My Top 3 BEST Books of All Time (+ a Life-Changing Idea From Each!)

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. I am sitting here hanging out with 500 of my favorite books and all the philosopher's notes that go with them. And people are always asking me, hey, what are your favorite books? And that's a very difficult question to answer. But I wound up creating a video on the top 10 my top 10 favorite books of all time. People loved it and it gave me an idea to create a top three favorite most life changing books across all the different aspects of our lives that we want to master so we can optimize our lives and give the world all we've got. This is our first one, my top three favorite books of all time. Then we're going to have a series of 30 different top threes. We're going to talk about ancient wisdom, modern science habits, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering productivity, my favorite Navy SEAL books, leadership books, etc. It's going to be fun. You can check out everything in the top three series at optimize.com me top three, optimize me top three. You can see all 30 of these top threes we're going to do and you can get the philosopher's notes on these three books, the Tools Deep Work Happy Together. What else before we jump in? Oh yes, go to Optimize Me and get a free trial. Two week free trial. You get access to notes on all. These are 500 books. We have 600 philosopher's notes, six page PDFs, 20 minute MP3s where I pull out the big ideas from these great books and help you apply them to your lives today while connecting them to other books, etc. So, top three books of all time, the Tools Deep Work Happy Together. The Philosopher's notes to go with them. What I want to do today and in our series is I'm going to tell you why each of these books is my favorite book. Then I'm going to share the number one most life changing idea from each of these books. That's what we're going to do throughout our series together. The big three. I'm sorry, the Top three series. So the Tools Phil Stutz Barry Michaels Transform your problems into courage, confidence and creativity. When I first read this book years ago, I bought a copy for everyone on our team and sent it to a bunch of friends. Now of course we've got the six page PDF where I pull out my favorite big ideas, the basic idea of this book before we Talk about the number one most life changing. Is that the tools, guys, Phil Stutts and Barry Michaels. I've been working with Phil Stutts. I loved him so much. I've been working with him. He is my coach, he's my honorary spiritual father. For the last three years, he and I have met every single week, with an exception of a couple of weeks. And it's just been extraordinary. Now they say there are five main challenges we face in life and we need to have tools to face them. It's not enough to think about these things. We need tools we can put into practice. So in the philosopher's note, I talk about those five tools. We do a quick little overview. Tool number one, two, three, four, five. Tool number one is what we're going to talk about. They call it the reversal of desire. It's basically getting yourself excited about the challenges you face, knowing your infinite potential exists on the other side of your comfort zone. They also talk about active love, dealing with interpersonal challenges, inner authority, dealing with self doubt, shadow issues, and then also jeopardy, dealing with the fact that our life is finite. Now's the moment to live our greatest lives. So that's the note. Here's the number one idea. Their number one tool is what they call reversal of desire, right? And they basically say, look, here's you. Yes, it's a pretty good sketch if I say so myself. And this is your comfort zone. Now most people don't like to be outside of their comfort zone because what does it feel like to be outside of your comfort zone? By definition, it's uncomfortable. Yet our infinite potential exists on the other side of our comfort zone. They say when you really get that, rather than every time you bump up against discomfort, retreating back into comfort, you reverse your desire and you want to feel uncomfortable. And their tool is bring it on. The moment you feel a niggle of discomfort, you run this little algorithm in your head. If I feel uncomfortable, then I say bring it on. And they go off and say, pain. I love pain. Pain sets me free, Right? But we can just stick to bring it on. Bring it on. My infinite potential exists on the other side of my comfort zone. Therefore, when I feel uncomfortable, rather than retreat, I'm going to reverse my desire and say, let's go, let's bring it on. In the modern science. Get a stack in the modern science session. Which by the way, most of the books in the middle here are positive psychology, modern science, they say you need to approach life and the difficulties in it as challenges, not threats. This is the Fastest way to approach it as a challenge. Bring it on. I love challenges. Obstacles make me stronger is one of our mantras here at Optimize Obstacles make me stronger. I'm excited. Is another corollary we'll talk about to deal with stress. That's the tools. That's my number one favorite idea from it. It's my number one favorite idea period. Because if we want to live our greatest lives might be tied for first with a few others. We, we need to get really clear and get really good on getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Thank you, Phil Stottsberry Michaels. You guys rock. Moving on. Deep work. Deep work. Cal Newport, one of my favorite human beings on the planet. He's become a dear friend as well over the last several years since I read his first book. So good that I read so good they can't ignore you. Rules for focused success in a distracted world. This is important. You want to do great work, meaningful, significant work in your life, you got to know how to go deep. So again, we've got a six page PDF philosopher's note. We talk about what the deep work hypothesis is and the fact that as Cal says, and this is my number one idea from this, he has a PhD from MIT. He's a professor computer science at Georgetown. Right. The guy's got one of the most beautiful logical minds on the planet. Right? And he does a great job of walking us through, selling us on just how important it is to deep work. And he says, look, deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, the superpower of the 21st century. Being able to get yourself to go deep and focus with no inputs distracting you is a superpower. Cal tells us it's simultaneously more rare and more valuable in the world today. And if we want to optimize our work, this is the book to start with. And you notice we got energy, work and love. It's what we call our big three here at Optimize Energy. Science says that's actually the number one virtue most highly correlated with success. This book helps you cultivate energy at the deepest level. Your life force, your soul force, etc. Then