Optimizing for the Modern Hērō 101 (Intro)

Foreign. You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today, I'm thrilled to be chatting about Optimizing for the Modern Hero. Optimizing for the Modern Hero. How to harness your soul force to create the strength for two so we can change the world together. The modern Hero. I was inspired to create this class after a dear friend of mine, Matt McCall, who happens to help run a venture fund called the Pritzker Group. And he also happens to be a dear friend and mentor and personal investor in Optymyze, whose license plate is karma, which I think is perhaps his coolest attribute. He reached out to me and said, hey, we'd love to have you come out and do a talk for us as part of a weekend event doing for 60 of our portfolio CEOs. I said, Matt, I appreciate the invitation. You know, I'm a hermit. You taught me to say no to anything other than my one thing. We actually have a plus one on some wisdom from Matt, and that's just not what I do. But then he proceeded to say, look, what I want you to do is teach a class, basically, or give a talk that we can call Optimizing for Superheroes. Optimizing for Superheroes. And help these CEOs who are doing such great work really go to the next level. I said, that actually sounds really, really cool. I had some ideas of how I would integrate Optimus and the idea of superhero that we'll talk about in this class. And I said, yes. I never say yes to anything. I rarely leave Ojai. I am a true hermit. But I said yes. And then a few weeks later, I realized, you know what? This isn't quite it. I focus on my one thing of serving you as profoundly as I can. And I've got a very clear sense of what I do rhythmically day in and day out. So I called up Matt. He graciously accept my change in plans. And then he followed up shortly after and said, look, I talked to our partners. We really want you to come out and teach this. It's all about Arete. And again, how do we help these CEOs go to the next level? Long story a little shorter. I wound up saying, okay, let's do this. Optimizing for Superheroes was the basic idea for the talk that I planned to give. And then I realized, well, let's actually use this as an opportunity to distill my absolute best stuff for these individuals in this talk who you know, the CEOs who are performing at a very high level entrepreneurially and use this as an opportunity to distill the best of the ancient wisdom, the modern science, the practical tools that I'm so passionate about, and combine the idea of optimizing to become a hero, two Greek ideas. We'll talk about optimus and plus heroes and have fun sharing that. So that's the origin story for this class. Again, optimizing for the modern hero. As always, we have 10 big ideas. Let's take a quick look at each of them and then we'll jump in. So our first big idea is optimus plus heroes equals soul oxygen. So when we talk about optimizing for the modern hero, I want to bring this back to ancient times. So I want to talk about the Greek ideas of optimus and hero. So, pop quiz. Do you know the ancient etymology of the word optimize? It's optimus, which means the best. And do you know the ancient etymology of the word hero? In ancient Greek, it wasn't tough guy or killer of bad guys. The word hero, which was spelled with a really cool line over the E, n the o. As we modernized, it meant protector. Again, not tough guy, but protector. And a hero's secret weapon was love. They had the strength for two, and they were willing to do the work necessary to create that strength. And I'm going to connect that to modern science and Abraham Maslow, who tells us that what one can be, one must be. This impulse to become the best version of you in service to others is fundamental to our existence. We'll talk about that from his model. Now I'm going to challenge you throughout the class. What's the best version of you look like? And how do you use that desire and impulse to be the best version of you in service to the world, such that we can change the world together by being the change we want to see one person at a time, aggregated and compounded over the world makes a huge difference. That's our first big idea. Just starting small. The second big idea, we're going to go back to ancient Greece and talk about telos, eudaimon and arete telos. Aristotle said that we are teleological. Human beings need to have targets, which is what telos literally means. He also said that the ultimate target of a happy human being and of a hero is eudaimonia. To have a good soul eudaimon. And they actually call that individual a eudaimon, one who has a great relationship with their soul. Who has unleashed and harness their soul force. And then we'll talk about how do you do that? The Greeks are very clear and so is modern science, by the way. And we'll connect the two together. You live with virtue, specifically with Arete, when moment to moment to moment, it's not a once in a while thing. The hero shows up right this second from a mundane perspective, kind of the modern hero. Emerson and I often talk about firefighters. He loves firefighters and he knows that when they get the call, they respond within 60 seconds. They're always ready. The hero is ready. They don't know when they're going to need to use that strength they've cultivated. We need to be that as we aspire to be modern heroes. Again, we're going to talk connect this back to modern science as well. We'll get into that when we get into it. And then the third big idea is the big three. We want to go from the abstract, high level orientation and philosophical concepts into the very practical. So when we talk about the best version of you, I like to distill it into the big three. Freud told us that to be human is essentially to combine work and love. Right? So work and love. But I like to say you're gonna have a hard time showing up fully in your work or in your love if you don't have energy. So our big three is