PNTV - An Undefeated Mind with Alex Lickerman, MD

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm really excited to have Alex Lickerman, MD, with us. Alex wrote the great book the Undefeated Mind, which has to at least be tied for first with best subtitle ever on the science of constructing an indestructible self. We'll talk about Alex's background some more, but he's a physician and former director of primary care at one of the world's leading universities, the University of Chicago. He's also a practicing Nichiren Buddhist and leader in the Nichiren Buddhist lay organization. Alex, really appreciate you taking the time. I love your book.

Thanks for having me.

And thank you.

All right, so let's jump straight in. Let's start with telling us what Nichiren Buddhism is all about. What's the difference between Nichiren Buddhism and the traditional Buddhism?

Yeah, so it shares a lot of features with traditional Buddhism, but it differs in a couple of key areas. The first is the actual practice of Nichiren Buddhism is chanting. There's a mantra that's chanted called nam myoho renge kyo. And philosophically, it differs a little bit as well. Nichiren Buddhism will argue that enlightenment is something that's possible within this lifetime. And it doesn't define enlightenment as this otherworldly, difficult to attain state that only a few people can achieve. But in fact, it argues that the life state of Buddhahood exists within all of us, and we just need to practice correctly in order to bring it out. And that happiness, which is the goal of Nichiren Buddhism, what they call indestructible happiness, is attainable when you achieve a towering life state, a state that is of mind, I should say, that is indestructible and ultimately resilient. And so that always really appealed to me, and that's sort of why I organized the book according to those Buddhist principles, because the philosophy of Buddhism really is, in a way, designed to support that central notion that resilience is the key to happiness.

That's fantastic. So obviously there's a ton more we can talk about there, but tell us about what it means to have an indestructible self, what it means to have an undefeated mind.

So I think about resilience in two ways. One is the more common way that people think about it is when adversity lands on you. Do you not just survive through that adversity, but do you thrive as a result of that adversity, that's one of the ways I think about it. But it turns out there are some people who are resilient in a sense that when adversity lands on them, they don't actually have the typical diplomatic in their life state or their mood or their affect. They actually just remain calm throughout the entire experience. That also is clearly a way to define resilience. Most of us, however, it takes a long time for us to develop that kind of life state or life force. Really. I think about resilience in that aspect, as when something bad happens, there's a dip, and then how quickly do you come back to your baseline state and maybe even a little bit better than your baseline state as a result of having gone through hardship. And the other side of the resilience coin I think of as how well are you able to persevere when obstacles arise in the course of you pursuing a goal, as they always do, do you get discouraged and quit or just discouraged and have your performance on all the tasks you have to complete on the way to that goal degraded because you're just so unable to believe that you can accomplish it? I guess another term for that would be grit. Sort of what is your passion for long term goals and how well do you handle obstacles when they rise up? That's the other way. I think about an undefeated mind.

I love it. And then you mentioned that you say we don't suffer according to Nichiren Buddhism because we face obstacles. We suffer because we face obstacles we don't believe we can overcome. I love that distinction. So that idea of do we have true trust in ourselves or do we think we're going to get hammered by these obstacles and be overwhelmed by them. Right?

Well, exactly right. That's actually one of the core notions. Because what we call an obstacle we think we can overcome is a challenge as opposed to an obstacle we didn't anticipate and can see no way to overcome. We don't see an immediate solution that feels like something that stops us. I guess the goal certainly in Buddhism, but also I'm arguing in life in general, whether you want to practice Buddhism or not, is to develop a life state and a confidence in yourself so that even when something arises in your way to obstruct your progress towards your goal that you don't at that moment know how to solve, you have the confidence that you will figure out how to solve it and you will push through. And then it feels more like a challenge than an obstacle. And that subtle distinction makes all the difference between emotionally, how you respond to what's sitting in front of you.

That's awesome. Well, obviously you wrote the book on how to go about doing that. I have some ideas I want to explore, but can you give us a high level overview of how we go about cultivating that?

Yeah. So it turns out in the last 10 or 15 years, there has been an explosion of studies in the psychological literature that can be applied to these 2,500-year-old Buddhist ideas about how to develop a resilient self and an undefeated mind. And so, in general, the notion is by leveraging your own psychology in a very clever way, not sort of through willpower or just deciding you're going to gut your way through things, but actually using truths about our psychological makeup to our advantage, we can actually change in very small ways the way we deal with adversity or maintain our grit when obstacles arise that over time add up to the difference between success and failure and thriving and not so. There are very specific techniques that I introduce in the book that are sort of based on the evidence in the psychological literature that I tried to creatively leverage to teach people very concrete and specific techniques for strengthening their resolve, for dealing with psychological pain, for generating gratitude, and on and on.

