a Greek sense. And these are my core virtues from a modern positive psychology sense. So arete, I'm committed to doing my best moment to moment to moment. I want to close the gap between what I'm capable of and what I'm actually doing. Boom. What does that feel like? It feels like Eudaimonia. Good soul. I get to high five the best version of me. That feels amazing. Then what happens? Well then I have entheos, I have God within. I have energy. There's my timer goes off every, I'll show you. Every 16 minutes and 40 seconds, my little timer countdown watch goes off. This is a Joan Vernacos, the NASA woman, Katie Bowman idea. We got to move more often. I don't want to be. So I will stand up. Usually I bang out some burpees or I hop on my little rebounder here, or I hang on my pull up bar back there, right? And I do a little movement every thousand seconds, which is how long 16 minutes and 40 seconds is. I get up and just kind of shake my body out, etc. Which by the way, coincidentally helps with my energy and enthusiasm. So enthusias God within, right? This is the ultimate purpose of what we're doing is to connect to that highest version of ourselves. Then I remind myself of, I'm committed to being my version of a modern day hero. I think we all, I know we all have the capacity to be heroes. Remember the ancient etymology of the word hero is protector. It's not tough guy. It's not some superhero that you can't be. It's someone who has enough compassion and empathy and love for others in the world that they're willing to do the work, to go out and serve profoundly heroes. That's an important idea for me. And then Euthymia, this is the idea of tranquility. Ryan Holiday talks about it referencing Seneca, who talks about it in a couple of our notes that we feature him, right? Euthymia, this is tranquility. This is you know who you are and you have the courage and the confidence to be you. That's a big idea. Who are you? Live in integrity with that. Don't compare yourself to other people. Don't look to the side and see what other people are doing. Don't second guess yourself every five seconds. Be you. You're the best version of yourself and the most authentic version of yourself. And you're going to feel pretty good. I represent that as energized tranquility, as calm confidence. These are qualities I want to cultivate. I remind myself of this every morning. Now, it's taken me longer to walk you through this than it takes me to actually do it. I spent less than 10 minutes doing this and reviewing my notes from the coaching session and some other strategic things we're doing this morning. So I don't spend a ton of time on this. I can do this. I can bang this out in like three minutes, three or four minutes. And again, research shows this is a really wise thing to do, to refresh your vision, the hope of, look, I'm creating this future. Nothing's stopping me, et cetera. And this is what I'm going to do in order to do it. Then my positive psychology strengths, the virtues in action strengths finder, what are they? Well, for me, it's creativity I need to create. For me to have a sense of flourishing, right? Hope and optimism. I'm always seeing, well, what's possible. And that's what I'm trying to share with you. You can do whatever it is you aspire to do, provided you're willing to do the work. Live with integrity, virtue, et cetera. Energy and enthusiasm are two of my top virtues. Courage. And then I add love, which is what the word heroes means to me. It's a combination of those two things. And then purpose. I'm obviously very committed. That's a transcendent purpose for me, is to do my best to actualize my potential. And then we've got this fun little one plus two plus three. This is the fruits of me kind of, I want to say, hammering my head against the desk because that's what it felt like at times. But just trying to figure out, well, how are we going to simplify and astonish? How are we going to serve our existing members as profoundly as we can while creating content that introduces people who haven't heard of me and our work yet, such that we can grow. Right. It's not an easy creative challenge to solve. So our operating principles are very simple. We're committed to simplifying and astonishing. When in doubt, we simplify and. And we astonish this little lightning bolt reminds me of that. So, long story short, here, one plus two plus three for me represents my current thinking, which is very much evolving, which is every day we do a plus one now that's been only available to members. We are looking at introducing that to everyone, where we just give away the plus ones every single day. Our premium newsletter is going to become something that we're going to offer for free, is what we're contemplating on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram. Here's our Plus One Daily. We hope you enjoy it. We hope we're astonishing you in helping you optimize your life so we can change the world together. And by the way, if you like that, we offer a lot more stuff for our premium members at 10 bucks a month. That includes two philosopher's notes per week, which I'm fired up about. So. So I just did this for fun, just to kind of ingrain it into my head. Plus two, plus two, plus two, plus two,. Clockwork. Here are two new philosopher's notes. Every single week, you can count on us to give you wisdom that will help you optimize your life. So, like I said, I'm working on the effective executive. I actually did the four disciplines of execution yesterday morning. But this is the idea. Every single week, you're going to get two new notes that will help you optimize your life. And of course, every month, you get a new Optimum Living 101. But for my purposes here, strategically, I look at it and say, one plus two plus three equals that 100k. If we deliver one optimized plus one a day, we deliver two PNs a week. And then I need to show up. And what I'm excited to do is three deep work blocks daily, right? So we talk about a lot of this in everything we do. But I've arrived at the idea in part from Cal Newport. And then I kind of intersect that with Anders Ericsson in his research on what makes experts and great performers great. These great performers put in roughly three deep, deliberate practice work blocks of about 90 minutes. It's about four and a half hours of truly deep work a day. Not kind of sort of going through the motions and checking email and stuff, but true, profound, deep work. And for me, that means I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm teaching. This is part of a deep work block. I'm unplugged. I haven't turned on the WI FI yet. And I'm striving to do my best work in this context. When I'M filming. That's a deep work time block, etc. But I want three of those every single day. Steady, consistent. I show up and I do that. You do that every single day. That's 15. I did