PNTV: The Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard

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, another great book, the Motivation Manifesto. Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard. Subtitle 9 Declarations to claim youm Personal Power Brendon Burchard is one of the world's most popular self development, motivational and business marketing experts in the world. He's one of the top 100 most popular public figures on Facebook. And apparently he has something like two times as many fans as Tony Robbins on Facebook. To put it in perspective, members have been recommending his books forever. I've been meaning to do a note on his books and then he and I connected last week. Decided now is the time. Philosopher's Note, bunch of my favorite big ideas we're going to explore. A handful of my favorites. He's also got an Oprah life class coming up. Check it out. Sounds awesome. For now, five big ideas. The first one, motivation. What does the word motivation mean? Brendon walks us through a great description of and definition of motivation and then the process of how to spark, sustain and amplify your motivation, which is our second big idea, but starting with the root of motivation. I love the etymology of words. So motivation comes from motive, right? Motive is the reason for doing something. And motive comes from the Latin word motivus. Motivus, which means to move. So motivation is the engine for doing things, right? What drives us, compels us to take consistent action in pursuit of that which matters most to us. Motivus. We've got to move by cultivating our motivation. Now how do we do that? Well, Brendan walks us through three phases of the motivation process. First, we need to spark our motivation. Then we need to sustain our motivation. And then we want to amplify our motivation. Spark, sustain and amplify. Each of those three phases has two components to it, right? So first you need to get going. Well, how do you do that? You do that through ambition and expectancy. Let's talk about that for a moment. Ambition and expectancy. So if you want to spark your reason for doing something, your motivation, you need to have ambition, you need to have desire. You need to be really excited about creating something. If you have a tiny little bit of ambition or tiny little bit of desire, you're not going to have strong motivation. You want strong motivation, you need to have strong desire. You have to have a strong want. I want this. That. Right. That's our ambition. Now that's not enough though, to spark motivation. You can want something, but if you don't think you can get it, if you don't have expectancy, then you have more of a hope or a wish, not deep grounded motivation. So you need to believe you can get that which you want so much. We talked about rethinking positive thinking. If you don't think that you can get what you want, then you either need to build your confidence such that you think you can get it or you need to reduce that what you want and be able to match it with your confidence and then go to the next bigger thing after you've hit this other thing. But it's super important that you have both a strong desire or ambition and an equally strong expectancy or belief that you can have it. That's the spark phase. As we move through that, we get to sustain. So now you're fired up, you know what you want, you want it deeply and you believe you can have it. Awesome. How do you sustain it? You sustain it via attention and effort. Now again, it's easy to get fired up about something. We've all had a spark, fired up, going to do it and then a week or two later we wonder what happened. I was so on fire about that. I actually thought I could do it. But then other things got in the way. Well, you need to sustain it by bringing it to your attention often. Anything you care about, you want to check in on all the time. In my interview and session on Grant Cardone's 10x rule, he talked about the fact that you need to have a healthy level of obsession if you really, really want something. And if you want to sustain your motivation toward it, you need to put your attention on it consistently. Which means write it down daily, reflect on it in the morning or in the evening or both. But don't make it a New Year's thing where you write about it on January 1st and forget about it until October 17th. You're not going to sustain motivation that way. You need to give it consistent attention and of course you need to put in the effort. You need to take action consistently, day in and day out in pursuit of that which you aspire to have. If you want to sustain motivation, attention and effort, two components to sustaining. And then in amplify we have two more components, attitude and environment. Attitude and environment. People who sustain high levels of motivation have high energy and enthusiasm and joy for life. They go for it and they work on that. Brendon goes off. He's ruthless about the fact that you need to take control of your mind. These Things aren't happening to you. You're allowing positive or negative thoughts to dominate your consciousness. You need to create an environment. Well, you need to create an attitude or an environment in your mind, right? That's positive consistently, and that takes hard work. Then you need to create an environment, both your physical environment that inspires you and the people around you who inspire you. He's also really intense about the people who kind of steal our dreams or want to steal our