That's awesome. What's one of your favorite research studies?

One of my favorite research studies has to do with the study that was done by a guy named Philip Zombardo. He did this in the 1960s with medical students. And I say that because you couldn't do the now, but basically he would bring in these students and he would deliver electric shocks to them. And he took half of them and told them, all right, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to continue delivering electric shocks. And you have no choice about continuing on the experiment. But there really is no significance. They're not expecting much to come from the results. And the other group, he said, you have a choice. You can either continue with the experiment and continue to be shocked or not. But you should know that if you do choose to continue, these results will contribute greatly to learning theory and add to knowledge to the world that will help a lot of people. And what he found was the subjects who were allowed to choose whether or not to continue and were allowed or enabled to form a sense of purpose or meaning behind the shocks, that not only subjectively did they report their shocks as being less painful, but through something called galvanic skin response, they actually physiologically found them actually less physically painful. Meaning when we endure pain for a good reason, how we experience that pain is transformed.

That's amazing. And that leads us to your first of your nine principles. Find your mission. So find your why. So can you tell us about why that's so important A and then I'll bring it back to you and how we go about discovering it? Yeah.

So there are numerous studies in many different contexts that argue for the value and effect psychologically on us when we have an important reason why we are doing something. And it's just many, many studies I quote and talk about in the book. But the bottom line, when you have a sense of purpose about something, there's an important reason you're doing something that will lend you a degree of resolve that not having that purpose will not. And so give you a really quick story. My wife one day, who's much tougher than I am, announced that she decided she wanted to climb Mount Rainier. She just loves to challenge herself that way. And Mount Rainier, you may or may not know, is one of the most technically difficult climbs in North America. And she started training, and the way she started training for this was she'd get on one of those stair steppers and do intervals and rather than sort of do intense level for two minutes and then rest for two minutes and intense for two minutes and rest for two minutes, she did an intense level for two hours. This with a 50 pound weight vest on her, because that was going to kind of mimic the conditions she'd be facing on Mount Rainier. And when she actually climbed the mountain, there were many points where she thought to herself, not only is this the hardest thing she's ever done, but she can't do it. And she was going to turn back. She didn't care whether or not she could prove to herself that she was tough or not. And every single time she thought to herself, I'm done. I'm going to turn back. Because it turned out about 50% of the people do that. They do turn back. The thought that stopped her was not about her desire to prove that she was tough enough to do it, but the fact that her brother was with her when she initially decided to do this. She put out the call on Facebook to see if anyone wanted to do it with her. And her brother said, I'll do it with you. And her thought was she couldn't possibly bear to be the reason that he didn't summit the mountain. She was surprised one to discover what the reason was that kept her going. But it was the meaning of that choice, the fact that it would be disappointing him that Actually brought out of her strength she did not know she had. I use that just as an anecdote to tell you that you can translate in life when you're doing something for a reason that feels like the most important reason you could have to do anything, it feels like the most important thing you could do. That gives you a resolve that enables you to continue on through obstacles and achieve things that you never thought you could possibly be able to do.

So inspiring. I just was so moved by that, imagining your wife on the mountain, and that's just so great. My brother invested in our business, and he's just been one of my deepest inspirations as well. So I can feel the parallels there in my own life. So. Good. So that's kind of a micro example of a mission, right? And then the processes we go through to discover the why and then to go commit and to follow through. Can you tell us about the macro sense of finding our mission in life with a capital M kind of thing? You share some great exercises in the book, and I would love for you to reflect on that, because I know so many people struggle with figuring out what their purpose is, what their mission is here on life. Can you shine some light on that?