four yesterday and change. Right. That's 15 to 20 a week. You're approaching a thousand of those a year. And you're certainly doing 1,000 deep work time blocks a year. You can get a lot done in that. So this is my formula to knock over the next domino. One plus two plus three, the daily, the weekly PNs, and then me showing up consistently with the deep work time blocks. Then I get excited about the body of work that I'm committed to creating, Right? So again, I'm creating this. This takes me 3, 4, 5 minutes to bust through in any given morning. Just refresh what's going on, and then I choose what the most important thing to do next is, which again, this morning was reading this book. But I look at the body of work I'm committed to creating, and I want to create the best possible collection of wisdom I can. Right. That will truly help you optimize every facet of your life. So you, you can actualize your potential and I would say your heroic potential. So what does that look like? Well, that looks like this. In 2020, just over two years from now, as I'm filming this, we'll have a thousand plus ones. We'll have over 500 philosopher's notes. We have 440 now, and we'll have over 50 optimal living classes. And then, like I said, I'm turning 56 and a half years. That's a wonderfully humbling and sobering and focusing thought, which goes well, by the way. With this, I'm reaching into my pocket. Memento mori. This is Ryan Holiday's genius coin reminding us. Memento mori, for those of you who don't know, is remember death. In the ancient Roman times, an emperor or a general who is going through Rome with a parade of people celebrating their awesomeness would have someone in the back of their chariot in the midst of them, waving to the crowd, being adored. Someone would whisper to them, memento mori. Remember your own death. Remember that this glory is all fleeting. Remember that you could go, as Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased by Ryan Holiday, says, you could leave life right now. What does that mean? That means it's a good time to live at your ultimate best potential period. What are you capable of in this moment? Arete live that what happens. Eudaimonia. Sense of enthusiasm. You're living your heroic best self and you have a sense of euthymia, of tranquility, etc. Anyway, this sobering, exciting turn of 50 in six and a half years. Let's do this. The body of work currently contemplated with an asterisk of everything is dynamic. But it gets me pretty excited to see having 2500 plus ones, little bite sized pieces of wisdom that I'm committed to having at a super high quality that can truly impact your life. Any one of them. And when we aggregate and compound those over an extended period of time, like I talk about, what do you get? We get you the most important thing here, by the way, for all of us, when we look at this isn't the goal. The goal simply gets us to go from here to here. Who do I need to be in order to achieve this somewhat arbitrary goal? That's the real game. I got to step up. I got to be the best version of myself. Get a little bit better. Moment to moment to moment. Body of work. Philosopher's notes, a thousand of them. That fires me up. I've got so many books. I'm so excited to read and to put the energy here and then 101 optimal living, 101 classes. So anyway, that's the one plus two plus three equals 100k. Again. I turn this on because I want to start sharing my thought process with you. And then I'm also really excited about when we imagine I got to promote, I got to create an ad for the end of all the content we're going to create. And I could do a studio produced animated thing or whatever. But I think what I'm going to do is just a walkthrough. Just like I'm sharing it with my mom. And I'm excited about it, which is how I approach all of our sales. I don't say anything. I put sales and quotes like, I'm just excited about this stuff and I want to share it with people. So my gut is I'm going to walk people through, hey, if you like that free piece of content, then I think you'd like this. And one of the things that I came up with this morning is I want to share my top 10 philosopher's notes. Like, start here. These are pretty cool. And this is a. It's tough to take 440 books and say these are my top 10 favorite ones, but it looks something like this. The tools, Phil Stutz. Right. And Barry Michaels. Epic. Some of these are tied for first, right? And then that falls into our confidence pack. So we're separating all of our content now by what we're calling wisdom packs. So we have purpose, we have goals, Masterpiece days, Stoicism, Peak performance, Anti fragility, confidence, positive psychology, movement, etc. Every piece of our content on our site is falling into one of these wisdom packs to make it easier for people to figure out what aspect of their life they want to optimize. Anyway, top 10 books that fall into those the Tools Deep Work by Cal Newport. Just epic, I think. Must read. The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. I finished that book and I was just blown away. He did such a phenomenal job integrating the Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and some minor Stoics. And then with his inimitable style of just kind of bringing that ancient wisdom and kicking us in the butt in the 366 daily meditation style. Fantastic. And I really like my notes on that as well. Rethinking Positive Thinking. Amazing book by one of the leading researchers on the science of well being and flourishing on the science of visualizing and goal setting and why staring at your vision board doesn't work and what does work? Well, we got to start there, right? Grit. Angela Duckworth Obviously. Epic Peak by Anders Erickson what greatness is all about. Mastery by Robert Greene. Presence by Amy Cuddy no Sweat by Michelle Seeger. And then I come back to so good they can't ignore you. Another one by Cal Newport, which is when we set up my studio, we use books to kind of hold down the white backdrop. People wonder if I'm on a green screen. I am not. We have a really well lit white backdrop, but we use books as our kind of paperweights. And the books that I use are deep work. Then so good they can't ignore you. Then grit, then peak, then mastery. That's what holds down the thing. Just remind me. Look, it's all about showing up and doing deep work to become so good they can't ignore you. Then to continue doing the work and grit and move through the obstacles so you can reach the peak and attain true mastery. There you go. My top 10. Anyway, there you go. Behind the scenes, I'm excited to share more. I'm thinking about one of these a week and as I kind of architect how I'm going to serve you profoundly and hopefully astonish and most importantly, hope you help you optimize and actualize. Hope you're doing great. Thanks for all your support. Let's do this.