PNTV: The Golden Rules by Bob Bowman

150 countries don't have as many medals as Michael Phelps. He is the 2-time defending national champion. When the time comes, perform with confidence. Again, confidence means intense trust. You gotta trust you put in the effort. I like to say, in the faces of men and women, I see heroes. I see people aspiring to be their best in service to something bigger than themselves. That's why I do what I do. Sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven Compose music. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, The Golden Rules by Bob Bowman, subtitled Finding World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work. As always, we've got a Philosopher's Note. You can get that for free. Check out the show notes for the link to that. We've got 780 or something like that notes now. Now, I've been a longtime fan of Bob Bowman, who you might know as Michael Phelps's coach. Michael Phelps, of course, is the most decorated Olympian in history. He has something like 25 gold medals, which is more than something like 150 countries In the world. 150 countries don't have as many medals as Michael Phelps. And Bob Bowman was the guy behind Phelps who wrote the foreword to this book. Super touching, basically saying, I couldn't have done what I did without Bob. He's one of a kind. Now, in addition to working with Michael Phelps, Bob's worked with a ton of world-class elite athletes. He is the 2-time defending national championship swim coach at the University of Texas Austin. Right down the street. And before that, he won a national championship with Arizona State. He turned them around, made them a champion. So he's won 3 of the last 3 national championships. Extraordinary guy, super intense, super clear and focused. The Golden Rules— I'm excited to share some of my favorite ideas. Let's get to work. So Bob is all about what he calls the method. The method to his madness and to his brilliance has 10 core rules. I talk about them in the note. I'm going to go over them with you quickly now. So rule number 1, which we're going to talk about in depth in a moment, is dream big. Champions set a dream big vision. Again, as you're watching this, think about it. Are you doing these things? Do you have a big vision that motivates you? Rule number 2, you want to adopt an all-in Attitude, not a get-out one. Bob is very discerning in the individuals and the athletes with whom he works and trains. You better be all in. You have that big vision, boom, now we need to show up all in. He talks about the fact that, yeah, Michael Phelps had extraordinary natural abilities, but nothing compared to the way that he showed up. The consistency with which he dominated his protocol day in and day out is unbelievably inspiring. Separately, we have a note on Phelps's book called No Limits. Check that out as well. Rule number 3, you got to take risks and then you enjoy the rewards. Find that edge, get comfortable being uncomfortable, etc. Rule number 4, short-term goals lead to long-term success. So he's all about mapping out what you want, the big vision, and then systematically walking your way through the process, the system through which you will nail that. Again, we'll talk about a little bit more, but the way that he did this is just unbelievable. We'll talk about that. In the game plan idea we'll discuss. Then rule number 5 is you've got to live the vision every day. Again, Michael Phelps, I think it was 6 years, they worked out every day. Christmas, see you at the pool. Thanksgiving, see you at the pool. Birthday, see you at the pool. You got to live the vision every single day. George Mumford, uh, I didn't mention, but I met Bob Bowman on a roundtable podcast I did with George Mumford, who was Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant's mental toughness and mindfulness coach, as part of an Inner Game podcast I'll tell you more about that soon. But George Mumford said, look, Jordan never took a day off. Every practice, every moment, boom, all-in intensity. You got to live the vision every day. Rule number 6, you got to take a team approach to have individual success. Rule number 7, you got to stay motivated over the long haul. One of the biggest challenges, how do you deal with— rule number 8, adversity? He says you do it right, it's going to make you stronger. Of course, that's the cornerstone of antifragility. Rule number 9, when the time comes, perform with confidence. Again, confidence means intense trust. You got to trust you've put in the effort. You go from your training mindset where you're analyzing things to the trusting mindset where you let it rip. Again, he's got a ton of stories on, on both Phelps and others that are amazing. And then rule number 10, you got to celebrate whatever you've achieved, then decide what's next. We're going to talk about that as well. So those are the 10 golden rules behind the method. Rule number 1, you got to dream big. You may have heard the story of Bob. Bob. Boom. And he's like 30-something, right? And he's working with Michael Phelps, who is not even a teenager yet. He's 