So I think that, in fact, we all already have a mission with a capital M in archives by the time we are past adolescence. Meaning that there is some single reason that feels like, or single thing that feels like the most important value we could contribute to society or to other people. And I don't think when you go to try to decide what your mission is, your personal mission in life, that it's a matter of making a choice about it. It's a matter of discovering what it already is. Because we're not in charge of what we feel. And what feels like the most important thing we could do is not necessarily something we consciously do choose. So in the book, I talk about exercises to actually not determine your mission, but discover what already feels like the most important value you could create, but also to be able to articulate it at a level that admits many different strategies you could use to complete it. So I'm a physician, and I don't define my mission as attending to the sick. I define my mission as alleviating suffering where I find it. It's broader than just sort of dealing with sick people. And I do that on purpose because I think there are many different strategies you can employ to complete that mission or to contribute, I should say, to that mission. You don't ever really complete it. So, for example, the other way which I try to alleviate suffering is through my writing. And it feels very different, but they both feel important to me because they have that same umbrella of a purpose, if you will. And so one of the exercises I suggest in the book is that if you try to imagine yourself at the very end of your life being given medal by the President of the United States on a national stage, what would you want that medal to be for? What would you want to be known as having spent your life doing the same sort of thing? What would you want to be on your tombstone in terms of what you want your life to have stood for? And by that I mean not what you're necessarily even the most passionate about. The passion comes through the strategy, but what feels the most important to you. That's the mission.

So good. And you share a phrase often throughout the book that I think is at the core of Nichiren Buddhism as well, of just what kind of value can we create in the world? Right. To kind of flip it inside out and say, well, how do I create value in the world? Can you talk to us a little bit about that as well?

Yeah. You know, it's one thing to do something only for yourself, but it just seems to be the way most of us are constructed, that what feels important, it feels important because of the contribution it makes to other people. And that there's also really good evidence that when you are caring for other people, when you are fully compassionate and care about the well being of others, that in itself adds to one's resilience. So you can immediately imagine, say, my wife wanting to be there for my brother, or a parent wanting to be there for their child. And when, say, a child could be imagined to be in danger in some way, the lengths that you would go as a parent to make sure your child is safe because it's someone else you love and care about. That seems to be when we're acting from compassion or from a place where we're trying to create value in some way for others. By value I mean in the broadest sense of the world, the word some type of contribution to their well being or their happiness, that seems to make us more resilient and motivate us more and in fact add to our life satisfaction a way that a life that is purely focused on one's own desires and the satisfaction of those desires does not.

Yeah, that's so cool. And in the book, if I recall correctly, I remember you bringing the exercise together where you had us identify. I think you were talking about a friend's college age son and he was trying to figure out what they wanted to do. And you suggested, well, sit down and Write down the 50 times when you've experienced the most joy. And then that how do you create value and meaning in other people's lives? And then fast forward that that 90 years old, the President handing you a medal. And I found that combination of facets of discovery to be beautiful. Yeah.

In fact, I'll tell you, we here at the University of Chicago, from the book, I created a curriculum that we took students through sort of series of workshops. And that's actually in that module where we talk about finding your mission, how we have people go about doing it. Because if your way in to discovering what you find to be the most important value you could create with your life is through enjoyable experiences, that's sort of a way to be discovering what feels like the most important thing to you. So that's where that came from.

That's so good. A little aside, I almost went to the University of Chicago. I had delayed admission for a year, then I decided to go to Berkeley, but I dropped out. And the only thing I knew I wanted to do because I knew it wasn't for me, and the only thing I knew I wanted to do that gave me joy at that time was to work with kids and coach a little league baseball team in the process. Wound up creating my first business and went through a whole bunch of things and hired the law firm I would have wanted to work for by the time I would have graduated. Just that whole follow your bliss and then find a way to have that bliss be that which gives you an opportunity to give your gifts in greatest service to the world. It's such a beautiful arc. Absolutely. Tell us about the second principle, making a vow and determination.

So the idea here is that when people wish for things or simply desire things, there's some evidence that actually that actually reduces the energy you have for accomplishing them. And the idea of creating a determination that is sort of a promise or a vow to yourself that somehow you're going to accomplish the goal you have in front of yourself seems to be what unleashes people. And the important thing about this is, and it's so common that we don't do this, is that you have to keep your mind open to let the path be something you do not foresee. Because if you are determined to accomplish a goal only in particular steps and sequence that you will allow, that may not be the path to success. In fact, often the path to success is filled with failure along the way, because that failure teaches you what you need to know in order to achieve success, or teaches you that you are not yet the type of person with the type of skills you need to accomplish the goal you've set for yourself. So the notion is really developing the confidence that if you don't know how to get from A to B, you don't have to see that path. The path still may exist, and it's determination that carries you towards discovering the path, Rather than being able from the first step to see all the way the steps you have to take. Because usually what we perceive to be the steps are not at all the steps. I'm sure you yourself.

No, only every time. Yeah. That's so good. Can you. Let's go back to wish versus vow. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?

