My Top 3 FOCUSING 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, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize Top three Books of All Time series. Today we've got three of my favorite books on a very important subject. How to focus our minds on what's important now in our work and in our love focusing. We could have also called this the top three on how to conquer our digital addiction. We have a 101 on that. We went with focusing, which is one of our core fundamentals. We've got eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating and prospering. Top three books are these. Number one, Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. We need a philosophy for philosophy for how we deal with our technology. Why? Because that's what's getting in the way of our focusing. Smartphones, technology, social media, etc. Number two book is irresistible by Adam Alter. Talk about why. The number one idea from each of these and then the third is Ryan Holiday's. Stillness is the key. Now as always, we've got a ton of other books that could have made the cut. Again, every single one of these books is distilled into a 6 page PDF 20 minute MP3. Get access to all of them for free. 2 week trial. Optimize me and you get all the 101s. Etc. What didn't make the cut? The Shallows. That's a great book. Indistractable by nerial. Great book. Bored and brilliant. Loved it. The Distraction Addiction. I'm kind of into this subject. Great book. The Distracted Mind. And then we could have gone off on meditation. I've actually got a ton of books on why to meditate. That's another way to train your mind. We'll do a whole other series on top three favorite books on meditation. Anyway, there's a lot of other books that could have made the cut. Check out those notes for now. We are going to have fun with these three books. So Digital Minimalism. Cal Newport Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. This book is fantastic. Cal has become a dear friend, one of the few people that's made it through the Hermitage firewall over the last few years. We covered Deep work as well. Cal wrote two of the books in the top 10 favorite of all time. The only person to get two books into the top 10 deep work and then this one, Digital Minimalism. I love Cal for a number of reasons. Ph.D. from MIT. He's a professor of Computer science at Georgetown. His mind is just incredibly beautiful mind. Just logically precise in articulating what the challenge is and what we need to do about it. So as we discuss in the Philosopher's Note, Cal tells us we need to create a philosophy. We need to have a philosophy in terms of how we're going to deal with our technology. And he proposes Digital Minimalism. My favorite idea from the book is the fact that your soul is fighting in a lopsided arms race. If you haven't watched the Social Dilemma yet, go check that out. The Social Dilemma Netflix documentary. Highly recommended. As Cal says in this book, and we talk about in the note, behind every screen that you interact with like that, there's a thousand engineers thinking about how they can manipulate your attention. And worse than that, they've written some very intelligent artificial intelligence algorithms to shape your behaviors. It's frightening. Your soul is in a battle right now and you need to decide what's most important to you. What are your soul goals, as we like to say in our Optimized Coach program and Mastery series and throughout the conquering digital addiction, etc. And I should say Cal actually taught a class with us. So I was so inspired by this book that I asked Cal, hey, can we work with you to create a 101 class? And he filmed Digital Minimalism 101 with us, which you can get instant access to right now as part of our two free week trial. Free week, two week free trial. Digital Minimalism 101. Where he unpacks all these ideas in an hour long class with the workbook, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we need to know what, what we really want to achieve in our lives. What is important to you? Then use technology as a tool to achieve that. Otherwise you are a tool of the companies whose products you use. You think that you're using Facebook and that's the product. Again, the truism in the industry is no, no, no. If it's free, you're the product. The customer is the advertiser who's paying to mine your attention. And again, that's fine. It is what it is. But you at least need to know that and then choose to mindfully interact with your technology. It's got some great lines in here. Much in the same way that the innovation of highly processed foods in the mid 20th century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools, a sort of social fast food or sugar, are proving to be similarly worrisome. We define digital minimalism in the book. He defines it. We pull it out as one of the big ideas we need to know from the book in our note. Here it is. Define Digital Minimalism. A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else. Right. In Digital conquering Digital Addiction 101, I said look. To sculpt your ideal life or to get hacked. That is the question. What do you want in life? Use the tools rather than be a tool. Right? That's digital minimalism. Great book. It's in my mind a must read. I mean, this is one of the biggest challenges we face, how to manage our technology. Cal articulates it brilliantly. Check out the note, check out the book, check out the class. Next up, Irresistible. Adam Alter, professor, I think at nyu. Yes. NYU Stern School of Business. The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Another great book. Malcolm Gladwell, what do you have to say about it, buddy? As if to prove his point, Adam Alter has written a truly addictive book about the rise of addiction. Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena modern times. Well said. This book is fantastic. You know that the tech titans don't let their kids use the very technology they sell to us, right? Steve Jobs. Hey, what do your kids think about the iPad? Are you kidding me? I don't let my kids use technology like that. Oh, really? Interesting. He makes the point too, that the only industries in which the customers are referred to as users, illegal drugs and technology users. Don't get high on your own supply. He talks about Steve Jobs in that story. Then he talks about addictive personalities. Which leads me to. There you go. You want to add 11 more years to your life. Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day. You add that up. 11 years of your life. That's crazy. And again, we're not saying get rid of all technology. We're saying use it mindfully. Have a philosophy such that you're using these tools in service to your ultimate goals. Now, my number one favorite idea from this is cucumbers and pickles. You can't un pickle a pickle. I read this in the book and I just knew I needed to pull it out. Oh. Did you know that the average office email. How long do you think the average office email goes unread? Adam? Guess ten minutes. The truth is six seconds. Think about that for a moment longer. That's insane. In reality, 70% of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving. Then he does the math. By one estimate, it takes up to 25 minutes to become re. Immersed in an interrupted task. If you're doing something you get interrupted by email. Takes you 25 minutes to get back on track. If you open up just 25 emails a day, evenly spaced across a day, you'll spend literally no time in the zone of maximum productivity. So just so you know, this isn't my number one idea from this, but turn off your notifications on your email on everything other than what's most important. Otherwise you're. You're just hacking your own attention, making it impossible to go deep. Now, cucumbers and pickles is my favorite idea. The basic idea here is once your mind has been pickled, a cucumber going to a pickle can never be unpickled. And once your brain goes from being a cucumber to being pickled by any given addiction. I'm totally addicted to technology, email, news, online, etc. I'm pickled. You can't unpickle a pickle once you've been pickled. Those neural pathways are wired. Now, of course, you can rewire, you know, by choosing different behaviors, but the old wiring system is always there. And Adam tells us the most dangerous point in the recovery of an addict's journey is the moment they think they're fine and that they've fully recovered. Seeing if I can find the. Oh, here we go. I like to again pull out these big ideas and these thoughts. The most dangerous time for an addict, he's quoting someone he interviewed. Is the first moment when things are going so well that you believed you've left the addiction behind forever. Then what do you do? Just a little bit. No big deal. Slippery slope. Boom. You're back in the habit again. Whether that's drugs or alcohol or gaming. He talks about a lot about gaming in here or online news for me, etc. So pickles to cucumbers. I talk about this a lot in our Optimized Mastery series. We talk about it in Conquering Digital Addiction. There we go. Pickle party. What are your pickles? We got to create bright lines so we can change our behaviors. The third in our top three here is Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday. Cal Newport and Ryan Holiday are two of my favorite young living authors. They're both brilliant. We have notes on Ryan Holiday's Obstacle is the Way Ego is the enemy, The Daily Stoic. And now this. Stillness is the key. Phenomenal. Everything Ryan writes is gold, basically. Check out his daily dad email. Check out his daily Stoic email at. I think it's the Daily stoic and the dailydad.com. if I got email, I would read those. When we were closing on our property here in Austin, I was using Alexandra's email. She gets his emails. I checked them out and they're amazing. He's prolific, he's astonishing. And one of the ways he does it is he embraces stillness. So in this book he tells us that, look, stillness is the key. It's the universal principle that all great traditions talk about, whether it's Buddhism or Stoicism or Epicureanism or Christianity or Hinduism, that inner peace, this stillness is the highest good and the key to elite performance in a happy life. The number one idea from this is you need to be able to flip the switch at will to create stillness in your life. Can you? That requires a technology, a philosophy for your technology use to know where you've been pickled and then to create bright lines in it set of behavioral habits that we talk about. Check out the top three on habits and how to do that such that you are able to create a level of what the Greeks called euthymia, which means tranquility. Right now, one of the big themes again in our Optimized Coach program and mastery series is what I call energized tranquility. And in this book, Ryan wrote 16 pages of the best writing of ever read on Winston Churchill, on how Winston Churchill trained his recovery. Winston Churchill worked like a beast. I mean, just an unbelievable. During World War II and his entire life, unbelievably productive and prolific. But he was on where he was off. He took record naps. You know, he would paint an extraordinary amount. He'd work in his yard and garden. He was on, then he was off. He oscillated. As we said, most people are like this. They're never totally on, but they're also never totally off. And that leads to not energized tranquility, but enervated anxiety, burnout. They're always doing more than one thing at once. They're never really on and then they never really recover. Their recovery is checking email again or Instagram. That's not recovery. Recovery is meditation or going for a walk or painting or doing something non tech based on off, on off. Energized tranquility, flipping that switch. That's one of the many things I loved in that book. Digital minimalism. Irresistible stillness is the key. Getting your focus right is unbelievably important. Which again is why we spend so much time in all of These notes and all of the 101s we have on the subject. We have a, you know, conquering digital addiction 101. We've got digital minimalism 101. We've got plenty of productivity 101. We've got meditation 101. We talk about all these ideas and of course we go into deep mastery in our 300 day mastery series coach program. But there you go. Hope you enjoyed. What's the number one thing you know you can do to optimize your focus today? Perhaps check out the notes, get some ideas, check out those notes, get more ideas, check out the one on ones, et cetera. But whatever you do, let's move from theory to practice to mastery today. Learn more. As always, Optimize Me. Get that free two week trial access to all the notes, all the one on ones, all the plus ones. And if you're really feeling it and you want to master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. This is a stack of how I take all that wisdom and all these philosopher's notes 101s and I distill it into one 300 day program. That's our Mastery Series. Learn more about that at Optimize Me Coach. I've got a letter that I wrote there inviting you to the program. 2000 plus people from 70 plus countries have gone through, half of whom are actually coaches or want to become coaches. And the other half are people who just want to master their lives and become the best version of themselves in service to the world. We know science says, we've done empirical research on it. It works. If you work it, you can fundamentally and permanently change your life. These are the seven modules we walk through and we'd be honored to welcome you. Optimize Me Coach. That's all I got. Look forward to sharing more soon. Have an awesome day. See you. 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. 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