My Top 3 CELEBRATING Books of All Time (+ a Life-Changing Idea From Each!) (#11)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize Top three Favorite Books of All Time series. Today we're going to talk about my top three favorite books on celebrating life. Celebrating is one of our seven core optimized fundamentals. We've got eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating and prospering. It's easy when we get started on this optimizing heroic quest of ours to forget to enjoy the process. So we want to take a moment and make sure that we are celebrating life. And so I'm excited to share three of my favorite books on this subject. And it's interesting because as I was preparing for the Mastery series, that stack There is the 300 Day Mastery Series program in 25 sessions. But one of our sessions is on how to celebrate. And as I was creating this particular session for the Mastery series, I realized, look, there's three parts to it. First, we need to accept ourselves. We need to accept. There's acceptance and gratitude and then celebration. First we need to accept ourselves completely. Then we need to accept reality completely. Then we need to accept failures completely, which is basically self compassion 101 that we're going to talk about in a moment. Then we need to have gratitude for what we have in our lives right now and look at the antidotes to gratitude and then look at how we can practice gratitude, which is our second of the top three books right there. Gratitude works by Robert Emmons. Then we need to go out and give the world all we've got. Winning all day, every day, breakfast of championship, hitting our ultimate target on our heroic quest, which leads us to Joseph Campbell. Pathways to Bliss. Joseph Campbell, of course being one of my top three favorite teachers of all time, Mr. Hero's Journey, etc. So that's our top three. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff. The proven power of being kind to yourself. Gratitude works by Robert Emmons. A 21 day program for creating emotional prosperity. And then Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell. Mythology and personal transformation. We've got compassion and acceptance of ourselves, reality and failures. We've got Gratitude theory and practice. Then we've got that Hero's Journey. Of course we've got philosopher's notes on each of those and I am excited to share one of my favorite big ideas from each and send us off. But check out these notes, I think you'll enjoy them. And of course, as always, we had a ton of potential notes. We've got other notes on Joseph Campbell. We could have picked the Hero with a Thousand Faces. That's kind of a must read classic. It's inspired everyone from George Lucas to J.K. rowling and everyone in between. The myth as told through all cultures and all time. The Power of Myth based on the interview series that Joseph Campbell did with Bill Moyers. Extraordinary. If you haven't watched that yet, check it out. And of course there's Finding Joe, the documentary that I happen to be in with Laird Hamilton, Deepak Chopra, et cetera. Man's Search for Meaning is another great book that almost made the cut. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Dilbert creator Scott Adams. And I've got a ton of other books on failure and courage and anti fragility that could have made it. But I went with these three for these reasons. 1. Self compassion is just absolutely essential to our lives. We need to learn how to accept ourselves completely. We know that self shame, on the other hand, vis a vis self compassion leads to all the things we don't want to see in our lives. Anxiety, depression, etc. So we need to practice self compassion. How do we do that? Three different things we talk about in the Note in depth. Number one Be nice to yourself. I always thought it was actually number one is common humanity. That's usually where I start. Usually the first thing that I tell people is, look, you're not alone. It's not because you're you, it's because you're human. Is what my coach Steve Chandler, when I worked with him years ago, told me. Common humanity. We all struggle. The story you're telling yourself about something being inherently wrong with you is the most toxic part of this whole process. So realize we're all in this together. Then. Be nice to yourself. Self kindness. Treat yourself like you'd treat a beloved child who scraped his or her knee. Be nice to yourself. Rather than beat yourself up, don't talk to yourself in a way that you would never talk to anyone else. Which of course we all do. Common humanity. But be mindful of that which is the third step. Common humanity, self kindness and mindfulness. Noticing when you're doing that. There are a ton of other great ideas in this book, but those are the principal ones. This is important stuff. Getting self compassion, practicing self compassion. The worse you feel, the more compassionate you are with yourself. And that's how we engage in a growth mindset which allows us to celebrate life. You cannot celebrate