Yeah. It's fascinating. The studies that looked at this, looked at people who sort of prayed to God and asked for things. And what they found was that that along with interestingly daydreaming about the things you want to accomplish, that there's something about when you hand responsibility to an entity outside of yourself, even in your own mind, you're doing this, it removes the sense of responsibility you feel yourself to accomplish it. There's another great study about this that fascinates me. They brought in a series of plants to nursing home patients. And on one floor, they said to the nursing home patients, this is your plant to take care of. You need to water it, you need to put it by the sun, you need to speak to it lovingly to make sure it thrives. On the other floor, they gave the plants to the same plants to the nursing home residents, but said the nurses on this floor are going to take care of these plants for you. Not only did they discover that the residents who were made to care for the plants themselves improved their functional status, meaning they went from, say, barely being able to transition from the bed to the chair, to being able to walk with a walker, or if they walk with a walker, to being able to toss their walker away. Not only did they have improvement in functional status, they lived longer. There is something about when the responsibility to accomplish something you feel is yours that activates us in an incredible way that not only empowers us functionally, but actually adds to length of life, at least in that population, in a sense. I'm not saying to people, don't pray, but be aware that when, even in a subtle way, you hand responsibility for an outcome to some force outside of yourself, in a sense you are cheating yourself of the ability to be activated in a way that makes it most likely that you will succeed.

So good. And just to go even deeper into that, you talk about. I'll just read what you said because I think it's just so perfect. You say, and when our response to failure is to summon an even greater determination to succeed, vowing to get back up after being knocked down not just once, but again and again each day, and with every obstacle that rises up to challenge us, attacking them as Nichiren. How do you say his name? Daishonin.

Nichiren. Daishonin.

Yeah, Daishonin. Like a lion king that's just going after it. And then you also mentioned the quote from Aikida when he says, when your determination changes, everything will begin to move in the direction you desire.

Yeah. The power of determination in the sense of sort of deeply saying to yourself, promising yourself, I'm going to do this, really does seem to unleash us in a way. It's sort of like a weightlifter getting ready to lift a really heavy weight. You pause and pull on the energy that you need to lift, whatever the weight it is that you're attempting to lift. It's a fascinating thing, but we don't necessarily prepare ourselves that way and tell ourselves that we have to clench our will, in some sense, for an extended period of time to accomplish what we want. But that's what it means to make a bow to yourself and a determination that you're going to succeed.

I just love that. And I think it's. It's the. In my work, we talk a lot about moving from 50% committed or 60 or 70 or 90 or even 92, 95, 99% to 100%. You're all in. You've made a vow. It's moved from that wish to, well, yeah, you know, it'd be great until something goes wrong. But that 100% determination changes everything. Which leads us to the third principle that I'd like to hear you reflect on briefly of. Once we found that mission that we're willing to commit to, we've made that vow, then you tell us, expect obstacles. So tell us about that.

Yeah, this is really fascinating research. So what it turns out is that we can't control how hard something is to accomplish, but we can control how hard we expect it to be. And the power of expectations. It seems like a small thing, but it has a profound impact on whether or not we become discouraged when obstacles arise. The idea here is that if you have a series of tasks you need to complete to accomplish a goal or a dream. And the first task you expect it to be easy and you fail at. Compare that situation to where you expect that first task to be hard and you fail at it. In the first case, when you thought it was easy and you fail at it, you are far more likely to to become discouraged and quit or to have your subsequent performance degraded than when you expected that first task to be hard and failed at. So what that means is expecting things to be difficult immunizes you to some degree against becoming discouraged. And I could give you, and I do in the book, many, many examples of how that's true. But this is one of those small little things that seems like it wouldn't have great power. But you can leverage this every single day in a way that prepares you to or gears you up or girds you to handle obstacles, even ones you're not expecting. And look at them sort of from a perspective of, ah, yes, there it is. There's the obstacle. Even if you didn't know you were going to get that particular obstacle rather than, oh my God, this obstacle. What am I going to do? We can't finish. We can't complete.

That's awesome. Can you share a story that can bring that to life?

