PNTV: The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins (#405)

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 we've got another great book. I'd hold it up, but it's still in the boxes we're unpacking for our library, but it's called the Five Second Rule by Mel Robbins. Subtitle Transform your life, work and confidence with everyday courage. The Five Second Rule. Mel Robbins is awesome. Alexandra got this book, told me about it, high level, and I'm like, that's awesome. I literally took it at the time we were living in Southern California. I ran to the upstairs office, read it, loved it, and people just loved the book. Love her. She's got great energy. Her TEDx talk has something like when I wrote this, 18 million views. I think she has a TV show now or something. I don't follow these things, but she is awesome and this book is fantastic. The Five Second Rule. One of my favorite books of the last couple of years and I highly recommend it. Check out what Mel is up to. Mel, thanks for the great book Five Second Rule. So. So one of the reasons why people love Mel so much is she's very, very open, honest. I wouldn't even say vulnerable, but just courageous and sharing her life's challenges and what she's done to deal with them. So she says in the book, she was 41 years old, drinking too much, relationship is challenged, finances are challenged. She's hitting the snooze button so many times that the kids are missing their school bus in the morning. The things just aren't going quite the way she had thought they'd be going at this stage in her life. Then one night, she's watching TV and a commercial comes on that ends with that, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, launch, lift off or whatever, right? She sees that and she says to herself, for whatever reason, I'm going to start my day tomorrow like that, right? So ends the day, goes to bed and wakes up the next morning, alarm goes off, not feeling it. And she's like, oh, yeah, I was supposed to do this little thing that's stupid. But then she does it anyway. And she said, for the first time in my life, I actually did this. And boom. She said, five, four, three, two, one, go. And she got out of bed. And that one decision literally changed her life. And she started practicing that. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go. 5, 4, 3, two, one, go. When she felt the best version of her whisper something in her ear, she did it and she realized, wow, if I do that consistently. Magical things can happen. Now I'll share in a moment why I love this so much. But first, let me read to you the five second rule. In her words, she says, the five second rule is this the moment you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and physically move or your brain will stop you. Something will get in the way. So I like to say that the ultimate game in life, really, if you boil it down to its essence, is to close the gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being in any given moment. Because if we're capable of being this and we're actually being that, it's in that gap that regret, anxiety, disillusionment, depression exists. If we can close the gap, boom, and actually be the best version of ourselves, which, by the way, is what all ancient wisdom and modern science says is the ultimate purpose of life, the summum bonum, to be a eudaimon, a good soul is what Aristotle said. And then he said, the way you achieve that is by, as I say, he doesn't say this, but high five your inner daimon, how you live with what they called arete, which as we've discussed, is the one word summary of every single thing we talk about. Now, arete translates as virtue or excellence, but it means something closer to expressing the best version of yourself moment to moment to moment. Now Back to the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The 5, 4, 3, 2,. Practice is perhaps the coolest, simplest tool we can use. It's like putting on a jetpack. If you're daimon, your higher self whispers to you something. Send this email to this person or go prep for this session. I was actually feeling a little bit tired, you know, natural oscillations, recovered, went for a walk, meditated all that. And I still wasn't feeling totally inspired. But guess what? I literally chose to do this note out of the stack of hundreds I could choose from because I needed a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And I want to remind myself of this wisdom because it's epic. And guess what happens when you do that. So you start a little slow, then you get a little more momentum and you forget that you were tired. Talbin Shahar says that whenever he starts writing, he's a professional writer and teacher, he almost always starts slow and doesn't really want to do it. Often he has a five minute ramp up. He says, no problem, just do it for five minutes. And he often sees that. He gets really creative. Now, I love that and this is even more distilled. Just give me five seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go. Now what needs to get done? Your daimon whispered, now go do it. That is literally one of the most powerful ways to operationalize arete virtue, excellence and be that best version of ourselves that I can possibly remember. Which is why I'm such a huge fan or one of the reasons why I'm such a huge fan of Mel and this book. It's like putting that jetpack on the version of you that's thinking about it. Boom. To actually expressing the best version view again, we can always throw that this way. Minus one plus one. If you start the day and you got your jetpack on. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Daimon boom. Daimon boom. Daimon boom. If you ignore it every single time. Ah. How are you going to feel at the end of this day versus this day? These are the days you come in, you come home to the kids and spouse with the spring in your step. These are the days when you're all picking your kids up and life is awesome. These are the days where you're like spiraling down. Another metaphor, right? We're spiraling up. That's not even going down, but sideways, but you get the idea. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go. That's the five second rule. That's our first idea. The ultimate tool, how to win the game of life. This is a cool section. So Mel talks about the fact that you just need to start, which is where the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 comes in. And then you need to stay in the game, keep on going and play the long game. Then she gives us some crazy stats. She's got some great stories throughout the book. Did you know Mark Ruffalo, right, in the Avengers? I think he's Hulk, right? Super popular, elite actor at this stage. Do you know how many auditions he had to go to before he got his first gig? What would you guess? Seriously, Pause for a moment. How many times do you think he got rejected before he finally got an acting part? What is it, 600? I don't think you guessed 600. 