The Study of a Good Hero and How To Create Antifragile Confidence + Heroic Courage + Response-Ability (via Module II.1 of The Optimize Mastery Series) (Preview)

You're listening to optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the optimize mastery series. Today we're going to discuss module 2 Hero Ology, the study of a good hero. Last session in module 1 we covered eudaimonology, the study of a good soul. This session it's all about the study of a good hero. And that would be you. We're going to talk about how to create antifragile confidence, heroic courage and responsibility to all of life's challenges such that we can use those inevitable obstacles as fuel for our optimizing and our heroic quests. This is going to be a three part module. In part one, today's session, we're going to take a high level look at the rules of the game again. Last week, last session we talked about knowing the game we're playing eudaimonia via arete, becoming the best version of ourselves. We can be that eudaimon to be the hero and the most heroic version of ourselves. Well, if that's the case, we want to know the rules and we're going to talk about rule number one and then define some terms. Antifragile, confidence, etc. Then in our next two sessions we're going to talk about how to train like warriors and to stockpile our armamentarium, which is an old school word that means arsenal. We want to have a set of tools and weapons to show up as powerfully as we can in this precious life and heroics quest. All right, so module two, hero, the study of a good hero. Three parts today, session one, big picture. As always, 10 big ideas. Let's take a quick look and then we'll jump in. Big idea number one. Know the rules of the game and meet your trainer. The number one rule of the game of moving from optimize equals optimist equals best equals judaimon equals human hero. Well, you need to know it's going to be challenging and you're never going to be exonerated from those challenges. It's an important rule to recognize. The second idea, we're going to define some terms throughout the next several antifragile. What does the word antifragile mean? Well, you can be fragile, you can be resilient, or you can be the opposite of fragile. The more life kicks you around, the stronger you get when you're anti fragile. We're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about falling seven times, rising eight and getting stronger each time. Everything becomes fuel for our growth. When we have an antifragile mindset. The third idea is confidence. Do you know what the etymology of the word confidence is? Confidere means intense trust. In what? Not in everything going perfectly, but in you having what it takes to do what needs to get done, no matter what happens. That's antifragile confidence. The fourth idea, heroic. Again, ancient etymology of the word hero. It does not mean killer of bad guys or tough guy. The word hero in ancient Greece meant protector. A hero has strength for two. A hero is willing to do the hard work to cultivate that strength. We're going to talk about the hero's journey. The fact you're going to battle dragons, not lizards. You want to wear your scars like metals and see these challenges as indicators you're on the right path. The fifth idea, we're going to define courage. Again, etymologically, the word courage comes from the same Latin word as heart. Courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. Just like your heart pumps blood to your arms and legs and vital organs, courage does that for us. It's the hero's heartbeat. We're going to talk about the fact that it's not about having no fear. That's silly. That's a vice of excess. Courage. Right? We don't want to be cowards, but we also don't want to be rash. We want to use fear to open the fear doors and step into our highest potential. The sixth idea is responsibility. Responsibility, our ability to respond. Stimulus, response. In that gap between a stimulus and response, Victor Frankl tells us, is our freedom. It's Stephen Covey's habit. Number one, be proactive. Ultimately, this is what it's all about. Can you choose the best response to any given situation? That's our sixth idea. The seventh is after defining those terms, antifragile, confidence, heroic courage and responsibility. You need to make a choice. Victim or hero, which is it going to be? And guess what? We're not going to make that choice once. We're going to make that choice again and again and again. Recommitting. And we're going to spend a lot of time on the juxtaposition between victim and hero over the next couple of sessions. We're going to take a high level look at it today. Then the eighth idea is we're going to flip that switch again. You face a challenge in your life, flip the switch, get your mind and your body right. Channel that optimist, best version of yourself. We're going to talk about some hero mantras, some hero Prayers and hero presence. The ninth idea might be the most important in all of our work together. Heroic stamina. My coach, Phil Stutz, calls this emotional stamina. The basic idea is the worse you feel, the more committed you are to the protocol. If we get only one thing across in our work together, make it this one. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. Of course, this begs the question, what's your protocol? That you have clarity on that and that you're committed to working it. Gotta get our energy dialed in. Zest is the number one virtue, remember? Then our tenth big idea is a fun one. Hero sandwiches. We're gonna get fueled up between here and our second and third sessions with a hero sandwich. We're gonna take that obstacle you've been faced with. We're gonna make that the meat of your sandwich. You're gonna have bread, top, bottom, wisdom, self mastery. Then we're gonna add some virtue to it. So you eat your obstacles and use it as fuel for your optimizing and actualizing in your heroic quest to give us all you got. Those are the 10 basic ideas. Let's jump in. Alright, our first big idea. We got to know the rules of the game we're playing. And we're going to meet our trainer. So again, Module 1, Eudaimonology. The study of a good soul. We learned the ultimate game we're playing. We asked Aristotle and Seligman. Hey guys, we what's the ultimate game? They both said the exact same thing. Eudaimonia via arete. You want to flourish and actualize your potential via living with virtue. Putting your virtues into action. Right? So we've got our little lanyard. Which we give to our coaches at graduation. What does it say? It says optimize equals optimist. Best equals eudaimon. But we don't stop there. We then go to equals hero. We want to move beyond just actualizing ourselves for ourselves. To become the best version of ourselves. In service to the world. Living heroically, having that strength for two. To give ourselves most powerfully. Now, what's the number one rule when we play that game? The number one rule is. It's going to be challenging. We need to get rid of the naivete that says it's going to be easy. You remember the choice of Hercules? The two goddesses. One kind of crowded in front of the other. All overly dressed and made up. Right. She said her name was Eudaimonia. It was happiness. But her name was really Vice. She promised a life of ease. And then the other virtue. Sat there more stern, simple beauty, and said, no, no, no, no. Life isn't going to be easy. A good life isn't going to be easy. You will be faced with challenges, and that's how you're going to earn the honor of the gods. Which leads us to our training partner. Then we're going to talk about some ideas from Phil Stutts and Ray Dalio to bring the point home. So at our graduation, I actually read a couple of passages from Epictetus discourses. Here we go. First, check out the philosopher's note. Of course, Epictetus tells us the true man or woman, of course, is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic class material. But this is going to take some sweat to accomplish. From my perspective, Epictetus says no one's difficulties ever gave him a better test than yours. If you are prepared to make use of them the way a wrestler makes use of an opponent in peak condition, how awesome is that? Your challenges. It's as if your trainer, God, or however you want to frame it is giving you an opportunity to practice your philosophy and to ask yourself, well, how bad do you want it? Do you really want to actualize your potential in service to something bigger than yourself? Well, get to work. Get on that mat with that young buck that Epictetus talks about. William B. Irvine, another great Stoic philosopher, scholar, and practitioner, wrote a book on the exact theme. It's called the Stoic Challenge. Check it out. He approaches every challenge he has in his life as if the, as he calls them, stoic gods are blessing him with an opportunity to practice his philosophy. And it ranges from the mundane stuff, like he's at an airport and his plane is delayed and he's got to stay the night. He'll literally be there. Everyone else is complaining, and he'll say, ahaha. Thank you, Stoic gods, giving me a challenge to practice my philosophy. Oh, we got to stay the night, goes to the hotel, checks into the room. It's totally disheveled. It's just a mess. He says, oh, very clever Stoic gods, giving me even more of an opportunity to practice my philosophy. And he shares another story which I found amusing. He's into rowing, and he says, I'm not that great of a rower, but, you know, I do it, and I show up and he competes at these meets, and apparently they're kind of handicapped. So depending on your age group and your skill, Level, whatever. They'll discount the amount of time it took you to finish the race and handicap you. Kind of like in golf, right? Anyway, he's not good. He never places. And then he does this one race and he's just crushing it. And he's just pulling and doing great and he gets to the end. He realizes he won. He's first place. He goes and gets a medal. He's bragging about it, telling all his friends. Yeah. And recapping every stroke of his push through the event. Right. And then all of a sudden on the loudspeaker, we have an announcement to make. William B. Irvine actually didn't win the race. We have a different winner. As it turns out. He got last place. And what did he do? You said, oh, stoic gods. Giving me another challenge to practice my philosophy. Now, those are mundane examples for the bigger heroic quest. We want to have the same attitude as we approach our lives. How funny is that? Imagine being at that row. Meet first place. Nope. Last place. Opportunity to practice. We're always getting opportunities to practice and one of the