Yeah. So my favorite story is one I tell in the book about my father, who one day came home and announced to us that he was going to learn to play the saxophone. He just every once in a while would get these strange ideas about things he wanted to do. And we all kind of groaned because we imagined the sound of a pregnant water buffalo soon be coming from his bedroom. So anyway, he shows up with his rented saxophone one day and announces to us all that he's going to go and practice his saxophone. He disappears into his bedroom and we wait and we hear nothing. And we thought, well, that's odd. What's going on? And so the next day, he comes out and again announces that he is going to go into his room to practice his saxophone. And he goes, and once again we wait and we hear nothing. And so the third day, he walks out and says, I'm quitting. And we looked at him and we said, well, what happened? And he said, you know, I knew I would not be able to make this thing sound good in the first little while, but I had no idea I wouldn't be able to make a sound at all. He had literally been in his room blowing into this reed with all his might, and he could not make a sound happen at all. And I am convinced, though, of course, I don't know this for sure, because it didn't happen this way. If he had only gone to, say, his teacher or another student. So tell me, what should I expect in trying to learn the saxophone? How hard is it to make it sound good? How long did it take you to make it sound good? Right away. And a student said, oh, make it sound good. I couldn't even make a sound for four weeks. Armed with that expectation, when that happened to my father, I don't think he would have become as discouraged, and I think it would have been far less likely for him to have quit. In fact, in the Resilience Project here at the University of Chicago, what we train students to do, how to leverage this fact, is when you're going to start a new venture, a project or something you've never done before, you don't know one how to do it, but you also don't know what obstacles to expect. And so what most of us do in that circumstance is we seek out a mentor, whether that is a book or an article online or a person to teach us how to do it. But what we don't often do is ask that person to paint a picture for us of what obstacles we are likely to encounter. And if you actually learn to take that history, so to speak, and ask them what happened to you that you expected, what happened to you that you didn't expect that ended up blocking your way, you can paint a picture of a reasonably similar scenario that might happen to you and sort of get a sense of how hard is this really going to be. And that actually prepares you. So when obstacles do arise that end up making the task harder than you expected, you are far less likely to get discouraged and quit.

Wow, that's awesome. That's one of the coolest ways I've ever heard to kind of really embrace the growth mindset, kind of Carol Dweck style of get out of that fixed mindset, that it's not a sign something's wrong with you or your idea. If you run into these obstacles but expect them, just go get a little better, right?

Yes. Yes. And it's the act of expecting them that prevents them from discouraging you in a way they. Otherwise white otherwise.

I love it. I love it. And that leads us to the kind of central theme of the whole book, really. And we've talked about it in different ways, but I just love the phrase changing poison into medicine. Can you just give us your thoughts on that?

Yeah. So this is a Buddhist idea. And the notion here is that no matter what terrible thing happens to you and no matter what obstacle may arise to block your path, that there is something intrinsic in the human being's life and the human engine, human mind, that can create value out of even the worst possible tragedy. And this is not to say that when something really bad happens to you that you're glad it happened to you or that it isn't horribly tragic. I'm thinking now perhaps the worst loss anyone could suffer that I think we talk about in our society, which would be the death of a child. But even in that scenario, when studies have been done to talk with parents who've lost children, they find over time, benefit does accrue. I don't remember the percentages, but some significant percentage of parents would say in those studies that as a result of having lost a child, they found themselves far more courageous. And some other percentage talked about how their relationship with their surviving children improved. Not that any of those parents would for a second, you know, want their child to be dead and wouldn't trade that for all those benefits. But the point is, those benefits did accrue. There is nothing that happens to you that is only bad. It changes the way you think about those experiences. And in the Resilience Project, we actually have the students sit down and write about a loss they suffered in the past, and then to list the benefits that they literally would not have gained had that loss not happened. And it turns out to be a very emotionally provoking exercise, because almost everyone, or almost in almost every class, there's at least someone who says, wow, until I wrote this down, I did not connect the fact that that loss I suffered brought me this really genuinely awesome benefit. It really is an example of turning poison in medicine. It just is the way we're built. We do that even unconsciously, without meaning to. But the issue is we don't often recognize it and focus on it.

Your Resilience class sounds pretty awesome.

Yeah. Well, the students have liked it. We've been really excited about it.

It's so good to see that getting into such great institutions. Important stuff. All right. Encouragement versus advice. I love the way you frame this. Oftentimes when people come to us with their challenges. I know I certainly tend to. I like to do both, but tend to lead with the advice. Tell us about the importance of focusing less on advice and more on encouragement.