600 auditions. Who is this guy? Kept on going, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Let's go. Didn't necessarily do that, but he showed up again and again and again. If you want to win in the game of life, you've got to act again and again and again. And then Mel Robbins tells us, you know how many times Eric Dyson, how many prototypes he had for his vacuum cleaner before he figured out the one that worked? What would you guess 5,000. 5,000. Picasso, one of the greatest artists in history. Of course, if not the hundred masterpieces, considered masterpieces. But do you know how many pieces of art he created over the course of his life? What would you guys. 50,000. That's two pieces of art a day to create those hundred masterpieces. Now, Creativity 101. We talk about this in Originals by Adam Grant in what is it? Art and fear. Check out those notes. Art and fear and originals. In Art and Fear, we talk about 50 pounds equals an A. The ceramics teacher who said at the beginning of the class, look, I'm going to split you into two groups. This group, you just give me one piece of art and I'm going to judge you on that. This group, I'm going to give you an A based on how many pounds of ceramics or pottery things you create. Right? £50 equals an A. £40 is a B. £30 is a C. Just give me a lot. Just produce a lot. You. I just need one piece from you. Fast forward to the end of the semester. What do we see? We see that the best art was created by those who were challenged to create the most. Five, four, three, two, one. Create. Five, four, three, two, one. Create. In the process of doing that, you get better. But if you're sitting there constantly letting your brain get in the way of you taking action and trying to do something perfectly, you're never going to do anything. Cripple yourself in paralysis again. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go. Your Daimon whispered to you, what are you waiting for, jetpack? Then we've got anxiety to excitement. So anxiety reappraisal, reframing anxiety as just neutral energy. And again, Mel's super funny here. She says that she was the most booked female speaker in the country at one point. She gave nearly 100 keynote addresses, significant keynote addresses in one year, right? And she said before every single one of them, she was sweating, just nag or falls under her armpits. Her face is hot. She's super, you know, energized, et cetera. Every single time. She still gets that rush, that high arousal state. But what she learned was that anxiety and excitement exist on the same plane. So researchers call that a high arousal state. High arousal, boom. We got a lot of random things on the board today. A high arousal state. Now, when you're at a high arousal state, getting ready for a performance, and you don't necessarily want to go down per se, you want to ground yourself through your breath, et cetera, but the way you move from anxiety to Excitement. Anxiety is a negative interpretation of your high arousal. Excitement is a positive interpretation of your high arousal. And the research on this is profound. And this might be one of the most life changing ideas I've ever discovered. As a very easily highly aroused guy who used to be anxious about everything, when I learned this simple phrase, it literally changed my life. The phrase is I'm excited. And the research is again, bring people into a lab, split them into two groups. Actually, there are more than two groups for our purposes. One group and they're told they're going to have to do something super stressful. Again, scientists have funny ways to stress people out. You got to give a spontaneous public talk in front of judges. They're going to look at you sternly and judge you and how you're doing. And then you're going to need to count backwards from this weird number by 17 to whatever number in front of a judge. We're going to time you. Basically trying to stress people out. Now, before they go in, they're told either to say to themselves, try to calm themselves down. Like, I need to calm myself down. Right. Which, by the way, is the advice most people give to people when they're experiencing a high arousal state. Your friends will say, well, just try to calm down. Right. Wrong advice. What the researchers found was if you tell people to simply say I'm excited, they immediately reframe that high arousal state as I'm excited. And then guess what happens? They perform better because they're not inhibited in thinking something is wrong with them per se. They're taking that big energy which we need to perform at a high level and just channeling it in a positive direction. Boom. From anxiety to excitement via one simple phrase, I'm excited. And the cool thing is, it's actually really true because if you're up and you're a bit nervous, it's because what you're doing is meaningful. If you didn't care, you wouldn't be in a high arousal state. So you genuinely are excited to do something. Now, you might be nervous and you might want to interpret it as anxiety, but you can just as easily interpret that as excitement. And your performance will go up to the extent you do. That's anxiety to excitement. Again, I'm excited. We have grade school teachers that go through our coaching program that use this with their kids before an exam. I'm excited. They have them do burpees or jumping jacks, get their energy up and they teach them how to breathe. And they teach them to say, I'm excited. Guess what? They're performing better research would say than if they were thinking, oh, no, I'm so anxious, I need to stop being anxious. No, you're excited. Go crush it. Then we talk about focus. So Mel's got some great wisdom on focus. She says there are two parts to focus, which I love, which also parallels a lot of things we teach. One, you need to have the ability to get rid of distractions. She says you need to decide that your goals are more important than push notifications. Go turn all those off. Go put your smartphone somewhere else. You don't need to go look at Instagram. Every spare two seconds you get, decide that your mind and your ability to focus in on what's important right now is more important than whatever input you're going to receive. Which is actually our second part of focus. First, get rid of the distractions, then focus all your energy on what's important. Now, two separate skills Again, we talk about this a lot in our fundamental session. We have a full session on focus, which is one of the core fundamentals.

