PNTV - Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, lead the Field by Earl Nightingale. As always, Philosopher's Note with a bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ideas here. First, Earl Nightingale. We did an episode on his classic the Strangest Secret in the World, which basically was we become what we think about, right? Big idea. Earl was one of the leading guys in the 20th century self development movement. Served in World War II, came back, had a very successful radio show in Chicago. Then he created Nightingale Conant, which revolutionized the way that we learned this type of material via audio, in our cars, etc. GR Great guys, super common sense, practical, inspiring wisdom. Five big ideas we're going to look at today. The first is acres of diamonds. Have you heard of this story Acres of Diamonds before? A guy named Conwell shared this to millions of people. He started Temple University and shared this story that Earl shares in his work as well. Acres of diamonds. Basic idea is there's a farmer you Africa who sees that a lot of people are making a lot of money with diamonds, mining diamonds. And he says, I want to be one of those people that crushes it by finding a diamond mine. So he sells his farm and he goes out in pursuit of this diamond mine that will make him extraordinarily wealthy. He searches year after year after year after year, finally gives up broken, throws himself into a river or something and kills himself. Bah. Other side of the story is the guy who bought his farm one day kicks a funny looking rock, brings it inside, puts it up on his mantle. Sometime later, someone walks into his house and says, where did you get that? He picks it up, he looks at it and it turns out to be one of the largest diamonds ever discovered. And the farmer says, oh, I got those all over my farm. The guy who sold his farm to this guy was sitting on acres of diamonds and he left it in pursuit of his dream. But he didn't realize that he actually already had everything that he wanted. So the moral of the story, of course, is before we go out in search for that next big thing, whether it's a relationship or a career or a health or fitness routine, slow down and see. Is it possible that you've actually already got acres of diamonds? The grass always looks greener on the other side or often does. But what if we just gave a little more attention to what we already have? That's the acres of diamonds. Big idea. Second big idea. What's your goal? What's your goal? So you remember when we talked about the strangest secret in the world? We become what we think about. And what Nightingale tells us we need to think about is our goals, what's inspiring us. And he grew up in Northern California near the ocean, and he fell in love with ships. So he uses ships often as metaphors for human beings in our lives. And he says that if you go up to a ship in a harbor in port and you walk up to the captain and you say, hey, what's your next port of call? What's your goal? The captain will answer you both immediately and in one sentence. He'll tell you where he's going, period. Imagine. Imagine walking up to a captain whose huge ship is in the dock in port, and you ask him, where are you headed next? And he says, well, I don't know, we're just going to kind of head out to the ocean and kind of see how we feel, and we'll decide where we want to go. It's absurd. And Nightingale says, we need to be the captains of our own lives and we need to be able to answer in one sentence what our next port of call is, what our next goal is that's inspiring us. And I mentioned in the note that scientists agree with this. Heidi Gran Halvorsen, who wrote the most popular blog post in Harvard Business Review's history. I'll put a link to it. Something like the nine things successful people do differently. The first thing successful people do differently is they're very clear on where they're headed. They have very clear specific goals or targets or ports of call. So what is your next port of call? What's the goal that's inspiring you right now? We want to be able to. If you can't right now, answer that immediately and in one sentence. My goal right now is creating 250 notes in 2015. That's my one thing. That's what I'm heading toward. And I want a thousand notes created. And I will create a thousand notes by my birthday in 2020. Those are my ports of call. What are yours? Have fun with that. Get clear, know what you want, move in that direction. You will lead the field. Alright. The third thing here is, do you want more? Okay, well, then you need to do one simple thing. You want more, you need to serve more. Not complicated. He says, imagine a scale, a big apothecary scale that balances itself. One little bucket or bowl has rewards in it, and the other bowl has service in it. And he says, if you Want to get rewards to be heavy, then what you need to do is you need to put a ton of weight into the service. You put a ton of energy into service, then naturally the world's going to respond with rewards. Even you out. You're always going to get back that what you put out. Steve Chandler talks about this in his great book Wealth Warrior. We've got one of these episodes and notes on that. He says, if you don't