PNTV: You Are Special by Mister Rogers (#424)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, you are special by Mr. Fred Rogers, subtitled words of wisdom for all ages from a beloved neighbor. Now, we did recently four PNTVs in a row on Navy Sea of wisdom, David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Mark Devine and Adam Brown from Can't hurt me. Discipline equals freedom. Staring down the wolf and fearless. So I thought it might be nice to round it out with a little Mr. Rogers wisdom. We're going to do three PNTVs in a row on three books by Mr. Rogers that I read after watching the brilliant documentary won't you be my neighbor? Documentary called won't you be my neighbor. If you haven't checked it out yet, I think you will be as moved and inspired as I was to watch this humble hero behind the scenes as he gave himself fully to his television show serving children, which as you may or may not have known, was his ministry. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister and his ministry assigned to him literally was to offer his show in service to kids and families around the world, which is astonishingly inspiring. And then this book is a quick reading, all three of the books we're going to feature. Just a tiny little collection of wisdom from Mr. Rogers across various sources. Super moving and again, just so inspiring. He's just an exemplar of warmth, kindness, calmness. And I found myself as I steeped myself in his mind and his wisdom and his energy, becoming a better husband, a better father, as I strive to be more like Mr. Rogers. So we're going to share a few thoughts. First one here, then we'll look at our five big ideas. Of course, we've got the philosopher's note. We have 600 of them. And at Optimize me, we've got the apps. We've got all the things we've got. So Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers tells us when we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is the lovely with the unlovely, the strong, along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade. And of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way. Always important to remember we cannot give to others that which we do not have within ourselves. So first idea here. Be the best you. Be the best you. Of course, I love that for a number of reasons. And I'm going to share a poem that often showed up in Mr. Rogers from the poetry lady. But first, again, optimize is from the Latin optimus, which means the best. The best. The best you. Not the best in an external perspective per se, but the best you showing up with eudaimonic joy, living heroically in your own idiosyncratic style. Here's how Mr. Rogers, via his poetry lady, puts it in youn are special, he says, and he's actually quoting a poem by Douglas Mallock. If you can't be a pine on the top of a hill, be a scrub in the valley, but be the best little scrub by the side of the rill and be a bush. If you can't be a tree, if you can't be a highway, then just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. It isn't by size that you win or you fail. Be the best at whatever you are. I just love that. Let's quit comparing ourselves to anyone else. Oh, I should be doing this because that person does it, or whatever. That is toxic. As the Greeks said that envy is literally, this is Socrates. Envy is the ulcer of the soul. Envy is the ulcer of the soul. Quit comparing yourself to people. Modern science agrees the more you compare yourself to people, the less happy you are. Happy people don't spend a lot of time thinking about other people. When they do, they're celebrating their gifts. They're too busy. Happy people who are flourishing, giving their gifts to the world. Which leads us to Martin Luther King, who echoes that wisdom. And he says this. Whatever your life work is, do it well. Do it so well that no one else could do it better. If it falls on 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. So what is your role in life? Work, love, wise mother, father, parents. Sibyl, what roles do you play in love, in your life? And what roles do you play in work? Play that role as well as you can. Be the best you. We're going to talk about the fact there are no perfect people in our idea down here. No perfect parents, no perfect kids, but be the best version of you that you can be. That's tied for first as our number one job in life. Another one of our number one jobs in life, Mr. Rogers tells us, is to encourage others. To encourage. This is actually worth checking out too. He says our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each of us really is that each of us has something that no one else has or ever will have. Something inside us that is unique to all time. It is our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression. We've talked about this before, but the word encourage is one of my favorite words. Encourage to literally inject with courage and hope in a belief that a better future is possible. As Admiral William McRaven, one of the Navy SEALs we featured, said, hope is the most powerful force in the universe. To give people hope, to give people courage is our job. And again, we can only do that if we have courage in our own lives. And of course, there's a beautiful cycle there that as we encourage others, we feel more courage. And as we demonstrate more courage, we feel more confident in giving that to others. And again, I often juxtapose encouragement vis a vis compassion. Compassion is a virtue, of course, and a powerful one. Of course it means to suffer with. We want to slow down and be able to and willing to have compassion and suffer with others. And again, we need people that are really out there living their heroic best lives who can encourage the same people who need compassion and show them what's possible. That's our job in life. Help people see their uniqueness, see how they can use life's challenges as forces and fuel to get better. And then we have. I like you. I like you, Mr. Rogers. That's just the way you are. You don't need to change a thing. I like you. I L I K E Y O U We just started watching Mr. Rogers in our house. We don't have a TV. The kids have watched a few, like documentary type of things, but on the computer. Recently, literally in the last couple of weeks, we started sharing Mr. Rogers with them. And it actually started because I was coming back to PNTV and I was thinking about doing these in black and white. Post production in black and white. Now we decided just to go black and white as kind of a retro ancient wisdom, modern science. Here we go. Approach. And I googled who had the last black and white TV show. As it turns out, it was Mr. Rogers. So we watched that first, well, the last black and white episode Mr. Rogers had, but also we watched the first episode of Mr. Rogers. And in that first episode he sings this song, I Like youe. Well, check out the link we'll have in the notes here. I highly encourage you to check out that video and to feel his presence. If you haven't ever or you haven't recently and it was amazing for me to watch Eleanor and Emerson be transfixed by this beautiful man talking in calm tones, teaching them cool things and telling them, I like you just the way you are. What a gift to accept ourselves completely and to be seen completely by others. Eleanor. So now they've watched a few more episodes. They love Mr. Rogers and we love inviting him in his ministry. You're welcome. We, we want you, Mr. Rogers, to help create the culture of virtue in our little