Optimal Living 101 - A Quick Look at My Creative Process

What is up? I am recording this video after getting off the phone with Juan, who is the COO of Mindvalley. I just posted this. We just got off the phone, talked about a bunch of different stuff, including the fact that Philosopher's Notes is going to be launched in Spanish by the end of the year. Yeah, stoked. But the reason for this recording. Let's get a cameo of my wife, darling. There she is, eating, working. Okay. The reason for this video is that Juan emailed me because he wanted to chat about a creative challenge he had about launching something really cool in the Spanish market with Mindvalley, and he wanted to just kind of tap my brain for some ideas. So we just had an awesome conversation, and I shared with him some of my creative process, and I told him I'd create a video for it that I would share with him. And I figured we could just make this for everybody. So I just got back from my honeymoon. Yeah. Three weeks at health boot camp and visualizing my ideal life. And I also just had a really, really beautiful creative surge where I came up with the product for optimal living 101. I want to give you a quick sneak peek at what that process looked like for me. So, first of all, I've been working on this forever. This is my passion. For the last almost 10 years, I've been studying the truths of optimal living, decided to give myself a PhD in how to live. The masters came when I had distilled 100 of my favorite books into summaries, and that's Philosopher's Notes. So anyway, the dissertation is when I bring it all together into a meaningful philosophy for the 21st century. We call that optimal living 101. Now, I started journaling and kind of getting clarity on when am I going to get this done by right, and started playing with some ideas. And I journal all the time, so I actually journaled every day. I've gone in phases where I've done it every day and then not for a while. And now I'm doing it for just maybe once a week. Now I'm doing it every day again. It's a huge practice. It's as important to me as meditation, training hard and intense exercise, eating well, and creating every day. My journaling is a ritual that I honor every day. This brings me close to who I am. Every morning, I write down my highest goal, which is part of the program I'm launching. My highest goal is to connect to and express the divine within me and to live with love, joy, appreciation, all my values. And then I Write down what I'm going to do to get there. I'm going to work hard and I'm going to crush my creative goals every day, blah, blah, blah. More on that later. For now, what I want to share is how I got from the basic idea to a more refined one. So what I did is I started journaling. I knew my 10 principles. If you've watched my 10 principles video, you know that there are 10 principles to my philosophy. I'll link to that so you can see where that is too. But I've got 10 principles. So each of the principles has its own basic things to them, right? All the big ideas, a thousand big ideas from 100 notes fall into 10 principles. So then I wanted to start checking it out and seeing like, well, let me just get deeper into it, right? Let me see which ideas fall into which principles and really start fleshing it out. So I did some really what I call ghetto tastic journaling, you know, where I just mapped out roughly, okay, Here are the 10 principles. I'm thinking about it. Make sure my subconscious mind knows what I want it to be thinking about optimism. Okay, cool. So optimism, kind of mapping out some things. Okay, here's a big idea. Learns helplessness, locus of control, empowerment versus disempowerment. Buddhists say this, Stoics say this. Viktor Frankl says this. Stephen Covey says this. Realize it's kind of hard to read. Other psychologists say this. Byron Katie says this. And I got a bunch of other ideas, right? This is a really simple mapping out first phase. And I'm like okay, well energy, that's one of the principles. What do I have to say about energy? And I realized, okay, well there's exercise, that's one of the components to energy. And Here are about 10 ideas roughly for that. Then there's nutrition, which is important for me. There's about 10 ideas there. Rejuvenation is huge for our energy. There's another 10 ideas. And then I've got money, I put money into energy. We've got to have a consistent flow. It's not its own thing for me. It's a byproduct of all this other optimal living, but it's an important part of our energy. So then I've got a bunch of ideas on energy and then I keep on doing that for each of my principles. I've got purpose and self awareness. I journal on that. You can see how kind of messy it is and just free flowing and totally mind mapped, crossed out all that stuff. I've got goals and Action. That's another important part. I've got wisdom, right? And I've got, you know, 20, 30, no, 20 things almost in the wisdom section. Love. That's an important idea. Cool. So you get the idea. Courage, spirit. I go through that and then I'm mapping out what am I going to do when I'm just churning on the ideas. Now here's another day that starts with my highest goal. And I've also got a number one now goal. I'm drawing the logo we're going to create. So I'm just impressing it in my