life if you're constantly shaming yourself. Which is why I start with this book and Acceptance. Then we move on to gratitude works by Robert Emmons. Robert Emmons is the leading scholar on the science of well being. We have another note on another one of his books called thanks, which is also great. This is his most recent one, which is also fantastic. This is simple as well. Gratitude works. He says that the stats are eye popping. You want a 25% boost in your well being? Bust out a gratitude journal. The research shows that simply keeping a journal once a week, tracking five things for which you're grateful for for like 10 weeks or something, will boost your happiness by 25% vis a vis people that just jot down things that happened that day. That's crazy. You get more sleep, you exercise more, etc. When you're grateful. And you cannot be depressed and grateful simultaneously at the same point in time. Try it. I challenge you. Now, one of the other things I loved about this book and why it definitely made the cut, is this idea. Most people who are ungrateful, which is all of us at one time or another, right? Take things for granted. He says, no, no, no. We should take things as granted. Grateful people literally practice gratitude. They see life's blessings and gifts. They don't take things for granted, they take them as granted. And the number one obstacle to gratitude, by the way, is entitlement. Thinking that the world owes you something. The world doesn't owe you anything or me anything. Let's be humble, practice humility. Then we can more easily see things as a gift and appreciate the privilege that is our life. Lots of other interesting ideas in that note. Then finally, after we've accepted ourselves and practiced gratitude, we've got that hero's journey we're here to live. Pathways to bliss. I could have put it takes what it takes here, because one of the ideas there is just fantastic, which is you need to start every day with a breakfast of champions. He talks about super bowl winning champion Russell Wilson, who literally eats breakfast with while watching a video highlight reel of him at his best in the days leading up to the Super Bowl. And I don't know how often he does that during the year, but Breakfast of champions, you at your best. That's super powerful. And then of course, there's just the overall idea of a hero's journey. If you haven't studied Joseph Campbell yet, start with these few notes that I just shared. Finding Joe is fantastic as well. Where do we want to go here? It's actually in the Power of Myth note, which I'll bust out over here, where we talk about one of the Things I talk about in the movie Finding Joe. Sat chit ananda. So you've heard of Joseph Campbell saying, hey, follow your bliss, right? Where did he get that from? Well, he also said, for the record, follow your grunt. You can't just follow your bliss and expect things to show up perfectly in your life. You got to actually put in the hard work. Heroes journeys are challenging. That's the whole point. You, you leave the comfort of the known, you go out on your quest, you face dragons, you get mentors, you win the fight, you come back with the boon. That's not easy. Yes, you follow your bliss and listen to what he calls the transcendent wisdom bubbling up. But he actually got the idea of bliss from the Sanskrit word ananda. And I tell the story in Finding Joe that there are three different ways, according to Hindu scriptures, that one can reach enlightenment. Sat chit renando beingness, consciousness or bliss. And Joseph Campbell said, look, I don't know, Is my beingness proper? Hard to say. Is my consciousness proper? Hard to say. But my bliss, Oh, I can feel that. I can feel when I am intuitively called to do something, that bliss bubbling up. I'm going to pay attention to that. And I'm also going to pay attention to the fact that life is calling me to live my hero's journey. One hero's journey after another. When we say yes to the world and we engage in the simple tasks of life with all we've got while daring to give our best on these trips, these quests in service to the world, we feel great. And guess what? That feels a lot like celebration. Accept yourself, practice gratitude. Go out and celebrate as you give us all you got heroically. Those are my top three favorite books, celebration style, as always. 500 books distilled into 500 philosopher's notes and then distilled into 50. We got, you know, 500 plus philosopher's notes. We've got 50 Optimum 101 classes, including the Modern Hero 101 and then a ton of other goodness. If you're feeling to go to Optimize Me, sign up for that free two week trial. And yeah, follow the whole program here with the top threes at Optimize Me. Top three. If you're not ready for the two week trial yet, fantastic. Get a few free notes, dip your toe in the water, it's warm, you're gonna enjoy it. Let's go.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. 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, etc. 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.