PNTV: Black Hole Focus by Isaiah Hankel

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Black Hole Focus. Black Hole Focus by Isaiah Hankel. Subtitle how intelligent people can create a powerful purpose for their lives. Fantastic book. Had a couple of members suggest that I cover it. Like the title and glad I read it. It's a great book, packed with wisdom. If you're looking to discover your purpose, this book is packed with ideas on how to go about doing that. If you are young and ambitious, I think you'll particularly like this. Isaiah is young, smart, ambitious. It's a super inspiring book. Bunch of big ideas in the Philosopher's Note. Let's look at five of my favorites now so we can get our Black Hole focus on. I'll talk about the physics of your purpose and our fifth big idea Singularity. For now, we're going to start with sheep versus Strategists. Isaiah kicks the book off, telling a story about how when he was a kid in the Pacific Northwest, he used to help farmers shear their sheep, right? And he said it was actually surprisingly easy to get the job done. All you need to do was get a few farmhands together with big sticks and bang the sticks over your head. Apparently sheep hate the sound of sticks. And then they'll start moving away from the sticks into a little triangular chute into the stall where they're going to or toward the stall where they're going to get sheared. Once you get them going in that direction by banging the sticks, then you get in front of them and you lead them down the little path to the shearing station with a carrot sticks. Carrots. That's how sheep respond, right? They're tacticians, he says. They only know how to respond to what's immediately in front of them. It's kind of like someone working off a to do list. I'll respond and just do what needs to get done. Carrots and sticks, he says. Most of us are like sheep responding to the those carrots, those sticks. We need to be strategists if we want to live a meaningful life. A strategist isn't just responding to carrots and sticks. They're stepping back and saying, okay, what's the vision of my future that I'm really fired up about? And then what's the strategy I need to put in place such that I can move from where I am? He talks a lot about being ruthless and honest about where you are, what's working, what's not neutrally accepting it, not getting emotional about it, but being honest about it and then creating a strategy of, this is where I want to go, this is where I'm at. What do I need to do to make that happen? Now if all you're doing is going through your life like a sheep moving away from sticks, oh, no, they said something. I don't want them to say something mean. That would scare me. Right. I can't trust myself enough. And then going after the carrots, whatever shiny carrots that you find most appealing, right Then you're going to have a tough time living a life of deep purpose. You need to step out of that, become a strategist, see your future and. And then navigate a path to it. That's what this book is basically all about. He talks about why you should discover your purpose and then how. Right. So here's a strong reason why it's pronounced ikigai, Japanese word that the author of the Blue Zones talks about as one of the key reasons why individuals living in Okinawa, a certain part of the main island of Okinawa, live. Live a crazy long period of time. The longest lived group of people on the planet, basically, right. The number of people who live over 100 is just wacky there. Why is that? Why do they live for so long? Well, one key is this. The icky guy, they have a reason for getting up in the morning. If you have a reason to get up in the morning, whether that's teaching karate at 102 years old or learning how to fish, whatever, at 104 years old, you're motivated, you're excited, you're inspired. That purpose gives you energy, it gives you vitality. If you don't have purpose, you're not going to have that vitality. And check in. Why do you get up in the morning? If you have a deep sense of why you get up in the morning, AKA icky guy, AKA purpose, right, you're going to have vitality and have energy. If you don't have a perfect, powerful, compelling reason to get up in the morning, you're not going to have a whole lot of energy. You're not even going to feel like getting up out of bed. So discovering your purpose is extraordinarily powerful. Not only are you going to feel better when you get up in the morning, you're going to live longer, is what this Blue Zone research talks about. We'll cover that soon. Next big idea is a crazy study. So I'm not a huge fan of animal testing, but let's go Back to the 1950s, this researcher, who was trained at Harvard, working at Johns Hopkins, was studying rats and how long they could swim in circulating water before basically giving up and then sinking and drowning. Right. Now he wanted to test some different situations. He found that on average, these rats could swim before sinking for 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes, and the little guys would run out of energy and they'd be done. Right. Now, then he tested what would happen if he pulled them out of the water. Right. Somewhere before the 15 minutes, pulled them out of the water and then put them back into the water. Gave him a little break, right. And then put them back in the water. What do you think happened in that process? My hunch is you wouldn't guess that. Whereas the average. If they just swam, right. The average was 15 minutes before they ran out of energy. Right. If they were pulled out, then put back in, they could swim not for 30 minutes or 60 minutes, but for 60 hours, 15 minutes. In one condition, 60 hours. If they were pulled out and then put back in, that's 240 times more endurance than the initial group. And the researcher said, what's going on with that? Right. That's crazy when you think about it. 15 minutes, 60 hours, 240 times more endurance. What the researcher concluded that it was because the rats had a sense of hope. When they were just swimming and swimming and swimming, they kind of realized, well, I don't know if this is going to work. They gave up. Obviously, the rats aren't thinking that, but you can think about it in those terms. Pulled out. They had a sense of possibility, a sense of hope that something could save them, right? That they could be saved. They. The scientific definition of hope is the belief that your future will be better than your present. If you believe that your future is going to be better than your present, you have hope and you are going to have vitality and more vitality than people who don't believe their future is going to be better than the present. The rat that was just swimming in the original condition didn't have that hope. Like the rat that was pulled out, then put back in it. 240 times more endurance, 240 times more energy. And Isaiah makes the point that having hope in a better future creates energy. Purpose leads to hope, which leads to energy. It's huge. Another reason why we want to cultivate our purpose, have a strong, deep sense of why we're doing what we're doing. So remember that 240 times more endurance when they had a deep sense of hope. The fourth big idea is greatness times two. Greatness. The two steps of greatness are basically step number one, know, underline all caps, exclamation point. Know that you can achieve greatness. You have something within you that's incredibly unique, that you can give to the world and you can fully express in a great, extraordinary way. You need to know that that's step number one of achieving greatness is you have to actually believe you can do it, that this is Self Confidence 101 or Self Efficacy 101. