Optimal Living 101 - The Immersion Reboot!

Hey guys, how are you? This is Brian. I am really excited to share a new class I'm teaching, optimal living 101, the immersion reboot. Super fired up about that. As many of you know, I taught a class called optimal living 1012 and a half years ago. It was amazing. We had 500 students enroll live and over the last two plus years we've had another 2,500 students take the class. The response has been amazing and I've gotten a lot of requests to kind of update it and teach a new class or optimal living102 or something like that. And I'm finally doing that. Super excited. I want to give a context for people who might not be familiar with my work yet, or just kind of a recap even for those who are about what I've done leading up to this. And then we'll also talk about the details of what the class will look like, a high level, etc. But the quick story is 5 years ago I was running a business, decided to sell it when I realized I really wanted to immerse myself in studying life and give myself a PhD in how to live. And wound up selling that company Zods to a company called Gaiam and spent the better part of four years really immersed in studying, teaching, writing, etc. And, and I started off by saying look, I want to give myself a PhD in how to live a PhD in optimal living. There wasn't a program that integrated everything I wanted to study from the old school philosophy and spirituality to modern day positive psychology and all the modern day gurus and creativity and health and fitness and business and all the stuff that I think goes into creating an extraordinary life in the 21st century. And I figured I'd give myself a Master's when I had distilled 100 of my favorite Optimal Living books into philosopher's notes. And we covered everything from again the old school classics like Marcus Aurelius and the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and Ralph Waldo Emerson, some extraordinary teachers, up to the modern day positive psychologists who are proving the science of well being and happiness. We talked about and covered everything from health and Nutrition to the the Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer, Getting Rid of Procrastination, a great book, the Now Habit, the Monk who sold his Ferrari 100 Great Books. And the idea was I'd get a Master's when I had read these books, distilled them into six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s and created a profitable business doing that. So that was Philosopher's Notes. Moved to Bali for over a year, just immersed myself in this stuff. Really, really cool. Then the dissertation was two things. One, a book that I wrote called A Philosopher's Notes, which is where I distilled a hundred of my favorite big ideas and what I discovered in the process of doing these notes. And I literally pulled out a thousand of my favorite big ideas from these great books. Those sections of the books that you underline and you asterisk and you kind of write all over, they can really change your life. There were a thousand of those big ideas in these hundred notes. And what I saw was that they kind of conveniently fell into 10 different optimism, purpose, self, awareness, goals, action, energy, wisdom, courage, love and entheos. And basically wrote this book with a hundred of my favorite big ideas in those 10 different principles. And that class was called Optimal Living 101. It was awesome and had a great time teaching it. And then I kind of got into building a business and in theos we created the academy and we produced over a hundred different classes from some extraordinary teachers. And I also started working on a second volume of Philosopher's Notes. I've now created another 84 of these notes. I'll have a hundred done sometime in the next hour. Months. Really excited about that. And again went deeper into all the things we know about the science of well being, all the positive psychology stuff that I'm so passionate about, more modern day stuff, a lot of health and nutrition and creativity, all that good stuff. So another hundred notes done, another two and a half years of kind of living and embodying these things. And now I'm really, really excited to integrate that all into this class. Optimal living 101. We're going to do it over a five day immersion. The basic class is really, really simple. Sharing my favorite stuff, the best stuff that I know. But it all comes down to a few simple ideas. The first thing is we've got to understand what we're all about and what we're passionate about. The ultimate currency in life, as Tal Ben Shohar calls it, Tal Ta, the most popular class in Harvard's history. He says the ultimate currency is happiness. That's why we do everything we do right. So you might want to do this or do that, but ultimately why you're doing it is you want to be happy, you want to feel like you're flourishing. Or the Greeks said you want to feel eudaimonia, that's the word that they had for it. It's not just feeling good It's a feeling, a sense of true happiness and flourishing that you're actualizing, as Abraham Maslow would have said. And if you want to experience this eudaimonia, you've got to live with arete. The Greek said arete directly translates as virtue or excellence. And it basically means doing your best moment to moment to moment. I like to think of it as in any given moment you have something that you're capable of doing. There's this line right here. Now, if you're actually doing this, if you're actual, there's a gap between what you're capable of doing, what you're actually doing. That's where regret and anxiety and disillusionment exist. When you close that gap, when you're living with arete in moment to moment to moment, what you're doing is what you're actually capable of being and doing. The regret and anxiety and disillusionment, where do they exist? They go away, they evaporate when you close that gap, when you live with arete, doing your best and expressing yourself most fully, moment to moment to moment to moment. Now that's cool, but how do you do that? Well, I think it comes down to living with a clear sense of intention. You got to know who you are and what you want and impeccability. You've got to actually do that which you know is best for you. Intention plus impeccability equals arete, which leads to happiness. Pretty simple equation. And I actually have a tattoo of this symbol for impeccability on my right wrist. A whole other conversation we'll get into another time. Now that's nice. Happiness. Okay, live with arete, intention and impeccability. But give me some more detail. Well, this is where the ten principles come in. And again, we've got optimism. All the great teachers tell us we've got to get in control of our minds. If we've got little gremlins running around up there, it doesn't matter how passionate we are, we're going to be inconsistent and we're not going to flourish to the degree we can. Now, when we get control of our minds more, we realize we kind of move from victim to creator. We realize, what am I here to do? What is it that I'm here to do? What's our purpose? What's our highest goal? How do we really give ourselves to the world? Well, that requires a deep level of self awareness. And we're going to talk about how to develop that and how to identify your purpose and of course, how to Strengthen your mind. And then when you kind of come through that, you get to a point where you need to set goals. Happy people have goals. What are you passionate about? How are you connecting your purpose with your goals? And then how do you connect that to action where you're actually taking action consistently, you're getting things done. We're going to talk about how to set goals, why goals are important, and we're going to talk about how to take action. I'm going to share some of my best kind of practices that I use and that I teach to get things done with David Allen stuff of getting things done to just simple practices that really work so we can feel like we're really, really getting the most out of our days and obviously as a result out of our lives. Now it's going to be difficult to take action if we're having a hard time getting out of bed. I like to say we've got to optimize our energy. So we'll talk about that as well. Then we want to live with wisdom. Our life is our classroom approach. Every moment as an opportunity to learn. That's always a good thing. Courage, one of my favorite words comes from the French and Latin words for heart. Courage is the virtue that basically brings life. It vitalizes all the other virtues, just like your heart vitalizes your arms and your legs and everything else and all the other organs in your body. Courage is extraordinarily important. We're going to talk about how to move through our fears and how to really, really go toward those things that are so important to us. I'll share again some of my favorite best practices there. Then there's a lot of our relationships and really making sure that we're showing up powerfully there. And finally, entheos, Two little Greek words again. Entheos God within the root of the word enthusiasm, which when you live with these 10 principles, you shine with a radiant enthusiasm that you only have when you're in integrity with your highest virtues. You could say when you're living with arte, you experience that enthusiasm. The enthusiasm, the happiness. So that's a super quick look at Optimal Living 101. I want to get this done in less than 10 minutes. I know you're busy. December 3rd, immersion week. I'm really excited, as you can probably tell, and I cannot wait to share with you. Hope you join us and I'm really excited to help you kind of wrap up 2012 and create the greatest year of your life heading into 2013. Let's have some fun. Alright. Hope to see you soon. See ya.