PNTV - The Message of a Master by John McDonald

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, the Message of a Master. The Message of a master by John MacDonald. This is an old school classic. 1923, quick reading, inspiring fable. Mark Allen, who's the publisher and owner of New World Library, tells the story of how he found this book. A guy driving a truck delivering books to New World Library said, hey, you got to check out this book. It's amazing. Went out of print. This is in 1990 or something like that, that this conversation occurred and Mark couldn't figure out who this guy was. And we still don't know a lot about John McDonald, but must have been an amazing guy because this book is fantastic, packed with wisdom, and he republished it. And here we are. And here we are. Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas. We're going to look at five of my favorite ones now. First, big idea, the mental house. The mental house. So John McDonald tells us the story of this master, a mysterious guy who offers these tips such that we can achieve whatever we want to achieve in our lives. The first step is to clean up our mental house. He uses a great metaphor. He says, imagine this house, and you approach it from the outside and it looks awesome. Beautiful house. Looks pretty good on the outside. You open the front door and what do you see? You see a mess. You see all kinds of extra furniture, thousands of pieces of extra things from furniture to just pictures everywhere, maybe old magazines and newspapers, all this stuff cluttering this house. And he says, look, most of us are like that. That's what our minds look like. It's just a mess. And the first thing we need to do is declutter our mental house. And what's cool is that when you imagine decluttering a really messy house as a metaphor for our minds, it actually mirrors what neuroscientists say. So neuroscientists tell us when you declutter, you're basically pruning connections. So neural pathways are constantly either being reinforced or pruned, removed. What fires together, wires together. When you do certain things again and again and again, you create new neural pathways. But if you stop doing those things, it's like decluttering. And you prune those pathways so they don't become as likely a habitual response, and you sprout. This is actually the word they use. You sprout new neural pathways, new connections, new neuronal highways on which your life can travel. So that's the first step and the first big idea. Clean out your mental house. Declutter. Get rid of all the stuff that just isn't serving you. All the thoughts and behaviors you do repetitively that just aren't optimal, prune them and start sprouting new ones. As you do that, think about your one thing. So if you remember the One Thing by Gary Keller, 1923, John McDonald describes basically exactly the same thing. He says, look, you need to focus your mental energy. We're going to talk about this in a second with intensity in one direction. If you're constantly going after a ton of things, you're not going to get anything done. So Gary Keller shares the Russian proverb, If you chase two rabbits, you'll catch none. And John McDonald says the same thing. We have a million different thoughts scattered and diffused. And what we need to do is focus our mental energy on one thing, not 100 things on one thing, and then align our lives in pursuit of that one thing. Big idea supported by the next big idea. Sustained intensity. So you've identified what's important to you. You let go of the trivial, many. That's a process in itself. If you don't know, then make your one thing. Be discovering your one thing. Turn off all the distractions and put a certain amount of energy, meaning a lot into figuring that out. So now, as you figure out your one thing, you want to have sustained intensity. McDonald makes a distinction between intensity versus tension. Very different things. You want to be intense, intense, but you don't want to be tense. The primary difference is intensity is putting your mental power in a focused manner. Tension is when you add fear to the equation. Essentially, you become attached to the outcome. You start keeping track of everything. You plant your seeds in the back, your one thing you're really excited about, but then you go dig it up. The next morning, you get tense, your breath gets short, your heart rate's going all the time. You're attached to the outcome. You're self conscious, you're pressing. You want to relax, have an intense calmness to you and go out and crush it. Sustained intensity. Now most of us get excited about things, then we change our mind. We don't sustain the intensity over a sufficient enough period of time to see results, whether that's habits or goals. We can have a New Year's resolution of, I'm going to do this every day. I'm going to meditate every day. We're fired up about it for a day or two or three or four. Gets a little Hard. And we give up. We don't sustain intensity. I'm going to create a business that does X, Y and Z. We get excited about it, we send a few emails, we draft a plan, we get going. Gets a little hard, we stop doing it. We don't sustain the intensity. Think of it as deciding you're going to go on a road