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right, et cetera. Step one. Step two is you need to decide what you're going to commit yourself to. Choose what are you going to commit your life to? It's not an easy path. You can't do everything. There are trade offs. You've got to say, look, I'm not going to do those 20 things, I'm going to do this one thing. Isaiah says this is a little harder than this part. You know, you can get to the point and say, look, I believe I can do great things. That's challenging in its own right. Right. But this is a little bit harder to actually decide. Most people don't have the courage to say, this is it. This is what I'm going to bet my life on, what I'm going to commit my best energy to over the course of my life, over the course of the next decade or whatever it is, right? If a lot easier to say I don't know what I want to do, then I don't have the courage to do what I know I want to do. So in the note I reference Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk has a new book coming out I'll be featuring soon called AskGaryVee. All bunch of questions that people ask Gary Vee, right? And he had this one guy who asked him, hey, you know, I've got a lot of strengths and I'm trying to decide which one I really want to lean into. You know, can you give me some perspective on which strength I should pick? And Gary Vee's answer was, shut the F up, pick one and start winning. Just lean into it. Quit making it more confusing than it needs to be. The reality is if I asked you what's the thing you really, really want to do with your life? If you could do anything and you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you go for? Most of us have an answer to that. So the issue often is less about what specifically you want to do with your Life and more about cultivating the courage to make the decision day seer. To cut off other options. Right. To decide and to move from vision to decision is another one of the ideas I cover in the note. So you got to know you can create great things and then you've got to choose. You got to decide what it is you're going to dedicate your life to. And then in the note, I share a Tim Ferriss quote and a JFK quote that Isaiah shares. The irony here is that when you go for greatness, Tim Ferriss says 99% of people don't think they're capable of greatness. They can't get over this first step, right? So then they just set mediocre goals, average goals. So the irony is there's actually a lot more competition for the basic mundane goals. You have to put in more time, more energy into the kind of normal baseline average goals because everyone's going after them. But when you go for the high hanging fruit, it's technically more challenging to get, but there's less competition up there, so it's paradoxically easier to do. And when you go for those stretch goals that really challenge you, you get a burst of adrenaline because you're fired up to go do it. But if you set boring, mediocre goals that you know aren't really challenging you and aren't really that inspiring, then you don't need to elicit the best within you. So commit to your own greatness, know you can do it, and then make your decision. And that leads us to the fifth big idea. The physics of your purpose. Singularity. Singularity is basically infinite density, infinite density in infinitesimal volume, combined singularity. Imagine that. Infinite density, infinitesimal volume, I can't even wrap my brain around. But that's what's in the, in a black hole. And when you have that infinite density, you're unbelievably compact and focused at a particular point. Everything gets sucked into a black hole. And physicists used to think that things were destroyed or obliterated inside a black hole. Stephen Hawking, Isaiah tells us, says, you know, that was my biggest blunder professionally was thinking that things were destroyed in a black hole. They're not destroyed, they're transformed. And Isaiah's whole point throughout the book is when you're willing to go that deep into your purpose, you're willing to commit to something that intensely, with that level of singular focus, everything gets sucked into it. Every thought, every behavior, everything you do and who you are is in support of your purpose. And all great teachers who talk about discovering your Dharma or your purpose or creativity with a capital C. Mihaly Csikset Mihaly's style say the same thing. It takes a ton of energy to do great work and you can't be dissipating it in a ton of frivolous distractions. You've got to be willing to have black hole focus. Bring everything you do in your life into support of that thing that you've decided is most important to you. And of course, family is part of that for people who are engaged in creating a family, etc. But be willing to blend that all into your chosen purpose. That's the basic idea of black hole focus. Singularity. The physics behind it. Suck in everything. All the energy into that greatness. Times two. We had our two steps. Step one Know you can do it. Step two Choose. Decide. Quit pretending you don't know. Remember Those rats swimming 15 minutes with no hope? When they had hope, they swam for 60 hours before giving up. That's truly remarkable. 240 times more endurance lesson for us is create hope. Create a deep purpose that creates energy and catalyzes you to do great things. The Japanese in Okinawa, longest lived culture Ikigai, right? The reason for getting up in the morning. What's yours? And then sheep versus Strategist. Have a clear vision for your future. Something that fires you up. Create the plan to go from where you are to that ultimate vision and make it happen. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. 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. 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