11 years old, and he can see his potential. And Bob's been kind of— he knew that he wanted to set records. He knew he wanted to work with super elite athletes. And here's Michael Phelps. This kid's got amazing potential, and Bob could see it. And he got together with Michael, who's 11 years old, and Michael's parents. He says, look, this is what I think we can do. Michael's a special kid. I think— this is 1997— in the year 2000, I think he can he can be part of the Olympic trials. In 2004, I think he can make the Olympics. In 2008, I think he might be able to, you know, do some stuff that's interesting. In 2012, I think he's gonna be hitting his peak, right? Goosebumps saying that. And his mom listened to it and she said, Bob, he's 11 years old. What are you doing here mapping out the next 15 years? What he was doing was dreaming big. As it turns out, Michael bought in, the family bought in, Team Phelps, and he did all of that and way more. Not only did he make the trials, in the year 2000, he made the Olympics. Youngest swimmer in I don't know how many decades. A long, long, long time. Then of course he did what he did in 2004, then he blew up 2008, and here we go winning more golds than 150 countries. How about you? Do you have a dream that excites you? You got to start with that vision of what's possible. You got to start with that wish, that dream of what you really want to do with your life. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment, but you got to start by dreaming big. Then You can't just put it up on a vision board. And again, Phelps had his clear vision. He was looking at his goals all day, every day. He'd know the times he wanted to hit. He was 13 years old. They sat down and said, all right, I want to break 3 records this time, this time, and this time, X months from now. And he nearly precisely hit those 3 world records. So he knew what he wanted to achieve, right? But then he had a plan through which he was going to achieve it. Again, Bob calls that your game plan. In the note, I talk about the science behind goal setting. Caroline Adams Miller, one of the world's leading, uh, practical psychologists, talks about this in her great book. I happen to write the foreword to that book, The Science of Goal Setting. You want to have specific, high, hard goals. Bob is an unbelievable case study in mastery of this. He knows exactly what he's going to have his athletes do every single workout. He writes it out in longhand. He's got his collection of notes over the last X decades, almost exactly like John Wooden, what he would do through his practices. But you want to set high, hard targets if you want to achieve this big dream of yours. He also tells a story about 1,068 days between the time he started working with one group of men and women who wanted to be at the— I think it was the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. 1,068 days before They had their systematic training plan that was going to take them from here to there. He says, look, if you're serious, you're dreaming big, you better have a plan that matches the grandness of your vision. And you're not going to do that on receipts, you know, from your last shopping trip when we used to get receipts. The book was written in 2016. You know, that you're kind of doodling on while you're watching a rerun of Law and Order. He says you got to step back, you got to take it seriously, you got to have a game plan. Rule number 4, that matches your big dreams. Rule number 1, rule number 4, all the way to rule number 10. What happens when you achieve your big goals or you don't achieve your big goals? But in this context, he shares the story of his own life, right? He's achieved all the things that he set out to achieve. Now what? Now what does he do? What's next? And he ran into, you know, a challenging time as he was redefining who he is. And he happened to be friends with a guy named Greg Harden. Greg Harden, bless his soul, he passed away recently. Wrote a great book called Be Sane in an Insane World. One of the world's leading mental toughness coaches from the University of Michigan. They were both at the University of Michigan. Greg worked with Tom Brady, Desmond Howard, all these great athletes, and they were friends. So Bob asked him, hey, you know, this is what I'm going through. And Greg says, you want to hear my honest opinion on this? Bob's like, I'm a little bit nervous about that, but yeah, what do we got? He basically said there are times in your life when you got to reinvent yourself. You got to figure out who the next best version of you is going to be. You got to dream big again. You got to create a new game plan. In the note, I talk about Jim Collins's new book. Phenomenal book. Jim is arguably— not arguably— he is the greatest living business strategist who spent 10 years of his life studying individuals and their path to creating extraordinary lives. And he talks about the fact that every single one of us is going to go through moments where we reach a cliff And it may be after a failure, or it might be after a huge success, but our life changes. We