themes we're going to talk about today is use those opportunities, the small moments, to prepare you for the big ones. When we taught our first class of coaches, it was awesome. Week 1 Module 1 Eudaimonology Tuesday. On Friday, I'm out in the backyard doing some Spartan training. We've got a rope climb, we've got some wall traverses, spear throw, etc. Go up and down the 20 foot rope. Thankfully, safely, I'm on the wall traverse. Oops. I fall as just horribly as I could. Smashed my wrist, broke it, wound up needing 20 screws put into that. Right, Friday. I've got a session on Tuesday. I can't even see the surgeon until the following Thursday. I show up for the next session like this. We actually changed it in the middle of the course and said, no, no, no, we're not going to go from module one to module two. We're going to go from module one to module X. Antifragile responsibility. This is what we train for. Can you step in between stimulus and response and choose the best response with a smile, knowing that this is how we get stronger. All of which leads us back to rule number one. It's not going to be easy. Expect challenges. Three more things we're going to talk about here. Then we'll move on, talking about a lot of the practices we can engage in in sessions two and three. So Phil starts Ray Dalio and then back to Epictetus. Phil Stutts, my Coach I affectionately call him my Yoda and spiritual godfather. Wrote the tools and coming alive awesome. One of his primary ideas is the idea that we're never going to be exonerated. We're never going to be exonerated. And this may in fact be the number one cause of suffering. The idea that we should already be there, that we should be at such an evolved state that life no longer challenges us. Well, we need to know that there is no there there. And when we're evolving and striving to truly be the optimist best eurdaemon heroic version of ourselves, we've got to know that we're always going to be facing challenges and in fact we're going to be facing even higher level challenges. As we spiral up and have more and more power. We will never be exonerated. We need to expect what he calls glitches. So imagine you're feeling it, life is good, everything's working out. Oh boom, you get disconnected and the whole game. The ultimate, most creative act, he says in the universe is to catch a turnaround, right? So you have this glitch and you catch it and you see how fast you can use that to get back and to get stronger. It's a really powerful concept. When you do that, you spiral up and you grow consistently. And he says again, the most successful person isn't the one who doesn't fail. It is the one who's able to turn it around faster and faster and faster. Then we use our obstacles literally as fuel for our growth. Which just so happens to be exactly what Ray Dalio says. I'm actually reading our bedtime reading. Emerson and I these days is Ray Dalio's kid's version for his principles for success. Highly recommended. It's awesome. Emerson says this is a good book. He likes it. He likes the pictures. You know what Ray Dalio says? Well first of all, the main image Ray Dalio uses to describe his philosophy is the exact image Phil Stutts uses on one of our coaching calls. I actually took a picture of it, sent it to him mid call because it was literally exactly the same. Dalio says the point of life is to evolve. He has a five step process to success. The first step is you set a goal. Can you guess what the second step is? The second step is problems. You face problems, you have challenges, you have obstacles, goal, problem immediately baked into his five step process for creating success. Then what do you do? You diagnose the problem. You see, well, why am I getting stuck here? What's this obstacle teaching me. Then the fourth step is you design a solution to that problem. Then the fifth step is you do what needs to get done. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1. Goal. 2. Problem number one. Rule of our actualizing. 3. Diagnose it. 4. Design a solution. 5. Go do it. Turn it around. Use it as fuel. Which brings us back to Epictetus, who I think is my favorite teacher. If I had to channel any teacher. Epictetus. You read him in his intensity 25 now. 2000 years ago. Just awesome. We're back to his discourses. He tells us what would have become of Hercules, do you think, if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar, and no savage criminals to rid the world of, what would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously, he would have just rolled over in bed and and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort, he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul without crises or conditions to stir him into action? Rule number one. Know the rule and have a lot of fun with your ultimate training partner. Hey, this is Brian again. I hope you enjoyed that overview of a Mastery Series session and got some wisdom out of it. You can apply to your life today. What was it again? You can learn more about our Optimize Coach program at Optimize Me Coach. And here's a fun little video we put together featuring some of our optimized Coach graduates describing what they got out of our program and why they loved it so much. You can also check out hundreds of other testimonials at Optimize Me Coach. Have an awesome day and let's do this.