PNTV: Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy (#303)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv Today we've got another great book, Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy. Living Forward Subtitle A proven plan to stop drifting and get the life you want. Michael Hyatt is one of the world's leading publishers and a best selling author. He joined forces with his coach who's one of the world's leading business and executive coaches, Daniel Harkavy, to create this book which is essentially a manual on how to create a life plan to deal with the drift, which we're going to talk about in a moment. It is a short book, but it is a challenging one that basically challenges us to create a vision for our lives. What are we here to do? What are our priorities? How are we doing and how do we optimize? We've got a philosopher's note, a bunch of big ideas and a bunch of journal questions in it and five of these ideas we're going to profile now. So when we talk about living forward and creating a life plan, chapter number one in the book says we need to first acknowledge the drift. We need to look at the areas in our lives in which we don't have a plan, in which we are drifting. We're just kind of going through the motions. And things when we're going through the motions don't tend to be optimized. So where in your life are you drifting? But before we get there, let's think about where in your life things are. Awesome. Where do you have a plan? How are you dialing in your life? Think about that, celebrate that, reflect on that. Right in the note. I've got some space to actually write it down, but think about it right now. Where in your life are you really flourishing? Most likely it's because you've brought a high level of intentionality to it. You've got clarity on that. Think about the areas where you're drifting, the things that just aren't going as well as they could be. Acknowledge the drift and then get yourself a life gps, which is what they describe the life plan as. They use the metaphor of a GPS throughout the book. If you want to think about a life plan in the way they use the frame, they're not talking about a financial plan or whatever, they're talking about an overall life plan. They say it's kind of like a GPS which guides you through the terrain of your life. And a GPS has three different elements to it, roughly, right. It's got a bunch of different nuances, but there are three primary things which are tied to three questions that are the through lines throughout the book. So what does a GPS need in order to work? The first thing you need in a GPS is where are you going? What's your destination? If you don't know where you're going, a GPS can help you get there. The second thing is where are you? Where are you right now? What's your current position? And then the third thing is you need to take action. You need to actually move toward your destination. Well, that's what a life plan does for us as well. The first thing it does is identify, okay, where are you going? This is my destination. That's where I want to be. And they set it up in each of the major categories of your life, right? So your health and well being, your relationships, your career, your financial setup, etc. Etc. Etc. Where do you want to be? What's your ideal vision, your destination in each of those areas. Then you got to be honest about where you're at. You got to acknowledge the drift, if it exists and how you're doing well or not so well. And then you need to take action. And by taking action, you see if you're on course or off course, right? Oops, made a wrong turn. Your GPS gets you back on course. Your life plan gets you back on course when you make the inevitable wrong turn. So there's a roadblock or whatever. So think about that. And obviously the book is all about helping us unpack this. What do you want in your life? The ultimate end is how do you want to be remembered? They say that all of us are creating a legacy. Whether we're aware of it or not. We're creating a legacy. We are going to leave a legacy behind. The question is, are we doing so deliberately? This is one of the most powerful journal exercises we can ever do. Imagine the end of your life. Imagine those closest to you. What do they have to say about you? Is that what you want them to say about you? And then look at where you are today and get more in integrity with those ideals. Life gps. Think of your life plan as your own little GPS system to keep you on track. Our third big idea here is pull power. I love that phrase, pull power. They say that your goals, your vision for your future, where you are going, needs to have pull power. It needs to pull you up toward it. If you are feeling motivated, you hop out of bed in the morning, you're feeling fired up. Your goals, your future is pulling you toward it. That's why you're springing out of bed with energy. If you're not if excited about your life and inspired by your life, your goals don't have pull power. They're not firing you up enough, which is exactly what we talk about in the science of motivation. Piers Steele, who won the equivalent of the Nobel prize for psychology, researched hundreds of papers or did a meta analysis of hundreds of papers on motivation. He came up with that equation, right? What was our equation? The equation was and is motivation equals expectancy times value over impulsivity times delay. Most important aspect is the numerator here. Expectancy times value. What that means is you value a goal and you expect to be able to achieve it. When you combine a goal you're really fired up about with the belief that you can have it, that's pull power. So check in on your goals and your vision for your future and see if it's inspiring you. If it's not, turn it up until it is. That's pull power. Fourth big idea. They talk about priorities, right? And how we need to get really clear on what our values are. We cannot have everything in our lives be important. We need to be essentialists about it and narrow it down to, you know what? This is important to me. This is important to me. This is important to