energy, work and love. We're gonna talk about the best version of you, the heroically best version of you. Energetically. We're work wise and love wise. We're going to talk about how you can create daily habits to make that a more consistent reality for you and how you can get rid of the things that aren't working. We'll talk about artes and kryptonites, those things that are pulling you back. And we've got to remember that the fastest way to optimize, somewhat paradoxically, is to stop doing the stupid things that are getting in the way of you expressing the best version of you. Because that best version of you is already there. We just need to harness it, we need to direct it and get rid of the things that are in the way. But it's not like we need to create that best version of you. We just need to invite it to the party more consistently and harness it such that we can give that soul force to the world more consistently. This is officially the longest introduction ever. The fourth big idea. We're then going to break down energy, work and love into specific ideas. So energy, we're going to talk about eating Moving, sleeping. Then we're going to talk about breathing and focusing and recovering the core fundamentals that we need to honor if we're going to build this strength for two again. We're all going to have different constraints in terms of what our upper possibilities are, what the best expression of us looks like. We've got to know that yours is going to be different than mine. But ultimately our best, as Ellen Langer, the great Harvard psychologist, says, who studies the psychology of possibility, our best is unknowable. You simply don't know. You don't want to put limits on what the best can look like. You want to get curious. But what would the best version of me look like if I actually showed up moment to moment to moment? But it starts with the energy. That's our fourth big idea. The fifth one is work. We're going to talk about deep work versus shallow work. Then we're going to talk about having a wildly important goal. You need to have a really, really profound yes to something or some things in your work life so you can easily say no to the distractions. I just was studying Yuval Noah Harari's newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and he threw out a stat. Americans check their phones 8 billion times per day. 8 billion times per day. That's not going to get us there. We'll talk about that and having a wildly important goal so we can shut out the distractions and focus on what matters. Then we'll talk about Peter Drucker's idea of first things first, second things not at all. We'll integrate that into our work and live and work heroically. Our sixth big idea is heroic love. Barbara Fredrickson has something called Love 2.0, a great book on the science of expanding our sense of love beyond kind of love 1.0, of our family and our friends and our very intimate group that we say we love. She says you need to have love 2.0 and extend that basically to everyone, all of humanity. I'm going to propose we want to have love 0.0. So love 2.0, right? We want to have love 1.0, optimize our relationships with our family and friends, et cetera. We'll talk about how to do that, but also with ourselves. It all starts with ourselves. Ayn Rand, who isn't known as the most compassionate human on the planet, but she said to say I love you, you first must know how to say the I. You have to have a strong sense of I. Then will connect it to one of the most compassionate teachers on the planet who talks about self compassion and how we can cultivate that. And then we'll have love 3.0, which I'm going to call heroic love, which is love for everything and everyone in the world. And using that as fuel, using our obstacles as fuel for our heroic journeys. So we've got energy work in love in detail. Then our seventh big idea is heroic algorithms. We're going to talk about AI versus iq and then we're going to talk about making your best. Your new baseline algorithms is as again Yuval Noah Harari says the number one concept of the 21st century. We taught a whole class, we've taught a whole class based on all these ideas. This is kind of a best of, right? But Harari says this is the number one concept of the 21st century. Ray Dalio, the billionaire incredibly powerful human being tells us that this is the number one language to learn the 21st century how to write algorithms. Psychologists tell us this is the fastest way to boost our well being to write algorithms. If so, we're going to talk about how we can create heroic algorithms. We're going to talk about willpower and the fact that it out predicts iq. Willpower out predicts IQ by a factor of two for academic performance. Think about that for a second. If you knew someone's willpower and you knew their IQ and you wanted to know which one would predict their academic performance, go with willpower. It's twice as effective at predicting their performance academically and basically in every other area of their life. But get this, willpower heroes play offense, not defense. They use their willpower, which is finite. In my interview with Roy Baumeister, who wrote the book on willpower, the scientist studying this, he says this. You got to play offense. You got to use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. Well, what is that? Those are algorithms. That's what I call AI Ancient intelligence. Artificial intelligence is cool, but ancient intelligence is your basal ganglia. It's 500 million years old. Mammals developed their basal ganglia 500 million years ago to basically groove behavioral patterns. So you do the same thing consistently. When it works, we got to know what works, do more of it, and we got to know what doesn't work and do less of it. Ancient intelligence. We're going to talk about that in depth. Our eighth big idea is memento Mori. So I have a Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic inspired coin. Memento