PNTV: The Big Picture by Tony Horton (#142)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great one. Tony Horton's the Big Picture. Tony, creator of P90X. If you've ever done that, you know Tony, my hunch is you love Tony. Funny dude, super fit, brilliant. And this book is a lot of fun. He's a funny guy and comes through in his book. I literally laughed out loud and nearly every other page. He brought me to tears with one story about him going up in fighter jets and it not going so well to say the least. Just hilarious. We have the Philosopher's Note. We got a bunch of big ideas. We've got our top five big ideas right here. We'll start with number one. Do your best. Do your best. And what else does Tony say? If you're a P90X fan, you know that he says, do your best and forget busting out the yellow chocolate. Forget the rest. Do your best and forget the rest. Right? Where did he come up with that, though? Do your best. I thought it was pretty cool. He came up with it from the four agreements. Don Miguel Ruiz. Four agreements. That's the fourth agreement. You do your best. First one, be impeccable with your word. Second one, don't take anything personally, is actually the third one. Second one is, don't make any assumptions. Third, don't take anything personally. Fourth, do your best. Your best is going to change moment to moment to moment, day to day to day. Your best will not always be the same. You're not always going to be rock star. 20 out of 10. There are going to be days where your best is a four or five or six. But you need to do your best no matter how you feel. And then you need to forget the rest. So Tony said, look, I really like that. That was good wisdom, but it was incomplete. So I want to do my best, but I also want to forget the rest. I want to forget all the little mental chatter in my mind from all the criticism I might have gotten in the past. Just forget it. Forget it. Let me do my best and let go of everything else. Not going to be attached to results, not going to be replaying old narratives. I'm going to do my best and forget the rest. I love that Tony tells us the second big idea here. To really embrace the big picture, we've got to live with purpose. He's got his 11 laws. This, I think, is the second law. Find your purpose. And he does a really good job of differentiating. He doesn't call it this, but he basically find your Purpose. And I talk about it in the note. Wow, there's intrinsic, then there's extrinsic, right? So, you know, P90X beach body, it's all awesome. We all want to look great in a bathing suit or swimsuit or whatever, right? And we want to feel good about ourselves. But he does a great job of walking us through the fact that, you know, at the end of the day it's nice, but that's not what's going to drive our lives. If we want to embrace the big picture, we want to got to have a purpose. And that purpose can't be all about what the scientists would call extrinsic motivation. It can't be all about being hot, being famous, and being wealthy. Nothing wrong with those things. But if that's your predominant focus, psychologists tell us, researchers tell us that you're going to have less emotional stability than people who are focused on the intrinsic stuff. The intrinsic stuff includes things like deepening your personal relationships, becoming a better human being, and making a contribution to your family. We want to orient our purpose around that stuff, around the intrinsic goodness. So let your commitment to being a better human being be what drives you in this big picture. And sure, have fun with all the other stuff. Again, nothing wrong with the extrinsic stuff, but we don't want it to predominate our mind, to dominate our mind. We want it to be kind of there, but not the driving force, not the engine. The intrinsic stuff needs to be the driving force. He has some really cool exercises to help you figure out your purpose as well, which we're not going to go into right now. Keep that in mind. And then he's got this awesome thing of failure. The word just connotates something negative. Failure, he says, look, everybody likes awesome. Awesome's awesome. So failure, he says, needs to be the new awesome. Because you can't succeed without failure. He says, they're Siamese twins. Flip a coin, you're going to have heads and tails. You're going to have both failure and success. But if you try to get rid of failure, you're going to get rid of your opportunity to succeed. You're going to quit trying. So given the fact that failure is so important to success, we need to make it the new awesome. I love that. Failure is the new awesome. Be willing to make more mistakes, go out, fail some more, learn, pick yourself up, get back to work. The obstacle is the way an iron will. We've been talking a lot about this. Failure is good, the new awesome. Then he's got this really cool idea. I love the way he described his voice of consistency. So he starts by sharing what he calls a dirty little secret. Dirty little secret. Tony Horton, creator of P90X, one of the most fit dudes on the planet, doesn't