consciousness, letting my subconscious mind know this is important to me. Start thinking about this. Help me out here. My highest goal, my number one now goal. Here's another day. Okay, I'm thinking about it some more. Oh, wait, now I can see that I'm going to have about 16 CDs. Once I looked through and saw how much content I had in different sections. Now I draw this every day. Again, whenever I get into something, I constantly doodle and draw and journal. So now I'm looking at it, I'm like, okay, optimal living 101. Your life optimized. I'm going to have CDs. I'm going to have a guidebook. I want to have this journal. Literally this exact journal. I want to have as part of the package. This is what I use. We can get a volume discount on that and throw it into the package. Wouldn't that be awesome? Then I've got. And that just came to me as I was journaling this. And then I've got the book that I want as well. Then I've got a timeline. What am I going to do? May, June, July. I'm going to be in Bali in August. When am I going to do what I'm journaling, journaling, journaling. So anyway, I'm doing that and I keep on doing it. And then I'm like, you know what? I need to get these notes into a more crystallized form. That's my next step. So then I went and I got the framework. I've got the intro cd. I've got optimism, actually, for a while I thought I'd put energy first. And I changed my mind and I'm going to put it down here. But I've got two CDs on optimism. I got purpose and awareness. And then I've got. Okay, the first thing I did was let me map out on a clean piece of paper what the introduction CD will look like. Oh, cool. So I'm going to talk about my background and why I'm so excited about this. Then I'm going to talk about how ultimately we want in theos, we want to connect to the highest within us. Then I've got Arete, I've got this idea of clear intention, impeccability. Then I've got my 10 principles. I've got to map those out. Then I'm going to talk about the CDs that are coming. I. I've got themes. Diligence, patience, persistence. This isn't about quick fixes, this is about consistency on the fundamentals. I'm doodling here, right? So this is my next step. Now I can record the introductory CD just on this. This is enough for me to riff for an hour. Then I've got optimism. So I went back to my notes and I saw what I had for optimism, but I wanted to polish it. So then I came here and I said, well, how would it flow? Well, here's the intro. Here's how I'd kick off the cd. Here's what it would look like. I'm going to start by talking about what optimism isn't learned helplessness. I go off on that. I've got some stories, okay, I'm going to tell this and that. Then I'm going to come over to Locus of Control. Then that's going to weave into the three Ps of optimism. Then I'm going to talk about stoics, Responsibility, Proactiveness of Habit number one from Stephen Covey, the Buddhists and what they have to Say, and a couple other books. Cool. Well, you know what? That's a cd, the second CD for Optimism. That's about an hour right there. I'm going to talk about some other cool stuff. And as you can see, I took this and I just made it neater and I made it cooler, right? So I've got emotional fuel gauges, I've got other really cool ideas I'm excited about. Same thing with purpose. And then I basically committed to doing one of these a day. And each day I finished one, I would cross it out. This didn't used to be highlighted and I watched it get highlighted, which was super inspiring for me, right? Just got giddy. Day by day, step by step, polishing it. So now I've got all of them and I got momentum. Just felt so good. I didn't do anything that day. I did my meditation, my journaling, my training, and then I did this. Didn't allow myself to get distracted until I created this one thing. Now, it only took me about an hour to do, maybe two hours to do, but it felt incredibly good. And now I'm focused on this, so my subconscious mind is helping and it's awesome. So now I've got my self awareness. I've got all the journal exercises. The best journal exercises I know are in self awareness. That was really fun to figure out. I got goals and I figured out this really cool way to tie goals in action. And just again, I go back to my journal and I kind of sketch it out. I talk to Alexandra about it and just keep on fleshing the ideas out. I've got exercise, I've got my nutrition, I've got every part of it is mapped out. So I've got this mapped out and now I could just record it. But what I'm going to do is I'm finishing my philosopher's notes, TVs to rehearse to get even clearer. Then I'm going to do 101 optimal living videos, which will release later in the year to practice this even more. By the time I'm done with that, I'm going to be ready to rock this and I'm going to do the best work of my life and I'm going to get this done done within the next three months before I head to Bali. So that's a quick overview for Juan and for everybody else. I hope you dug it. I'm also going to do a behind the scenes where I'm going to spend a lot of time showing my creative process and hopefully you'll get a lot out of it. So there you go. Hope you dug it. Juan. Kick some butt. So excited about philosophers of Spanish. Everybody else, rock on. Talk to you soon. Bye.