mori. If you ask my 6 year old son Emerson what this means, he'll say, that's the death coin. Remember death. Memento mori. Why do we want to remember death? Well, we want to remember death because on the other side of the coin, we have a Marcus Aurelius quote, which is, you can leave life right now. You can leave life right now. Which means today's the day. Right now is the moment for us to step into our highest potential. What are you waiting for? As we become more and more embodied with that best version of us and that modern hero version of us, we appreciate that today's the day. Then we have fun creating what I call masterpiece days. If you could have a blank piece of paper and put in your ideal day, your masterpiece day, what would it look like? I'm gonna suggest you think really hard about that, and you start with your big three. Energy or work love. Put those into your day as your big rocks. The first things that go in such that when you execute those things on a daily basis, it's really hard to have a bad day. And it's really exciting to see how you spiral up into the next best version of you. So memento mori leads us to carpe diem. Today's the day which leads us to masterpiece days. We'll unpack that. The ninth big idea is heroic. Courage plus antifragile. Buoyant confidence plus hero mantras. So courage. Go back to Aristotle in his Ethics. He's the one who told us that eudaimonia is the highest good. It's the summum bonum. It's the whole reason for being alive, right? How do you achieve that? You live with virtue, or arete, the number one virtue he teaches in his ethics, courage. Courage comes from the Latin word for heart, right? So courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. Just like your heart pumps blood to your arms and legs and your organs, courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. We're going to talk about cultivating that. We're going to talk about being antifragile rather than fragile or robust. You get stronger when life challenges you. We're going to talk about being buoyant, which is a combination of. Of levity and gravity. We don't want to fly away into silliness or into mania. We want to be grounded. We want to be buoyant, as Barbara Fredrickson puts it. Then we want to be confident. Not that what we aspire to do is always going to work out. That's not confidence. What confidence is, is intense trust con fidere. Intense trust in what? Not in success. Per Se but in your own strength to deal with whatever life throws at you. Then we'll talk about some hero mantras such that we can show up with that courage, the confidence, the buoyancy, et cetera. Our 10th big idea is whoop plus wigs plus wins. We're gonna talk about the science of making your dreams a reality. Gabrielle Oettingen. I was gonna say Barbara Fredricksen, but Barbara Gabriel Oettingen is one of the world's leading researchers studying the the science of how to make your dreams a reality, which in itself is pretty cool. And what she discovered is it's not enough to throw up a vision on a board and get excited about it and dream about it coming to fruition. She says you need to rub that vision up against reality. You've got to see what obstacle is going to get in the way. And that creates a necessity to act. It makes you more likely to take action and to get the things you want. She has a process called whoops that I talk about a lot in these different classes. We want to build our whoop muscle such that we use this science, this technology, this real superpower for the little things and for the big things. You know your wish, you know the outcomes you want to experience. Then you look at the obstacles and you make a plan. We're going to connect that to wildly important goals and then the wins. The what's important now. What am I going to do now to move me in the direction of the big goals that I have in my life? You do that, you're going to experience joy on a consistent basis, which is what Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile calls the progress principle. Again, we'll unpack that some more. All of which leads us to the 11th big idea. Usually we have 10 big ideas. Champions do more. 11th big idea is relentlessly chasing optimists. We're going to combine Vince Lombardi and Confucius. Vince Lombardi tells us, gentlemen, we need to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing we're never going to catch it. But in the process we'll catch excellence. And Confucius tells us that you need to approach your life in self mastery and living with arete like you're chasing someone you're afraid of missing. I'm going to propose that that someone is optimist. It's the best version of you. You need to relentlessly chase it, knowing you're never going to catch the best version of you. But having fun making it a game, moment to moment to moment, when going to cultivate emotional stamina is a phrase from my coach, Phil Stutz, emotional stamina. Which basically means the worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to running the algorithms. That has changed my life, making that distinction of, oh, I don't feel like it, Fantastic. Today's the day that I make sure I do those things I've decided are important to me. And then he says, you need to embrace the endlessly evolving process. You're never going to be exonerated from doing the hard work of optimizing your life to be a modern hero. And that might be the core root of suffering. Thinking you should already be enlightened and you should already be there is one of the hallmarks of making sure that you don't ever, quote, get there. So you're never going to be exonerated. You need to relentlessly chase Optimus. And what happens when we do that? We harness our heroic soul force. We're able to give that good soul to the world as modern heroes. That, as I said, is officially the longest introduction. Let's jump in. I'm excited to share more. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. It.