have the amount of money you want in your life, there's one and only one problem. You're not serving enough. He says, you're out of service. Imagine a sign that that's hanging up on a bathroom or on something else. You want a gas pump. Out of service, out of service. It's not working. You're not going to get anything out of it. He says, we have those signs hanging on our neck sometimes. Out of service. Not going to get you anything. If you want more, serve more. So think about how you can serve more. You want more in your relationships, how can you serve more? You want more in your professional career, how can you serve more? Not complicated. Nightingale talks about another metaphor. He says, don't be like the person who goes up to the fire, the fireplace, and says, okay, fireplace, you give me heat and then I'll give you wood. He says, that's insane. If you want heat, you need to start by putting in the wood. You got to chop it down, you got to put it in, you got to get it lit, then you'll get heat. It's the same thing. We can't stare at our vision boards all day long and think about rewards and rewards and rewards and say, okay, when I start getting rewards and people really respect me the way I want to be, then I'll put in the effort. Works the other way around. Put in the effort, then you'll get the rewards. That's our third big idea. The fourth big idea to help us get clarity on what our goals are is to identify, what are your powers. Nightingale and all the great teachers say there are certain things that you do when you that you, A, really enjoy and B, are really good at. Sir Ken Robinson, we talked about his element, right? The element had two variables. One, you love doing something, and two, you're good at it. That's one way to discover your powers, and then you naturally serve. The reality is that if you're focused on what you love to do, what you're good at, and you give yourself to the world, you're naturally going to find ways to serve. But those Three questions are really powerful ways to figure out your purpose. If you're looking for more sense of clarity around your purpose. What do you love to do so much you pay to do it? Do an inventory on that. What are you really good at, right, that you excel at and how do you serve? How do you bring that to the world? What does the world need? What will they pay for so that you can get paid to do what you love to do, that you're good at and that the world needs? Big idea. I've done that exercise I don't know how many times. And you can always get more clarity on it. That's our fourth big idea, discovering your powers. Fifth big idea. Nightingale tells us, look, sometimes when you're pursuing big goals, it can get stressful. We talked yesterday. Scott Adams, maybe a couple days ago. Scott Adams, how to fail at Almost Everything and still hit it big. He says goals are for losers. And he's being a little extreme deliberately for that. But he wants to make the point that, yeah, sure, you need to know where you're headed, but what's way more important are what he calls the systems that are going to get you there. So our captain on the boat knows what his next port of call is, but more importantly, he knows what he's going to do day in and day out, such that he can get there 99.999% of the time. He's going to get there successfully, barring some super weird thing happening because he has clear systems. So what we need to do is make today the day we crush it. Make today a masterpiece. Don't stress yourself out about all the things in the future you want to have break it down and see that that is going to be a byproduct of what you do this year, that which is going to be a byproduct of what you do this month, which is going to be a byproduct of this week and ultimately today and then right now, this task. What do you have in front of you? How do you do that to the best of your ability? Make it fun, make it easy, do your best, and you do that and you can't help but succeed. So make today the day. Not tomorrow, not sometime in the future, when you got it all figured out. Today is the day for you to show up and do your best. That's a quick look at leading the field, discovering your powers. If you want more, serve more. What's your goal? You ask a captain what his next port of call is. He knows immediately in one sentence, we want you to have that clarity. Remember Scott Adams? He was so clear on his system. Said he says, look, you want to know what I'm doing at 6:20am on a Saturday the summer of 2017? I'll tell you, I'm going to be doing this. He's unbelievably clear on what his goals are and what his systems are. They're going to take him there and then remember acres of Diamonds. You have so much amazing stuff going on for yourself, going on for you right now in your life. Right now we want to slow down from the obsessive. Something out there holds the key to our awesomeness and realize we're sitting on acres of diamonds right now. Find the things that are great in your life. See how you can expand and evolve them and enjoy the process. Alright. Hope you enjoyed. I look forward to sharing more with you 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 you called the Optimizer. 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