me. And all that other stuff just isn't important to me. And they do this in the context of life categories. I think you can check out a lot of these exercises, by the way, @livingforwardbook.com Check that out. Livingforwardbook.com but they say that when you look at your priorities, you need to make sure that you put yourself up there on the top of the list. They say for them, their own self care comes after God, their commitment to God, right? And they make the point that just like when you're on an airplane, right? So if you travel often, you know that after you sit down, fasten your seat belts and then they give you the reminder in the event that cabin pressure gets changed, right. The little masks will come out of the panel above you put it on your face, over your nose and your mouth, and end of the story is always the same. Make sure you take care of yourself before you try to help anyone else. Why is that? Because if you're not getting oxygen, you're not going to be in a position to help anybody else. It's the same thing with our lives. If we aren't taking care of our basic fundamentals, our mental, our emotional, our spiritual, our physical well being, our eating, moving, sleeping and mental training to use the language we always come back to, then we're not going to be able to help anyone else. We need to take care of our soul oxygen. When life's pressure gets destabilized and we got that turbulence and the ups and downs of life, the inevitable ups and downs, we need to lean into our fundamentals such that we can be present for everyone else around us. We've got to prioritize our own self care, not be super weird about it, right? But prioritize that such that we can give ourselves most fully to the world. And when we do that, it's not a selfish act. We can look at it as a vehicle to give ourselves most fully to the world. And the only way we can do that is if we're taking care of ourselves. So remember, soul oxygen is important. Take care of yourself before you're trying to take care of everybody else. The fifth big idea here is the law of Diminishing Intent. This is a cool frame they talk about Jim Rohn, who said that there's a law of Diminishing intent, which basically means that, let's say you get really excited about something, right? So here you are, and your excitement level is up here. Roan said that the further away you get from that excitement, the more it diminishes, the more your intent diminishes. The Law of Diminishing Intent. And what that means is you got to recognize that as excited as you might be about an idea that we're discussing right now, or another one that you've discovered in a book or a seminar or whatever, the longer you go before you implement it, the less likely it is you're actually going to implement it. Law of Diminishing Intent. Stated positively or framing this positively. What that means is you need to use the emotional energy of intention. When you're inspired by something to take action, however small, get the ball rolling in practical action. Otherwise you will fall to the law of Diminishing intent. We talk about Rory Vaden in his book Take the Stairs. He talks about the similar idea and he has something called the rent axiom. He says the rent is always due, right? People have this idea that they can make a resolution at New Year's and it will somehow carry them through the year. It doesn't work that way. The same thing happens. Law of Diminishing Intent. You're fired up on December 31st and January 1st and January 3rd and 5th. By the 10th and 20th and 30th, you're already not too fired up. You've got to pay that rent of motivation on a daily basis. And again, remember, you're only going to do that if you have strong pull power. If you have a vision that inspires you, that fires you up, then you take daily action to keep that intention strong while keeping your soul oxygen dialed in. There's our pull power again and remembering your life GPS where do you want to go? Where are you and what do you need to do to get where you want to go? When you're off track, look at your compass, look at your life plan and quit drifting. That is a super quick look. This is powerful stuff. They talk about spending a day doing this. The book kind of culminates into okay, go take a day and go do this. The life plan that they suggest is five to 15 pages long. Each of the categories in your life. I actually read this last week. Plan to take Friday. I did take Friday intending to do this. Went to the spa, right and I was all ready to kind of rock it. And before my wife Alexandra surprised me with some amazing birthday notes from our community. Thank you to everyone who submitted a birthday wish and reflected on how my work has improved your life. It was ridiculous. Unbelievably inspiring. My day wound up being largely spent just really appreciating your kind words and feeling into that. And when I look at my eulogy and how I want to be remembered, it was captured in so many of your generous and kind words. So thank you so much for making my day awesome. I got to get back into the spa at some point and actually capture everything in the crystallized form that they suggest. But there you go living forward. Thank you Michael. Thank you Daniel. Hope you enjoyed. What was your favorite big idea? How can you make it a bigger part of your life? Get on that. Have another awesome day and here's to an awesome life. 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. Ten 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. Old school classics, Positive psychology, Modern stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, purpose, neuroscience, wealth, etc. And what you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again. We have 250 of these on all these different great books. And then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to optimal living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. Super practical, fun, inspiring classes ranging from habits 101, confidence 101, getting stuff done one on one meditation 101, instant access to all those classes. 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