usually. I think it was either often or usually. Enjoy working out. Let me reference this quickly. Let's check out the philosopher's note and see what in fact, he said. Tony tells us, here's a dirty little secret. I don't get all that fired up about exercise most of the time. I don't get all that fired up about exercise most of the time. That's awesome. This guy created P90X, which has just destroyed me one on one. That is fantastic. So how does he get himself to work out if he's not fired up most of the time? Well, he has this great story. He says, look, I've got. Let me use a different piece of chalk here. That one's squeaky. I've got different voices in my head, right? He's got. We've all heard of, you know, kind of the angel, right? Then you got the devil. We're used to that. But what he says is, look, those aren't the only two voices in your head. And when you do the math, he comes up with something hilarious. He says, look, his angel is hanging out in his head. When he wants to work out or he's got a workout planned, his angel comes in. What percent was it? 21.21.35% of the time, his angel comes in and says, tony, let's go do this. This is going to be an awesome workout. Let's go crush it. Yeah, right. He's the positive version of him. Then the devil comes in. The devil comes in. 35. He's very precise. 35.4% of the time, Devil takes over the airwaves and says, dude, come on. Working out. We're not going to work out today. No, no, no. Right. So he's got the angel, he's got the devil. But his trick is he has the voice of consistency. The voice of consistency shows up. What do we got here, Tony? 43.25% of the time, he's got his voice of consistency. Now, the voice of consistency, he says, is about as interesting as a wet rag. The voice of consistency says, tony, it's time to work out. Let's go workout. No drama to it. But it's the voice of consistency that knows that if he wants to achieve the results he's committed to, he's got to show up. Now he says, look, if these guys were duking it out, I'd lose. But I've got this voice of consistency. You throw the 43% with the 21%, 64% plus, we can win. We can take over the airwaves and dominate the devil and go work out. So keep that in mind. When you're thinking about how you don't want to work out, think about Tony Horton. P90X. He doesn't want to work out most of the time, but guess what? He doesn't anyway. He has this voice of consistency and he shows up and does what needs to get done, whether he feels like it or not. The cornerstone of willpower, which is the greatest predictor of our well being and everything else we want in our lives. So voice of consistency gets yours rocking. Go crush it. Final big idea. Functional optimism. I really like this one as well. Functional optimism. So we've got functional training, we've got functional medicine. Functional optimism. And he says, look, being optimistic isn't about just believing that you can achieve the things you want in your life. Very important. But it's not just that. It's believing that you will create the life that you want because you will do whatever it takes for however long it takes to make it happen. You will take action. So it's positive belief plus positive action. That's functional optimism. Functional optimism. Really cool idea. You believe and you know you're going to do what it takes to get there. Functional optimism. So there you go. It's a quick look at the big picture. More in the notes, obviously. A lot more in the book. Hope you dug it. Do your best, forget the rest. Don Miguel Ruiz's fourth agreement. Just let go of all that chatter and show up. Do your best. Forget the rest. Find your purpose. Focus on the intrinsic stuff. Becoming a better human being, deepening your relationships, making a contribution to your community. More than the extrinsic stuff of being hot, famous and wealthy. If you're focusing here and obsessing about that, you will be less psychologically stable even if you're succeeding and, and you think you're going to succeed because that's not how human beings are wired. We're wired to care about people, we're wired to give ourselves to the world. If you aren't focusing on that, you're going to struggle, you're going to suffer. That's a good thing because it's going to get you geared back toward where you need to be. Failure is the new awesome. Yeah, celebrate it. Can't have success without failure. Therefore, it's awesome. Voice of consistency. We did our math, the devil, the angel. We've got that wet rag of consistency that just gets us to do what we need to do when we need to do it. It's a good voice. We want to give more airtime to that functional optimism. I believe it and I'm going to do whatever it takes to get it. Good equation. Hope you enjoyed this quick look and what was your favorite big idea? As always, how do you take whatever landed most for you, which was just a reminder what you already knew? How are you going to make that a deeper embodied part of your reality? Figure that out. Theory to practice. And I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.