we have work. This is the number one book for work. Then we have love, which leads us to happy together. This is a recent book I read, which is one of the reasons why I love it. You know, after reading all of these books, and I'm marching my way to a thousand right now, I learned something new. In every one of these books, in every single one of these books, there's what I call a life changing big idea, literally can change your life. My life has been changed so many times, again and again and again. And then you spiral up. You just constantly get better and better and better and better, which happens to be the exact way that Phil Stutz views his world. And so does Ray Dalio, who we'll talk about later. But anyway, we've got energy, we've got work. Now it's time for love. Happy Together by Susie and James Powelski, a married couple who are two of the leading luminaries in the positive psychology world. Using the science of positive psychology to build love that lasts. Now, this book I love for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it's the first book that integrates ancient wisdom, modern science and practical tools completely targeted on love. Then again, if you follow along, you know that Optimize is all about ancient wisdom, modern science and practical tools. Yet I never had a book I could point to and say, read this one that integrates all of it. Now, James is the co founder of the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania with Martin Seligman. And he was literally there at day one when they launched the positive psychology movement. And so as I read this book, I literally had a choir of angels singing with me. And you can see that in the note I talk about all the parallels of our wisdom and the testimonials for this book, which is where I usually start. Reading a book is a who's who of positive psychology. And we happen to have notes on almost everybody who wrote a testimonial for this book. But this book is the best book for relationships as it relates to ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools, and it's the best book on the science of virtue. And we're going to talk about virtue in a moment. It's actually interesting because this book essentially is this book plus this book in love. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle tells us the summum bonum of life. The highest good is eudaimonia, which literally means good soul. The way you achieve that is to live with virtue. Martin Seligman leaned on Aristotle when he wrote this book because eudaimonia, good soul translates as flourishing. When you're expressing that best version of yourself, this is what Seligman says is the ultimate purpose in life. How do you do that? You put your virtues in action. This book is such a good overview of how we go about doing that and combining the ancient wisdom, modern science, etc. Now my number One favorite idea from this is Aristotelian lovers. Aristotelian lovers. Isn't that just a cool phrase? And again, big ideas. We start with relationship gym. Relationships aren't supposed to be easy. Falling in love is easy. Standing in love, growing in love, not so much. You got to put in the effort. Then we have Aristotelian lovers. They talk about. And I'll check out the note for more. But they talk about Aristotle's different levels of friendship. The main point we want to make here is that our society is all about hedonic love, right? It's the you completely Jerry Maguire kind of love versus flourishing love, Hedonic versus eudaimonic love. Aristotelian lovers are all about helping their partners become the best version of themselves. That's what it's all about. That's the you make me want to be a better man as good as it gets type of love. And they talk about that and how pop culture brings us the wrong direction, etc. And then of course, they tell us, know your virtues and how to put them into action. And then know your partner's virtues and how to put them into action. And that is a quick look at why I love that book. And that is a quick look at my favorite three books of all time. The Tools Deep Work, Happy Together. We can obviously talk about this forever, but check out the notes if you feel so inspired. And again, you can get instant access to all 600 notes at Optimize Me. And you get 50 Optimal Living 101 masterclasses as part of that membership. It's only 10 bucks a month or so, depending on how you do it after the free trial. And you can get 1000 optimize + ones daily, little bursts of wisdom, et cetera. Optimize Me. And if you want to follow along with the top three series, go to Optimize Me. Slash Top three, Arabic number three, Top three. And you'll get these three notes on these three books at that URL. And then also we've got a special lifetime offer going on right now. It's about 10 bucks a month to join the core membership. If you want to go in lifetime, usually it's 400 bucks, 399 bucks. The team has set it up so it's $250 for a lifetime membership to all these notes forever, all the ones I'm going to do, etc. And then finally, we have an optimized coach program where we help individuals who are committed to going in deep and truly mastering themselves and Taking the wisdom from all these notes. All of my classes in becoming the best version of themselves in service to the world, half of them we have over 2,000 people from over 70 countries now have gone through our first three classes of the program. We're less than two years in, super excited about it. We're going to have 100,000 Optymyze coaches in the world. Helping change the world over the next decade is our mission. We are fiercely committed to it. You can learn more about that at Optimize Me Coach. That's Optimize Me Coach and I should say Phil Stutz, Barry Michaels, Cal Newport and Susie and James Powelski are part of our visiting faculty for our coach program. We have dozens of my favorite teachers who wrote all these books as part of our coach program. And again, it's for people who truly want to master their lives, serve heroically and empower others to do the same so we can change the world together, one person at a time together. Starting with you and me today. Next up, what are we going to do next? Ah, next we've got Habits. We're going to share the top three. My top three favorite habit books of all time. That's going to be good. I can't wait to share more on that. Tiny Habits, Atomic Habits, the Compound Effect, and some bonus ones to help us achieve self mastery and again, give the world all we've got. That's all I got. Hope you enjoyed what's one idea you might have picked up in the last X minutes that you can apply to your life today. Let's move from theory to practice to mastery. Make today a great day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note, if you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach. Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach. If you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same, have a great day. See you tomorrow.