PNTV: Crazy Good by Steve Chandler (#251)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today I'm excited to share my thoughts on a great new book called Crazy Good. This is a word document printout version of Steve Chandler's new book Crazy Good Subtitle Book of Choices. It's awesome. I have the new book with the fancy cover. Just came out yesterday. Steve Chandler is one of my favorite teachers. He's also one of my favorite human beings in the world. In the note I said I love Steve and I use that word a lot. In this case I mean it literally. Steve has been, and I wrote in the note, one of the most positive influences in my life. And I would say the most positive influence in my life. We've covered a ton of his books. Well, actually we've only covered a fraction, but we've got five other books we featured Wealth Warrior Time Warrior, Fearless, 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself. I think I'm missing one. And now Crazy Good. But I also worked with Steve for two years. Super intense, one on one coaching weekly. Extraordinarily impactful. And I just love the way he integrates everyone from Nathaniel Brandon and Ken Wilber and Byron, Katie and Alan Watts in a really fun, practical, smart, yet grounded and self deprecating way. Steve also comes from a really challenged background. He was a suicidal alcoholic in his younger years. And his whole point is, look, if I can get through, Steve says anyone can. It's just awesome. And particularly touching for me as a guy whose father struggled with alcohol. His father was an alcoholic as well who killed himself. I had my own personal challenges dealing with hopelessness and all that stuff. So super inspired by Steve. That's officially the longest prelude to any note. Philosopher's note here. Bunch of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. Crazy good. What is crazy good? So crazy good. There's bad, there's good, and then there's something way beyond good. Crazy good. That's where we want to live from. And Steve says most of us ping pong back and forth between bad and good, bad and good. He says our good isn't even that good. It's kind of good enough. And when he and I worked together, the whole point of our work was to create crazy good stuff in our lives. And to make my life crazy good, the word that I took out of that was was astonishing. And every single morning I write down this lightning bolt which for me represents crazy good. To astonish. I got this from Steve. The word astonish means to strike with lightning. That's what we want to do crazy good. That's what this book is all about. And we do that by making better choices. We don't need to go into therapy for years or decades and do deep archeological digs. We need to make better choices. And he has 15 different choices that he offers wisdom on in different sections of the book. Here's a look at a few of my favorites. First is the 5% solution. So Steve went through some challenging times when his wife and the mother of his ex wife, now and former wife, mother of his four children was institutionalized with multiple personality disorder. Intense. And now he was suddenly a single dad. Unbelievably incredible challenge, right? He started working with Nathaniel Brandon, the great therapist who wrote the Six Pillars of Self Esteem that we featured as well. And Steve said, I need help. And Nathaniel said, okay, let's work on this. But they didn't try to make it perfect. What they tried to do is make it 5% better. And Nathaniel Brandon has something called sentence stem completions. And he asked Steve, and Steve unpacks it in the book. If, if you were 5%. So let's do it right now. If you brought 5% more awareness to your challenge. So imagine your challenge in your life, and if you could bring 5% more awareness to it, what would your life look like? Well, then I would do this and I would do that, and I could do that 5%, right? And he says, do it six times. What do we got? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times. If you brought 5, 5% again, not 95% or 1,000 and 5%, you're not trying to change it instantaneously. Why? Because you can't. You can't change every single thing in your life that took you years or decades to accumulate instantaneously and have it stick. You might have a state experience where you have an epiphany. Then you need to do the work to make it a new stage of development, to quote Ken Wilber. So what are your six things that you can do to increase your awareness or be 5% more responsible in your life in a particular domain? It's a huge concept, and we want to remember that if this is kind of change and you're here, right, you could be over here, but you're here. You're not going to go here instantaneously, but you can go here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here, and get there. 5% improvement compounded over time is huge. And sentence stem completion is a great way to do it. That's our first big idea. The second one is systems versus Dreams. So Steve shares a story with one of his friends and a client of his who was a systems expert. And this guy told him, hey, look, every system works perfectly. Steve says, what? Every system works perfectly. What are you talking about? The guy says, every system works perfectly for the results you're creating. If you have these results, your systems produce those results. If you want different results, you need to create new systems. You need to create better systems. One way to do that, by the way, is with this. How can I improve my systems? The things I do on a daily basis, by 5%, not 1,000 5%, 5%. Six things, stream of consciousness that come to your mind. To finish that sentence, If I brought 5% more awareness to my systems, then six answers to it. Try it out. It's really huge. Steve says, look, focus on your systems. This is a choice. Systems versus dreams. Most of the time, people, when they get stuck and they want new results, or a lot of times anyway, they fantasize. And Steve jokingly says, on your vision board, you have a castle in Spain that represents abundance. He says, look, that's actually just going to drive you crazy. What you need to do is work on your systems such that you create more results rather than going nuts here we're going to talk about that a lot more. By the way, I'm working on Gabrielle Odingen's Rethinking Positive Thinking and Mental Contrasting, which we've touched on. Really powerful stuff. But think about your systems. Third big idea is game versus shame. This is another one of the 15 choices. You have a choice. You can shame yourself or you can make your life a game in your day to day work and life experience a game. He says, shaming yourself is kind of like getting so upset that your lamp isn't emitting enough light that you just unplug it from the wall. Oops, now there's no light. Not a good idea. That's shame, right? He says, we want to make life a game. How do you make life a game? And when I read this, Steve sent me the book last week I started reading and it was Labor Day when I got it and I was doing some other stuff that day, so I read half of it and then I read this section. I started working on the note or thinking about the note and I said, you know what? How can I make today a game? That was my question. That's the question I suggest you think about in the note. How can you make today a game? And for me, it became very obvious, oh, I'm going to make it a game to see if I can finish the book and then immediately work