PNTV - No Excuses by Brian Tracy

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 we've got another great book. Read it on Kindle. No Excuses by Brian Tracy. No book here. Philosopher's Note book. Bunch of big ideas. We're gonna look at five of my favorite ideas from this great book. But Brian Tracy is awesome. I've read a ton of his stuff back in the day when I was first getting into this. I don't even know, 15 years ago. Got as much of his audio stuff as I could listen to it. He has a ton of wisdom and lists and questions and exercises. Great guy. Thank you, Brian. Favorite five ideas from this book. We'll start with number one, Someday aisle. Now, if you are prone to making excuses, you may live on Someday aisle. If you do that, you're the kind of person that says, someday. Someday I will. Someday I'll. Someday I'll get in shape, figure out how I'm going to optimize my life, really maximize my skill set. Do whatever. Someday I'll get it. Someday I'll pay attention. Are you living in that someday zone? We don't want to be there. We want to be now. What do you want to do? Now is a good moment, a good time. Today is a good day to do whatever it is that inspires you. So move out of Someday aisle into now. I will. It's pretty funny. That's the first big idea. The second one is a worry pill. I'm not talking about an actual pill. A worry pill. If you're sitting here worried, the best possible way to deal with worry is to get into action. Do something. Action cures fear. Now, if you just sit there and ruminate again and again and again and again and again and again and again about all the things that aren't working in your life, well, you're going to be super, super stressed. Scientists tell us this. Sonia Lyboomirsky, the how of happiness. If you can't get yourself to stop ruminating, you won't be happy, period. Essentially, is what she says. Now, there are a lot of things you can do to kind of challenge your thoughts, etc. But one of the best things you can do is just get to work. Be so busy that you don't have time to ruminate into worry. Try it out. It's a great worry pill. In the Wealth Warrior episode, I joked about the fact that Steven Chandler says you need to have like a spray bottle called a project or work. You can Spray on your worries and watch them evaporate. So get busy. I think it was George Bernard Straw who said, spit on your hands. Get to work. Get your blood going. You only can worry if you have the leisure time to worry. So think about that next time you're worrying and obsessing. Get to work. Third, big idea. Don't make excuses. Just get to work. Now, what needs to be done? That question is so powerful. Now, what needs to be done? Yeah, you don't feel good? I got it. Now, what needs to be done? Now, what needs to be done? That's all that ever matters. Just do the next right thing. As Matthew Kelly says, don't make it complicated. No excuses. Third idea. Cool peeps. Brian Tracy presents a question. He says, if you could spend an afternoon with one individual, living or dead, who would it be? What one individual would you want to hang out with? Why? And what would you talk about? And why would that person want to hang out with you? Who are you? What are you cultivating? What are you giving to the world that would inspire that individual to want to hang out with you, too? Think about that and remember, we're the average, as Jim Rohn Sundays, of the five people with whom we spend the most time. So who you hanging out with? Are you up leveling them? Are they up leveling you? What's the dynamic there and then in relationship to this one individual who you'd want to spend time with? Always think about if you want to hang out with a group of people, who do you need to be in order to be there? Get clear on these are the types of people or this is the type of person I want to be in a relationship with. And this is who I'm committed to being, such that that's a natural dynamic and it just makes sense that I would be in a relationship with those individuals or with that individual. Fourth, big idea. Turn off your tv. Brian talks about this and again, all the great researchers do. As I've mentioned before, and I'm going to mention again and again, scientists tell us that TV viewing is correlated with mild depression. If you watch TV or watch movies in general, particularly for over two hours, you are going to experience things you don't want to experience, period. Why is that? Because you're unconscious. Your conscious mind knows that you're capable of more than sitting in front of a TV the time. And your unconscious mind is sitting there saying the same thing. Not good. Mild depression correlate to TV viewing. Turn off your tv. If you turned off your TV for an hour A day and you chose to read during that time instead. For example, say you can read around 40 pages per hour, roughly. If the average book is roughly 200 pages, you can read a book a week. You can read 50 books in a year. People ask me how I read so much. Well, first of all, this is what I've committed my life to. But I don't waste time. I haven't had a tv. I don't know when the last time I had a TV was. Shortly after college, over 15 years ago. I got rid of it. What do you need a TV for? I don't want to be entertained. I want to create. We can have fun. We can watch the occasional movies. If we're sitting there vegging out in front of a TV all the time, sitting, think about what you can do with that. Recaptured time to figure out what you're excited about. And then you don't need to make excuses anymore. You can put in the effort into the deliberate practice we talked about yesterday with Talent Code and go out and crush it and optimize your skills. So turn off your TV and then get teleological. Teleological? Yes, teleological. Telos. Aristotle. Thank you, kind. Aristotle told us we need a target. Telos. Telos, Greek for target. We are purpose driven human beings who need a target that we're going for. If we don't have a target, we literally are aimless. We're aimless. Well, how does that feel? That doesn't feel good. Create a target. Get excited about something again. Sony Lyubomirsky says happy people have projects, happy people have goals that inspire them. So we want to quit making excuses. Get teleological. Create a goal that inspires us, that elicits the best out of us and focuses our energy getting rid of this worry, surrounding ourselves with interesting people. Not having time to spend in front of a tv, you're just too busy crushing it to do that. And you're no longer living on Someday aisle because now you are on purpose and you are crushing it. Well, there you go. It's a super quick look at this great book again. Brian Tracy is awesome. Put a link to his stuff below. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See ya. 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. 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