Anyone can give advice. It's very easy. And yet, often, of course, you're not standing in the exact same shoes and position that the person to whom you're giving the advice is. And certainly if someone asks for advice and sometimes that's what they want. But really the greatest thing I think any one person can give another, the greatest gift is the gift of encouragement, making that person feel like they can solve their problem, even if they don't know how. Because what prevents people from solving problems is not necessarily a lack of information. It is the belief that they can't. It is discouragement. It is not believing they themselves can walk that path. And so advice can be good or bad, and sometimes it's quite good and quite valuable. But when you can make someone feel like they can do it, when you can take them from feeling discouraged and like a failure to believing in themselves again, getting that energy going is so much more valuable because then suddenly whatever solution is offered, whatever advice is given, they feel like they can take it.

Yeah, that's so good. It goes back to the research of Ellen Langers you referenced with the elderly patients in the nursing care home of well, what are you doing? Are you giving them an opportunity to exhibit their own strength? Or are you taking care of everything for them and really allowing people to shine powerfully? So good. So one more question before I want to wrap up with two more broad questions. The Buddha is often referred to as you describe in the book as he who can forbear. You talk about the fact that some challenges we don't get through on a mountain climb or in a week or a year even, they take decades to get through. But this idea of never being defeated tell us why was the Buddha called that, and what does that mean, and how do we apply it to our lives?

Well, he was called that because of his presumptively towering life condition that viewed the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that happen on a daily basis from the correct perspective, that he looked at life from the broadest possible perspective in the greatest possible height, so that he was not wrapped up in the daily victories or failures, but really took a broad perspective. Because I'll tell you what's fascinating to me as a physician, that when people really want to change their lives in some meaningful way, whether that is start a new business and go on a new career path or begin exercising or lose weight or quit smoking, the real key to victory or accomplishing your great goals is small victories every day. And losing weight, for example, is not something you can do or should even think about doing abruptly, but by making little teeny advances every day, the distance you can travel time is on your side, and you can travel enormous distances and get to places you never imagined you could. If you have the patience to forbear and to view it from that broader perspective and not expect instant success. Because if you're doing something that's really hard and you really need to be capable of doing and maybe need to be trained to do, patience is the key. And sort of recognizing that the really valuable and meaningful things in life you want to accomplish are not done overnight. Because if they were, it would be easy. It wouldn't be a challenge, it wouldn't be a growth opportunity for you, and it wouldn't transform your life and enable you to become happier.

Small victories every day, little by little, drop by dropping. Water. Pot is filled with water, right?

That's it.

Corn becomes good. This has been wonderful, Alex. I really appreciate it. And I'd like to conclude these chats with two questions. One, I'm all about fundamentals and those little victories every day. Doing the things that help us stay plugged into our highest selves, whether that's exercise or meditation or nutrition or rest or whatever. And I like to ask authors I admire and people I admire what they do. So would you be open to sharing? What do you do on a daily basis that you feel helps you stay plugged into that bigger game?

Yeah. So I practice Buddhism and so I chant. And the notion of chanting is a way of making a daily determination to accomplish my goals and to be my best self. I literally try to plug into that self and connect with itself in a conscious, mindful way every morning and every night. And I don't always succeed. But I will tell you that when I make that vow in the morning to manifest my Buddha nature, my happiest, most compassionate, wisest, most energetic self, that seems to bring out wisdom in me and help me with that and make me mindful of my own negativity and challenge that negativity on a daily basis. So that's my daily practice. And I make that effort every day.

Fantastic. And the final question, if you could only share one piece of wisdom with people who are committed to optimizing their lives and actualizing their potential, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

You know, that would be one thing we didn't talk about. It's the chapters labeled Accept Pain. There is incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful notion that, that the goal in life is not to lead a pain free life, but the people who succeed are people who are able to endure more pain than anybody. The obvious metaphor is sort of the Olympic athlete, but it turns out to be not just physical pain I'm talking about, but emotional pain. And when you can look at the things we traditionally try to avoid feeling like anxiety or depression or even anger or guilt, and recognize that you can't control those feelings. But when they arise in the pursuit of a goal, like you want to do something but you're horribly anxious about doing it, and instead of needing to not feel anxious before you do it, you say to yourself, I'm going to let myself feel anxious. I'm going to accept the fact that I feel this way, but I'm going to take the steps I need to take anyway. Then you will become unleashed.

You would have an undefeated mind in an indestructible self. Eh?

That's the idea.

I love it. Thank you, Alex.

Thank you.

Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that interview. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And 2 our optimal living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes when you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my Optimal Living classes.

This is where I take all the.

Ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Relationships 101, Habits 101, etc. You'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson ME membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.