on the note so I can send him the six page PDF philosopher's note in less than 24 hours. He sent me the book, I printed it out, read it, wrote the note and sent it to him in 24 hours. That'd be awesome. That'd be so fun. This is literally my internal dialogue. He's going to be stoked. He's going to think that's funny, that's going to be an example of crazy good astonishment and he's going to see just how much I appreciate him and his wisdom and all that good stuff, right? Gets me a little emotional. Even when I say that that's a fun game and it's easy to do that. I don't need to shame myself. I guess the alternative would have been, oh, I should do this because Steve's done so much for me and da da da or whatever, right? You tell me which is more empowering and inspiring. Steve shares the story of a dolphin trainer. Dolphins have fun learning new tricks. That's a game for them. But if the dolphin trainer, a good one, gives them fish and supports them, a bad dolphin trainer would be super mean. And Steve's hilarious in the book, you know, yelling at the dolphin, saying, what are you doing? You missed the hoop again, you stupid dolphin. And what is that squeaky sound? You think that's funny? And shaming the dolphin, it wouldn't work. We want to make our lives a game and let go of the shame, self compassion, make it fun. And that's the question practically, how can you make today game? That's our third big idea. Fourth big idea is another really powerful one. I forget the specific choice this might have been in the fear and love section and Steve actually profiles me. One of the chapters is on my process from fear to love. My own process of getting my mind right and starting to live an inspired life and then pursuing crazy good. But shortly after that, he talks about sirens and, and how he used to look at sirens and when he'd hear them at night, he'd think of all the things going wrong in the world, right? That, wow, someone's hurt right now and they're going to take him to the hospital. The world's not safe was kind of his attitude, right? And then he realized, no, no, no, that's a sign that someone's helping someone else right now. And sirens suddenly became a sign of peace for him. And I read that it was particularly moving for me because 45 days ago, we had sirens in our life. My wife Alexandra was taken to the hospital twice in 48 hours. She had two seizures. And it was the most terrifying reminder of how fragile life is now, precious life is. And I talk in the note about what we've learned from that mri, came back clean, which is great. She had seizures as a kid, which is actually a good thing. She has a genetic threshold that's a little lower than most people. And we're kind of digging into the root cause. We think it was mold, which is a whole other conversation I'll save for another time. But during the experience as she was having her seizures, we called 911. They arrived before her seizure was done, which was, like I said, terrifying. And then as we kind of got into the ambulance and we were heading to the hospital and that stuff, I just, I had this moment of, these people are amazing. They're just amazing. We have the firemen, we have the EMTs, then we go to the ER. They're on the night shift. It's like midnight at this point. And they've dedicated their lives to mastering their craft and then being away from their family to work the overnight shift, to serve people, and in this case, to serve us. And I just had this huge heart opening experience realizing how blessed we are to have so many people that are serving us all the time. And for me, I've always had a game I played with sirens where I would alchemize it into sending love to whoever was being served. Now it's a reminder of exactly what Steve described. Someone's helping someone else. Someone has dedicated their life to helping someone else. I get emotional as I say this. I think it was Einstein who said that we need to remember the anonymous people we're never going to meet. And in this case, I was able to meet them. But most of the time, we aren't able to meet the people that make our lives possible, to make the technology possible. For me to share this with you right now, the countless people, as Patricia Ryan Madsen says, the silent gifts we receive every day, and to take the opportunity to think of them and to thank those people for giving their life force to us, to make our lives as amazing as they are. So for me, again, the siren is now a trigger for that. You may want to try that out. Think of the people that are helping other people. And then for me, it's, how do I help back? How do I give as much in return to the people that are serving us? Huge Idea. Fifth big idea is experiments. Experiments. So Steve says that all life is an experiment. Technically, Emerson says all life is an experiment. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The more experiments, the better. We named our son Emerson. I love that quote. All. All life is an experiment. The more experiments, the better. This is from his choice. Testing versus trusting. Testing versus trusting. In the two years we worked together, this was at least tied for first for the most impactful idea. That and probably astonishment that Steve taught me. And the basic idea here is most of us are waiting until we have it all figured out. We want to trust everything that we've got the perfect plan and it's going to work perfectly. We can trust it. We can trust ourselves. Now, of course, intense trust, confidence is very, very important. But if we need it to be perfect, we're never going to do anything. Steve says, test. Be an experimenter. Test. And he says experiments. Quoting one of his friends. Experiments never fail. Experiments never fail. And I love this idea so much. I sent Steve a lab coat and goggles and I sent myself that, and I sent our team that a lab coat and goggles so we can remember that we're experimenters in the lab of life, right? And we're just getting data. We don't need to get emotional about it. Oh, wow. This didn't work. This little experiment. This email requesting something from someone came back negative. Now, if I'm going to be emotional about it, right. Oh, man. What does that mean? If I'm an experimenter, I got my chalkboard out, I note it. Okay, well, that didn't work. It's data. It's not a big deal. It's good data. And if things don't work out in other ways, I can use that to get a little bit better. It's the growth, mindset, testing, and a willingness to put ourselves out there and just get a little bit better. 5% day in and day out. So test versus trust. Experiments never fail. We want to organize our life so it's one big experiment. This episode has become longer. Sirens. What can they trigger for you? Sirens signal for service. That's how I like to frame it. Game versus shame. How can you make today a game? Quit shaming yourself. Systems versus dreams. You may want to take your vision board down for a little while and put up a nice big calendar that has the things you're going to do on a daily basis such that you can achieve your dreams. And then the 5% solution, incremental improvement compounded over time is how we get to crazy good. Hope you enjoyed. I love the book. I think you'll dig it. Short, powerful, impactful chapters. Thank you Steve and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another great day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. 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