PNTV: The Art of Taking Action by Gregg Krech (#237)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, the Art of Taking Action. The Art of Taking Action by Greg Krek. Subtitle Lessons from Japanese Psychology so Greg Krek is one of the world's leading teachers on Japanese psychology. This book integrates 25 years worth of wisdom over on three different facets of Japanese psychology. Something called Morita therapy, Kaizen, which most of us are familiar with, and Nikan, which is a practice of self awareness. Unpacks it all in the book. Really enjoyed it. It's also very similar to Constructive Living by David Reynolds. Dan Millman has been influenced by some of the same philosophies. Everyday enlightenment, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, all that good stuff. And a bunch of other books that I mentioned in the Philosopher's Note. Bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ones. We will start with one of my favorite new words. This is Sanskrit right here. Arambhashura rmbashura, roughly, my apologies for those Sanskrit speaking people among us. Correct me, help me if I mispronounce that, but this is an awesome word. It means a hero in the beginning. So we talked about this with Eknath Eswaron. He says that a lot of people begin saying something like a meditation practice or a business or relationship, like a hero. And in Sanskrit, this is such a familiar concept of starting strong and then kind of fading away that they came up with a word for it that literally means being a hero in the beginning versus the end. You start off strong, there's trumpets of fanfare. It's just pure awesome. And then the moment your excitement wanes, Aswaran says, you tiptoe out the back door. Oh yeah, forget what I said about that. It's not that cool, right? The moment we get bored. We talk about this with George Lennon in Mastery a lot too. Basic idea is you get excited, right? You got some growth going on and then you hit a plateau. That's boring. Hero gives up, tiptoes out the back door. The hero in the beginning, but the hero who endures and finishes strong, endures this plateau knowing that they will eventually hit another little peak in growth and then they'll hit another long plateau. And that that's what life is all about. But George Leonard tells us that our society is so backwards, every single thing that we get in media and on TV and entertainment, online, etc. Is basically proposing this myth of an unending series of orgasmic bliss, right? And no honoring of the plateau. The word for giving up the moment you get bored is right There. Awesome idea. We want to be a hero at the end, so know that your enthusiasm is going to wane. I mentioned in the note the fact that this is one of my most exciting realizations to use excitement is the fact that now I know that this is going to come and I rub my hands together, I get excited about it because then I get to show up diligently, patiently, persistently. And that's where all the magic happens. Alright, moving on to big idea number two. Isaac Newton and Mr. Mo equals BFFs. Yeah. You didn't know that, did you? Isaac Newton, Mr. Mo are best friends forever. Why is that? Newton's law. We talked about this. Newton's first law. We talked about it in Mini Habits. And Greg talks about nearly the same thing Stephen Guise did. I have the two passages in the note. It's remarkable. He basically says that an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Right? An object in motion tends to stay in motion. So knowing that what we need to do in order to create momentum is to simply take a little bit of action, it doesn't take a ton of action. Once you get out of rest and you give it just a little bit of action, you get into motion and then you have momentum. And it's a lot easier to keep that momentum going than it is just to kick start it right now. Too often we think that we need to do three hours of writing or we need to go to the gym for 60 minutes. And he says, just like Stephen Guise said that, get going with one pushup. Write one sentence in that novel that you want to write. It might sound simple, but. Well, it is simple. It might sound silly, but that's a good thing. Get the process going with whatever you've been avoiding and then notice that your momentum starts to build. You can do good things. That's Newton and Moe. Third big idea is ripples. This is a really cool concept as well. We've got to remember that the cornerstone of this book, obviously is the art of taking action. The cornerstone of Merida Therapy is to realize that you don't have direct control over your thoughts and feelings. We're going to talk about that more in a moment. But you do have control over what you do in any given moment, right? So when you're aware of that, then rather than overthinking something in your life, you can just take action. So he talks about this in the context of one of the demons of inaction. So one of the things that we can get stuck in is. Is indecision, right? We Just don't know what the right answer is. And he says, well, first of all, there is no such thing as a right answer. There are a ton of different things you can do. And rather than play out all the scenarios in your head, take action. Kind of similar to our ready, fire aim concept. But think about it like this. He says, the moment you take action, no matter how small or simple or what, direction doesn't even need to be the perfect direction. But when you take action, you create ripples in the world. Little ripples cascade out and life responds to you while you take action. You do something, you try something out and you get data. And you can take that data back in and say, oh, well, that didn't go quite the way that I thought. Let me adjust it this way, right? So kind of that ready, fire, aim of here's your target. You can think about that target all day long or you can take a shot at it. Now that'd be awesome. If you hit the target in the first shot, right. More likely you're gonna go over here. Oh, man. Then you're gonna go over here. Oh, man. Then you're gonna go here. Wow. A little closer. Oh, went over that way. Then I'm on target. Ripples. Life responds to us when we take action. So