come to a cliff. And when we get to that cliff, we enter what he calls a fog, where the certainty we had before we hit that cliff is no longer there. When Bob's driving with Michael toward those big goals, that's very, very energizing and focusing. What happens on the other side of that? What happens when a dream either is fulfilled or dies? What do you do? You go to that cliff, you enter the fog, and you need to figure out what your next step is. stepping back and figuring out who you are, how you're going to give your gifts to the world. I talk about it in the note. Now I'm going to do one of these episodes on Jim Collins's book. It's tied for first as my all-time favorite personal self-development book. Wonderful, wonderful human being. The basic idea is you got to know your encodings. You got to know who you are at your essence. You got to discover them, and then you got to deploy them. You got to figure out how to get paid to do what it is you love to do. None of the people he studied did what they did for the money, but they needed the money to do what they love to do. Then you got to focus your fire. You got to figure out how you can deploy those encodings while getting paid over the long run. Phenomenal book. Check out the notes on both of them for more. The last idea here is the final words of the book. I often love to pull out the very last words of a book. You kind of get the essence of, of what the author's thinking about. Well, Bob wraps up this book by saying, you know what, when I was a young man, I thought I would be a conductor. Of an orchestra. That was kind of my vision for my life at the time. He says sometimes he chuckles because here he is and he's created a life through luck and through hard work, he says, maybe a little bit of both, in which he's been blessed to do what he does, helping these elite swimmers become their best. But he said, I wonder what people think when they watch the Olympics and they see these swimmers going as hard as they can to swim as fast as they can. What are they thinking that the swimmer is experiencing? He says, when I watch these swimmers, I see art, I see beauty, I see an absolute fierce commitment to excellence. It's a wonderful, beautiful passage. And I actually talked about this with Bob in our roundtable podcast discussion that, again, I'll share with you soon. Well, I was hearing him tell this story about his hero, Leonard Bernstein, right? And I'm like, dude, you've been a conductor. You're just conducting a different type of symphony of excellence, watching these elite athletes show up as their absolute best. What a joy. What a privilege to see that art and beauty in action. And then I shared in the note, And I'll actually read to you, uh, 2 things. One, Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King gave a speech, uh, a long, long time ago, 6 months before he was assassinated, in which he talked about what is your life's blueprint. It's a 20-minute talk. I'll link to it in the show notes. A 20-minute talk by Martin Luther King to a bunch of high school kids. And I had goosebumps even thinking about it. I watched it and I had goosebumps watching it just to hear his eloquence, to hear his poise, his calm confidence, his storytelling abilities is phenomenal. But the talk was, what is your life's blueprint? And he says, look, whatever you do, do with excellence. To quote him, he says, if it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. Whatever you do, do it with excellence. When I look at an elite swimmer or someone else committed to doing their absolute best, I think of Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman once said, in the faces of men and women, I see God. I like to say, in the faces of men and women, I see heroes. I see people aspiring to be their best in service to something bigger than themselves. That's why I do what I do. I can't see you. I'm staring into a blank camera right now, but I wish I could see you, look you right in the eyes and say, you are the hero we've been waiting for. Here are some golden rules through which you can show up as your best. We need you to show up as your best. Today is the day. It's time to— let's go it. So all that to say, great book. Check out the notes. Remember the method, 10 rules for excellence. You got to start by dreaming big, but then you got to do the hard work to actually game plan it. Then of course, show up. And you got to know that your life is going to be a good life. Joseph Campbell says it's one hero's journey after another. What's next? Get to the peak of one mountain, look to the next mountain that you want to climb, and then remember, anything you do with excellence is a form of art. It's a form of beauty. You are the hero we've been waiting for. How can you take— hopefully there's at least one idea today that jumped out for you, inspired you. How can you apply that wisdom to your life today? How can you move from theory To practice, to mastery on that idea. Let's do that together. Let's do it today. Make today another great day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya. See ya.