family, in our community. And we need to be mindful about what inputs we allow into our families. As Mr. Rogers said, like, he never changed the production value of his show. 900 shows, three decades of production. More than that, right? He stayed the same. Simple. Said everyone else is going fast and bashing people over the head. He's like, no, no, that's not what kids need. Kids need a structured environment, calm, supportive, beautiful, engaging connection. And we find that to be deeply enriching. So anyway, Eleanor said to her, mommy, mommy, I like you just the way you are. It's one of the sweetest things. So check that out. And if you feel inspired, invite Mr. Rogers into your family. I wish he was our neighbor. We get him virtually. Now we get to a side of Mr. Rogers you may not be as familiar with, which is the creative side of Mr. Rogers and the challenges that he faced. Can you believe that the mild mannered Mr. Rogers often felt like he was going through what he called the tortures of the damned in order to create for us and for our kids and our families. And perhaps as a kid. We watched him growing up. I did, yeah. Mr. Rogers wasn't easy for him. Powerful stuff. I actually shared this quote with Cal Newport in one of our chats. And he loved it so much, I sent him a framed kind of picture of this. This was actually in the documentary. Mr. Rogers typed this out on lined yellow ruled paper, right? And I did a screen grab of it and I posted it on my own little corkboard thing in my office. And I read it to Cal. He loved it so much, I sent him a framed gift. And it was actually in his office behind him while he was doing our live luminary session for our optimized coaches. It was pretty awesome to see. But here's what Mr. Rogers says now. This is after he created hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes of Mr. Rogers. Then he took a little break, then he came back, and this is what he wrote. As he struggled creatively to try to create something that he thought was great, he said, am I kidding myself? That I'm able to write a script again. Am I really just whistling Dixie? And again, imagine him typing this out on yellow lined legal paper. If I don't get down to it, I'll never really know. Why can't I trust myself? Really, that's what it's all about. That and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. Then all caps. After all these years, it's just as bad as ever. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned to try to create. Oh, well, the hour cometh, and now is when I've got to do it all caps again. Get to it, Fred. Get to it. But don't let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn't. Ah, so good. Again. We all think that someone like Mr. Rogers, heroic guy. We talked about this in our last PNTV on the hero with a thousand faces. The myth of the hero is that it's easy, that they were blessed with some divine natural talent. We miss this part of the story that Mr. Rogers went through the tortures of the damned, and that meant something for him as a Presbyterian minister, to try to create something of value. In the note, I quote Ira Glass, the great creator of NPR's this American Life, who tells us the same thing that great creative artists. There's always this standard. We never quite hit it. And we always feel a certain sense of despair that we're not quite hitting what we know we're capable of hitting. But you got to show up, you got to produce again and again and again and move through these tortures of the damned. Go into your discomfort zone to reach your infinite potential. There you go. Thank you, Mr. Rogers, for having the courage to do so. Which leads us to the next and final idea. What Mr. Rogers is more than anything and what he encourages us to be more than anything, is a living example of what we want to see in the world. So it's Gandhi's idea of be the change. My life is my message. Mr. Rogers life was his message. Who he was, how he showed up with his presence, his calmness is what taught us the most deeply. I reference good parenting in the note and quote Angela Duckworth. The word parenting literally means to bring forth. But she says, look, people aren't listening. Kids are not listening to us. They're imitating us. Are we being a living example? And it's the same thing with our clients and our colleagues. Everyone. They're not listening to us. They're seeing who we are and what we're doing. Again, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, what you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say. So let's be radiant living examples of what's possible and what we want to see in the world. And again, know that there are no perfect parents. There are no perfect kids. Mr. Rogers tells us that. Abraham Maslow tells us what one can be, one must be. But he's never met one perfect person. And you and I will not be the first, as I like to joke, but we can be living examples. We can be willing to go through the tortures of the damned to go give our gifts to the world. We can like ourselves and we can like others. As we remember our job in life, which is twofold, to encourage others to be the best versions of themselves and to be the best versions of ourselves, whatever that looks like idiosyncratically for us, let's play our roles well today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Bryan Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hey guys, this is Bry. Hope you enjoyed that video. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about, so I just wanted to give you a super quick tour of our site, tell you what we do. We do two primary things. We have an optimize core membership and we have an optimized coach certification program for people that want to go from theory to practice to mastery. So the core membership is basically 10 bucks a month depending on whether you do monthly or annual. And you get instant access to over 500 philosopher's notes, the six page PDF, you know, 25 minute or so MP3 recordings of these great books. And then you get over a thousand optimized plus ones, 50 optimal living 101 masterclasses, et cetera. And we have a free trial the team set up, get it, you know, free for 14 days and then go from there if you like it. So we're blessed to have a lot of people who subscribe to this, including some of my friends who happen to be some world class peak performance gurus like Tal Ben Shahar, who taught the two of the largest classes in Harvard's history. Starts every day with Optimize. Ben Greenfield, friend and coach optimizes bar none. 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We have trained over a thousand optimized coaches from over 50 countries and yeah, really excited about this. This is one of the core levers for us to fulfill our mission to change the world one person at a time together starting with you and us today. We've been told that here's one little thought and we have hundreds of testimonials you can check out about how it's transformed people's lives. And if you want to be a coach, your coaching practice now. Half the people who do this want to be coaches. The other half just want to master their lives. But Barb, a coach of ours, says I already had two coaching certifications but Optimize Coach was indisputably the most valuable I have taken. Thank you, Barb. Honored to be part of your life. You can learn more about what we're doing with Optimize Coach at Optimize Me Coach. There you go. Hope you're doing great. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See ya.