if you've been paralyzed by indecision, make it simple. Allow that to be okay. Accept your feelings of fear that you're gonna make the wrong decision or you don't know quite what to do, that's okay. Again, a huge part of this is to accept these feelings. He says it's a supremely important thing for you and for us to be able to deal with feelings that are unpleasant and then go do what needs to get done anyway. So really powerful way to engage the art of taking action is to do a little thing in the face of your indecision. Create ripples. Fourth big idea is gradualism. Gradualism. He talks about this in the context of a 176 year old turtle that recently died. Now, this turtle, I think the turtle's name was Harriet, was apparently one of Charles Darwin's turtles that he picked up on the Galapagos Islands. What's fascinating about Harriet, beyond the fact that she lived to 176, is the fact that Harriet has cousins who evolved in a very different way. So Harriet has a shell. I think she's called a dome shell. Tortoise. Right. Giant tortoise. And that shell is structured in such a way that it helps her eat grass. That's kind of right in front of her right now she has cousins on a different island that's drier, that doesn't have all the wetness that creates the grass on the ground that they needed to eat stuff off of cactuses. So their shell actually evolved in a very different way, which allowed them to go up instead of down. Right, fascinating. And Greg makes the point that that difference in how they evolved took millions of years. Darwin called it gradualism. Japanese psychology would describe that as kaizen kaizen. Tony Robbins would say constant and never ending improvement. Darren Hardy would call that the compound effect and Jeff Olson would call that the slight edge. Tiny little things done consistently over enough time lead to huge results. Now, Greg tells us, unfortunately, most of us, when we see something in our lives, we want it not over millions of years, that'd be a little long for us, but not over a year. We don't want to lose 20 pounds over a year, we want to lose it over a month. We want to find a relationship that is just amazing that we're extraordinarily blessed to have in our lives. We don't want to give that. He says 25 years, but even 2, 5, 10, 25 years to find and cultivate, we want it in a few weeks. So the idea with Kaizen is to allow for gradual improvement, show up and just do a little bit better. You compound 1% gains even a week, let alone a day. That's nuts. You get so much better over the long run. So check in, do a quick inventory and notice, do you want things super quickly, snap your fingers done, or are you willing to put in the effort? It's the same idea here, right? We've covered the plateau, but it's the same thing. You're not growing a whole lot in the plateau, but you are. You're getting ready for another little punctuated growth phase right there. We got to be willing to embrace that as masters. That's our fourth big idea. The fifth big idea is what's controllable. He has a really cool exercise and says, look, if you're facing a challenge in your life, get a piece of paper out, write controllable, not controllable. Draw a line down the middle and identify what's controllable, what's not controllable, and the big idea. There are two big ideas here. The first one is you got to remember that your feelings and thoughts are not within your control. You can control them to an extent, but not completely. We all have weird thoughts that come up and feelings. We need to see them as more like clouds passing in the sky. Not a big deal. That's first big idea. The second big idea, well, they finished that first one. What is within your control is your behavior, thoughts and feelings. Not completely. Behaviors completely. Now, when you're looking at a challenge, whether that's getting a job or finding a relationship or whatever, the results are not within your perfect control. You can do everything right and still not get the job you dream for. Dream of right. And what we want to notice is that that's always going to be the case. But what we can do is focus on what we do have control over, which is our efforts. So you can take consistent, disciplined, small baby steps and massive action over time. And that's where we want to put our attention. Let the results be a byproduct of our effort. Controllable versus Uncontrollable gradualism. Kaizen Ripples Just take action. Get out of indecision by being willing to take a step forward, let life respond to you, and then take the next appropriate step. Newton and Mr. Mo. They're BFFs. You just need to get going. It's hardest to get out of rest, but it doesn't need to be that hard. Do one push up. Write one sentence in your novel. Send one email to someone who might be able to help you with a product you're working on. Whatever Newton and Mr. Moe, they go together. And then let's not be a hero in the beginning. That's an awesome word. Arambasura Hero in the beginning. We want to be a hero in the end as we master the art of taking action. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have an awesome 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. 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. What'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. Optim101 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 101, Meditation 101, instant access to all those classes and then Future classes include Relationships 101, Energy 101, Purpose 101, Business Goals, etc. Those are our full length classes. And then I create micro classes. Two to three to five minute little bursts of wisdom on my favorite great ideas from these great books across the domains that you want to optimize in your life. So we have dozens of these so far. I create 50 new micro classes every month and 10 new philosopher's notes every month for 10 bucks a month. So we're blessed to have thousands of members who are enjoying the program and sharing some incredibly kind words with us. And super simple. 10 bucks a month. Cancel anytime. Would be honored to be a bigger part of your life and I appreciate your support. And here's to optimizing and actualizing.