Quick Thoughts on Dynamic Tension

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. I am chillaxing here. I got a little long weekend. It's my birthday weekend. I'm turning 36 tomorrow, Saturday, pretty excited about it. Doing a lot of journaling and reflecting and not spending a lot of time online or worrying about working hard today. More just kind of feeling into the flow. Great meditation, great workout, great yummy food, some millet lightly cooked with some avocado and other yummy goodness in there. But anyway, I'm reflecting on, you know, my last year and all the things I'm really excited about from last year including getting married, finishing Philosopher's notes, creating all the PNTV episodes, deepening our relationship with Gay and Katie Hendrix, some of the stuff that were just really cool, spending a year in Bali, etc, etc that we did, I did last year, that has been awesome. Then I'm looking at the things that I want to create in the next year of my life and the things that I want to be. Who do I want to be in the next year of my life? And the number one thing is I want to be in integrity. I want to live my values and my virtues and even more integrity. And I want to be creative. I want to be super productive and creative. This is my number one signature strength. And I feel best when I'm creating powerfully. And I've structured my entire life around creating, you know, reading, writing, studying, sharing and just figuring out how I can live optimally, how I can embody these truths and how I can inspire and empower other people to do the same thing. And, and then my health and physical well being is a big thing for me. I summarize that right now with Radiance. I want to be radiantly alive. So looking at what I'm going to create, really excited about Optimal Living 101. We've got the CDs, we've got the class, we've got Optimal Living 101 TV shows. I'm going to finish the book and then over the course of the year I'm really excited to do top 25s on nutrition. It's a subject I'm really passionate about. There's so much contention and misinformation out there to do 25 philosopher's notes, create an optimal living program around it and create a book. Now I'm going to do the same thing for economics, personal economics, business and how to run a good business and then economic theory from a macro level, free markets, economies, et cetera. And then I'm going to talk about love and relationships and parenting as we get ready to have parents. I'm going to do 25 top books on that and I'm going to do the same thing on leadership and greatness. And that will probably take me more than a year. Still figuring out the details, but really excited about it. Mapped out what I'm going to do over the next 10 weeks before we head to Bali and really excited about the class optimal living 101 class that we are starting on Tuesday, May 25th. I'm just pumped up about it and I'm looking at what I'm going to talk about in the first class and just going deeper into a couple of ideas I'm really passionate about right now that I wanted to share with you in this quick video. So really quickly. Well, really quickly. If you haven't signed up yet, sign up. I think it's going to be awesome. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to do this class again. I am going to produce CDs on Optimal Living 101. Probably about 20 hours of content. We've created a really cool 10 week class, 90 minutes a week, starting Tuesday, May 25th. If cash is an issue, it's only 99 bucks, but if cash is an issue, get a scholarship. I just really stoked about everyone who's signing up and hope you can play. So in the first class we're going to go over why we should even think about optimal living. What the classic Greek philosopher said about it. Living with virtue, they called it Arete and I call it integrity. We're going to go into detail on that. Intention, impeccability, of course, the 10 principles that I go off on on optimal living 101 that really form the basis of my work right now that I've seen talked about again and again from all the great teachers. Now that's going to be half of the first class probably. And then we're going to talk about something called dynamic tension. This is a big theme of my work and, and something I'm really excited to go into now. I want to share some ideas right now and we've only got six minutes here, but I'm going to share a few and we'll see how much we can get into it right now. So the basic idea here is the required supplies for the first class will be a rubber band. See if I can get that on. So a rubber band put between two fingers, ideally between two fingers on two separate hands. And then you stretch the rubber band. Right. So my thumb is my current reality here. And then my finger pulling away is my ideal thumb. Current reality, finger pulling away is my ideal, right? So it's kind of like the thumb is being and the finger pulling away is becoming. Now there's a dynamic tension that exists there. And when I talk about things like the Tolle trap, what I'm talking about is not wanting to have any of that dynamic tension there. That's not okay. We've got to just be in the beingness, just in the thumbness. Right? And Tall Ben Shahar talks about this a lot and he's got some great ideas in his book Happier and the Pursuit of Perfect where he basically says that there's a different way we can orient