trip. You live in la, you're going to go on a little road trip to San Francisco, hop in your car, you get some gas, you start driving. You're about an hour into it and you're kind of overthinking and you're like, well, do I really want to go to San Francisco? It's a long drive. I got a long ways to go. I'm getting a little uncomfortable. It's foggy up there this time of the year. Ma ma ma ma ma, bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. Paralyzing blah, right? Overthinking. And you decide, nah, nah, I'd actually rather go to San Diego. San Diego is amazing this time of year. I'm gonna go there. And you get off on the off ramp, you cruise back on, and instead of going north to San Francisco, now you're going south to San Diego. You do that for a couple hours. You go by your house, you wave, okay, you're going through la, now you're going to San Diego, and you change your mind again. You don't have sustained intensity in the direction of where you want to go. You're constantly changing your mind and you have 100 things going on, not one. Now, that example is obviously absurd, but we do that a lot. Check in and see if you have done that, and if you have a habit of doing that, and discipline yourself to make a choice, to decide, cut off other options. That's what the mature human being does. We realize we can't do everything, but I'm going to choose to do this and I'm going to stick to it until it gets done. That is the third big idea. The fourth one is related seeds. I love coming back to the metaphor of planting a seed in a garden and then the next morning going out and digging it up and seeing if it sprouted yet again. It's insane. But the. But that's how we approach so much of our lives. So those habits that we need to create, give them time. And the goals we're pursuing, give them time. As Mark Williams says in his great book, Mindfulness Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation, you need to measure your success in Things like meditation and other things that we're discussing not in clock time, but in horticultural time. Think about that clock time versus horticultural time. Horticultural one is measured with a stopwatch, seconds and minutes and hours, and the other is measured in days and weeks and months and years and seasons and years. That's what we want to approach our lives. Don't go into your backyard and dig up everything that you do and see if it's working yet. That's a great way to kill it. Quit obsessing about outcomes. Focus on the process. And then the fifth big idea here is Mr. Mo McDonald tells some great stories about as you figure out what your one thing is and you go and you hit the next goal, the next milestone, baby step, don't let up. We have a really weird tendency to allow inertia to come back in. We've created this energy. We achieve some goals and then we soften, we let go. He says that's when you need to recommit, create a new goal and keep the momentum going. And you'll spiral up and you'll get energy from that flywheel. That's so tough to get going. But once you get it going, it sustains itself. In the note, I talk about Darren Hardy, who talks about inviting Mr. Mo in. This is Darren Hardy, who wrote the Compound Effect. He's the publisher of Success magazine. He says, smart, small choices consistently applied over time equals the compound effect, equals huge results, equals a good thing. But we need to recognize that a ton of energy goes into creating new habits or pursuing goals. It's kind of like the shuttle launch. Almost all of the fuel is used in the very initial part of the launch. Once you get out of gravity's pull, you can actually tweak things very easily with very little energy. It's the same thing with our lives. We want to keep the momentum going. Steven Pressfield shares a story that when he turned pro, he worked hard, unbelievably hard, his first year to write his first novel. He committed to finishing his novel or finishing his life. That was how committed he was. So he gets to the end. He writes his first novel, the end. He's stoked, finishes it. He goes to see a mentor that evening, and his mentor tells him, start your next novel tomorrow, immediately. Keep your momentum going. Don't let it wither. That's Mr. Mo. He's our friend. We want to use him wisely, keep him at work. You hit a goal, set the next one. Hit it. You're going to get better and better and better and faster. And faster. Faster at approaching your goals. Don't dig up your seeds. Sustained intensity. Concentrate on your one thing with a sustained level of intensity. Don't be focused here and then go oh no, I kind of sort of want to be over here. No, I really want to be over here. Oh this looks great over here. Not going to get anywhere. Diffusion doesn't help. Concentrate your energy and then clean up your mental house. Prune and sprout and clean up all that muck and nonsense and old magazines and extra furniture. Give yourself some mental space by creating more optimal awesome thoughts and behaviors and all that good stuff. There you go. Quick look at the message of a master. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you. 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. 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