Overview of My Philosophy

What is up? This is Brian checking in with another little video. So I'm at the morning desk, office, if you will. And I wanted to share something that I'm working on. Let's see the best way to do that. Let's just kind of get a view here. We've got optimism, which I shared before, which is one of my 10 principles I'm developing in my philosophy. Got a couple of friends over here, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two inspirations. I love walking by and seeing these guys. And I'm also working on. We're going to do a series of philosopher's notes on some of the greatest people ever. So imagine profiles in the top 10, top 25, maybe even top 50 of some of the greatest people. Of course, Franklin and Jefferson will be in that group. And what I'll do is go to a great book on each of them. Biography or autobiography? Also got Ben's autobiography right there. And pull out the big ideas. So again, six page PDF, 20 minute MP3. And just really quickly, let's get inspired by these great people. But that's not why I turn this on. Wanted to share the philosophy that I'm developing right now. And why don't I start from scratch here? So here's the big idea. So I've done a thousand big ideas and 100 different notes. You've been studying this now for the better part of 10 years, and the last two years exclusively, right? Right. And what I've learned is that we all want happiness, right? Pretty much happiness. Call it happiness, fulfillment, greatness, prosperity, abundance, all these different things, bliss, joy, et cetera. All synonyms for the basic concept of happiness. Right. And early in my studies, I came across an idea from Greek philosophy called arete. And the classic Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle said that, that if you want happiness, right, you've got to live with arete. It's a Greek word that directly translates as excellence or virtue. But it has a deeper meaning, something closer to striving to live at your highest potential, living at your highest potential, moment to moment to moment. So it's kind of like uber excellence, essentially doing your best moment to moment to moment. And the way I like to say is if this is what you're capable of, this is what you're actually doing. And there's a gap between those two. That's where regret and anxiety and all that depression and unfun stuff shows up. And it's almost like it's nature's way of helping us be our best. And when we actually collapse this gap and are capable in our actual or one like that. We feel bliss. We feel radiantly alive. We feel fully expressed. It's a great thing. So this is an interesting thing to think about. And the Greeks talked about it in the sense of arete. Now if I say go out and live with arete, that actually has pretty deep meaning, you know, and live with deep virtue and be your highest expression of yourself. But we need a little bit more detail to it. So then I break it down a little bit deeper and I talk about something that's a compass, if you're wondering. And that is the Sanskrit symbol for the third chakra. I have a tattoo on the inside of my right wrist, my only tattoo, which represents this symbol here, which I'll get to in a moment. So we have intention, right? Pardon that intention, which is the compass. We've got to know who we are. We've got to know what we're doing in this world, how we're going to show up powerfully, and we've got to just do it, right? So that's impeccability. We got to do our best moment to moment to moment. And this symbol is a Sanskrit symbol for the third chakra. So it's essentially the center of our third universe, where all of our power comes from our authenticity, our courage, our confidence, our impeccability. So if you look at great people, really consistently happy people, they have a clear intention of who they are, what their values are and what their plan is to how they're going to show up in the world, right? And they show up consistently and they do what needs to be done. You can throw anyone into this model, whether it's a Tiger woods going to be the greatest golfer in the world, right? And he hits more putts than anybody else. He's willing to train harder than anybody else, or an Obama or, right, who's committed to his ideals and to giving himself most fully to the world. That's a pretty clear intention he's had for quite a while. And he's willing to work harder at that than nearly anyone else in the world, right? You put the two together, you get arete, you get happiness. So again, those two principles are cool, but that's not the end of the story. So then what I've come up with is a system of 10 principles that I've seen again and again and again and again across all of the great literature and the hundred notes I've done, from Buddha and Lao Tzu and Confucius to Nietzsche and Rumi and Ayn Rand to the modern teachers like Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie and the positive psychologists. Everybody's saying the same thing. They're all talking about this, and then they talk about, from my perspective, 10 different principles, right? So what I want to do really quickly, and this is going to be really quickly because we're already five minutes into it, is look at those 10 principles, and then I'm going to go into more detail like I did on optimism for each of them. So where do we start? We start with number one. Number one is optimism, which I pointed out the 10 big ideas within this concept. But it all starts with optimism. If we can't control our minds, we're in trouble. If we're constantly coming from a victim mentality, we're going to have a really difficult time living our greatest lives, living with consistent happiness, et cetera. So optimism, we've got to get our optimism on, number one. And again, there's 10 ideas. We can talk about optimism for a weekend, right? Certainly hours, easily. But let's move on to principle number two. So once you've created this sense of optimism, you realize, wow, you can create your ideal life, you have a sense of optimism. Then the question is, what do you want? What's your vision? Most people have a really difficult time answering the question of what they want because they just don't know. Haven't spent any time, spend most of our time envisioning our vacations to escape the jobs we hate because we lack the third principle, which is self awareness. You know, it's the classic Socrates, ancient Greek again, know thyself. So what do you want to see? I mean, who are you rather like, and what do you want to bring to the world? What are your deepest impulses, your deepest desires? What are your signature strengths? Positive psychology talks about that a lot. Martin Seligman, Authentic happiness, all that good stuff. So the idea again is you need to have control of your mind. You got to be optimistic. Then what's your vision? As Stephen Covey says in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, everything is created twice. You need a blueprint for your life. What do you want to see? If everything went perfectly, what would your life look like? Well, that's tough to answer unless you have self awareness. So get your self awareness on. Then we get out of the abstract, and I realize I'm going ridiculously quickly here, but I'm seeing if I could do this in under 10 minutes. The fourth principle is goals. We've got to have goals, that brings it down into reality a little bit more. Right out of the abstract into more practical. So goals, goals, goals. We can talk about that more. Then the fifth principle that I see everyone talking about is action. It's not enough to have goals or a vision or even optimism and deep self awareness. You've got to just do it at the end of the day, right? None of this matters without that. Then we draw a little happy face person who's already radiant, just creating a greater life for themselves. And it kind of goes like that. So action. And then I say, you're going to have a hard time taking action consistently and living your highest potential if you have a hard time getting out of bed. We've got to optimize our energy, our physical energy through exercise, nutrition, proper rest, etc. And money kind of falls into that for me. Just circulating wealth, you know, producing more than we're consuming, all that kind of stuff. So that shows up there. Then I draw a circle around all these ideas and I have seven. Wisdom. So this is studying wisdom. It's embracing life, it's seeing life as our classroom. It's things like loving what is. In order to hold the tension between our ideal and in our current reality, we've got to have wisdom. We've got to love where we are. This is Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, Byron Katie's loving. What is all that good stuff? So then I draw a box around those seven principles and we get principle number eight, which is love. None of that matters if we don't live with love. So how do we open ourselves to ourselves first and love ourselves, give that to the world? We can talk about that for hours and hours, and we will in the future. Number nine, which encompasses all this is courage. Courage comes from the same word as heart in Latin and French. Courage is the virtue that pumps blood to all the other virtues. If you don't have courage and you're overwhelmed by fear, none of this matters. You won't have the audacity and the courage to live your ideals. Then around all of this, I have principle zero, which is at the center. And it's the circumference to everything and that's spirit. So there's something bigger than us at work here. And I think that ultimately what we want to do is align with that spirit and let it flow through us. And our obligation is to do that. And we do that through these nine principles. That is a whirlwind tour of my evolving philosophy. This is what we're going to what I'm spending all my energy on now, and I'm just so excited to go deeper into all this with you. We did it in under 10 minutes. Yes. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. And I'd love to hear what you liked about this and what you'd like to see more of too, in the comments. So there you go. Have an awesome day. More soon. Bye.