In our mastery series for our coaches.

I'll leave it at that for now. But you got to know what's important to you. What's a soul aching? I really want to achieve this goal. Set up the target and then get clear. Is what you're doing right now moving you toward that target. And again, we're talking energy, work and love wise. You want to know who you are, what you're moving toward, and then what needs to happen now in order to do it. And the good news is you always have the wisdom there. It's always already there. We just need to quiet down long enough to listen to that Daimon, put on the jetpack and 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It when he or she whispers in our ear. And then that leads us to the final idea. One moment. Mel says one moment, five seconds can change your day, which can change your life, which can literally change the world. And if you think that's an exaggeration, I challenge you to go experiment with this. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. When you hear your Daimon whisper, let's review the rule. If the higher version of you whispers something in your ear, then we shall follow this rule. The moment you have an instinct, an inspired instinct, to act on a goal, you must 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And physically move or your brain will stop you. Go take the action that your daimona is encouraging you to take. Strap on that jetpack and go live with Arte. Express the best version of yourselves five seconds at a time. Today. That is a quick look at this great book. If that resonated, go check out the book. It's awesome. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. How to win. You got to start and you got to stay in the game and play the long game. Remember Picasso 50,000. Dyson 5,000. Next time you watch a Mark Ruffalo movie, think about that guy going to 600 auditions and getting rejected. That is crazy. £50 equals an A. I'm excited. Reappraise anxiety. You're focused on what's important right now and you're giving us all you got right this moment. Not just carpe diem, but carpe punctum. Seize the moment. Dan Millman says, what did you get out of today? How are you going to move from theory to practice? What's one idea that you can implement into your life? What's one thing you can do right now? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Bry.

Hope you enjoyed that video. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about, so I just wanted to give you a super quick tour of our site, tell you what we do. We do two primary things. We have an optimized core membership and we have an optimized coach certification program for people that want to go from theory to practice to mastery. So the core membership is basically 10 bucks a month depending on whether you do monthly or annual. And you get instant access to over 500 philosopher's notes, the six page PDF, you know, 25 minute or so MP3 recordings of these great books. And then you get over a thousand optimized plus ones, 50 optimal living 101 masterclasses, et cetera. And we have a free trial the team set up, get it, you know, free for 14 days and then go from there if you like it. So we're blessed to have a lot of people who subscribe to this, including some of my friends who happen to be some world class peak performance gurus like Tal Ben Shahar, who taught the two of the largest classes in Harvard's history. Starts every day with Optimize. Ben Greenfield, Friend and coach optimizes, bar none. My go to source for taking a deep, efficient dive into some of the world's best books via the Philosopher's Notes. It's an indispensable resource. Thank you, Ben. Marcy Shimoff loves philosopher's notes. Mark Devine, retired U.S. navy Seal commander Dear friend who starts his days with Optimize + one winning win in the mind routine to charge him up for the day's battle. If you're serious about leading heroically, I recommend you use them too.

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