dreams or dissipate our energy by not believing in and supporting what we're up to. We need to take care of the our environment if we want to amplify our motivation. So there you go. Quick look. Spark, sustain, amplify. In the note, I talk about how that's similar to the procrastination equation by Piers Steele, who, as I've said before, won the Nobel Prize equivalent in psychology for his meta analysis of all the research done on motivation. And he came up with his equation that motivation equals expectancy times value, which is exactly what we talked about here, right? Divided by impulsiveness times delay. We're going to talk about that more in our class on Procrastination 101, which is coming up this week, which could also be called Motivation 101. But for now, we're going to move on. Third big idea here is digital addictions. If we want to sustain our motivation, we need to notice how addicted we are to digital distractions. And again, Brendan, the second declaration. This book has nine declarations, right? The second one is that we need to reclaim our agenda. Reclaim our agenda. Too often we're just letting our days go. And he walks through the typical individual's day who's addicted to digital distractions. And he says, look, this is no different than an alcoholic who's addicted to the next drink or the gambler who's addicted to placing the next bet or whatever, right? So we need to realize that if we're waking up in the morning and the first thing we do is roll over and turn on our smartphones and check whatever emails or updates or whatever, just look at that and see are you addicted to that? Because if that's what you're doing, odds are you are. If you go through your day and you're kind of constantly being hit fed by those digital distractions, you're going to have a really, really hard time sustaining motivation. And in that equation I shared on Piers Steel, we had impulsiveness. Impulsiveness is one of the best ways to destroy your motivation. Digital distractions and addictions are a Cornerstone of that impulsiveness. So be honest with yourself. If you have an addiction, deal with it. We all have addictions in different ways. In the note, I joke about the fact that we all have that. And I work hard at creating bright lines so that I don't get taken over by these. And when I find myself being compulsive, I take a breath, I notice, and I choose a more constructive behavior. Except when I don't. So we all do it. But let's optimize and get better. Fourth one is your manifesto. So he writes a manifesto, super intense style. And he challenges us to write our own manifesto. Think of a one page document, even just a few sentences. And he says, identify three things. Identify your mission. What is the mission? Spark your motivation. What's the mission that's going to guide the rest of your life? Write that down in a sentence or two. What's your plan? What's the high level plan that you're going to engage in in order to execute that mission? And then what are the steps you're going to take today? Mission plan steps. Super simple but super powerful. Challenge yourself to write that down. Mission plan steps. What is it for you? It's a good thing to look at. Bring attention to it consistently as you take consistent effort. Fifth big idea. What are the qualities by which you want to be remembered? What are the qualities by which you want to be remembered? Brendan asks us, hey, if you died tomorrow, what would you want people to say about you? And specifically what qualities and what words would you hope they use to describe you? It's an incredibly powerful exercise. And when I first started doing some coaching, one on one work like 15 years ago, this was the first exercise I started with a eulogy exercise inspired by Stephen Covey. His whole idea was begin with the end in mind. You got to know your ultimate end. Who do you aspire to be? The most ultimate sense of how do you want to be remembered? What would people who attend your funeral say about you? Think about that now. Know what qualities, specifically the words that they would use to describe you. And then connect that back to today. We talk a lot about little tools we can use as a compass to guide our actions so we can live with arete more consistently day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, month out. This is a huge one. What are the qualities by which you want to be remembered and are you living in integrity with them right now? Every moment gives us an opportunity to embody those virtues. We need to translate that wisdom into action and into true embodied virtue. That's a super quick look at this book. Five qualities. Your manifesto, mission plan, steps. Let go of your digital addictions, notice it, be honest about it, put it yourself in airplane mode for a little bit more, create the bright lines, turn off the Internet at whatever time in the day, do your deep work, etc. We come back to this again and again because it's so important. And then we had the spark, sustain, amplify the components to those and we have our motivation, which comes from motive, the reason for doing something which comes from the Latin motivus to move. We want to move in the direction of our highest selves more and more consistently. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more. If you enjoyed this, I think you'll enjoy the book and check out Brendan's Oprah life class. Have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me, connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.