to the world. We've got future orientation and we've got now orientation. We can have a negative relationship to the future and we can have a negative relationship to the now. And he says there are four archetypes. One archetype is the rr. It's the rat racer. The rat racer is all about the future. Future is positive. They don't care about now, they're just chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing rat racer, right? Then you've got somebody who's like, you know what? Rat racing isn't a good idea. Let's just be in the now. The now is positive, the future is negative. You're going to get in trouble. If you ever think about the future, just be in the now. Right? Well, that's a hedonist. According to Talban Shaharch, neither one of these archetypes is going to lead you to happiness, right? We need to have that tension that we get when we're stretching between our future becoming in our current being now. Some people experiment with rat racing and experiment with hedonism and then they give up. And the negative is in the future, future's worthless and the present's worthless. They're nihilists. He says the archetype we want to play in is the happier archetype, where we have a future goal that's worthy of us and, and that's authentic. It motivates us intrinsically. We're not doing something because we want to impress people. We are personally driven by it, right? And we're in the moment, we're enjoying the journey, but we need both. We need that dynamic tension right between the rubber band finger scenario. So we're going to talk about that a lot throughout the course because this is really a huge thing. And I think people jump between the rat racer, which is a lot of the self development discussion. It's all about More and more shiny toys and houses and cars and all that stuff. And then there's the enlightened teachers who are all about being in the now. And the fact is, we need to find authentic. I'm not into shiny toys, which is one of the things we're going to talk about. We've got two issues with how I see most people dealing with this tension. Number one, the question is, whose vision is this? Is this your vision? Or is it your guru's or. Or your societies or your families? Or either your self development guru or your enlightenment guru? We've got to create an authentic vision, right? It's all about, what do you really want? And I'm going to focus a lot on being in my journaling. We're not going to go into it right now. I talk a lot about being goals and creating goals versus having goals, right? Shiny toys do not create happiness. Checking off bucket list stuff, traveling and doing all the bucket list. Doing things that's fun, but that's not gonna. That's not sustainable happiness. Sustainable happiness is through being goals, being love, being joy, being appreciation, being kind and generous and energetic and enthusiastic. So we want to orient our vision away from shiny toys into being goals and into creative production goals. We're gonna talk about that a lot. So the first step is to create authentic visions and goals. Get authentic. Right? Step one here, create authentic goals. Again, we're going to talk about it in detail. And then step two, once you've created your authentic goal, is to hold the tension. And the way you hold the tension between your ideal and your current reality is through baby steps. You've got to take. I've got to hear baby steps. You've got to take diligent, patient, persistent action toward your ideal and love the moment while you pursue something worthy of you really, really big idea. And it's kind of like in an interview I did yesterday with Sam Rosen over at Thought Lead, Purposeful Product, we talked about follow your bliss. What's your authentic bliss? But you know what? That isn't all of it. And Joseph Campbell, later in his career, joked he wished he had said, follow your grunt, right? So follow your bliss and follow your grunt. You've got to take baby steps as you move toward your bliss. You've got to do the work, show up every day. Follow your bliss. Follow your grunt work. In Sanskrit, there's ananda, which is bliss, which is one of the jumping off points into enlightenment. And then there's tapas, which is literally to burn away impurities. It's like heat. You burn away impurities by working hard, moving toward your ideal. So really interesting ideas around dynamic tension. Holding the tension between our ideals and our current reality. Creating an authentic vision that's ours. Not our gurus, not our families, not our parents, not our societies, but ours. And then taking diligent, patient, persistent effort. And the basis of that is. You can't read it. Sorry. Consistency on the fundamentals. What are your fundamentals? It's going to be the. One of the big things we do in the courses. I'm going to help you identify what your fundamentals are, those bright spots in your life, to use language. From Switch, the great book on how to make change stick in your life. On what your bright spots are. What are the things you do in your life that work when you're on. Mine are, as you know, meditation, exercise, nutrition, creativity, and journaling. We're going to discover what yours are and then help you implement them over the days. Months, years, decades ahead. That's a really quick, meandering overview. Hope you dug it. I'm out of time. Have an awesome day. See ya.