(Under 60 Days Left!) Behind the Scenes of Heroic Basic Training and Beyond

Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. Just finished my AM one deep work time block. 1 hour and 53 minutes following an hour of meditation during which reflected on these folks as part of my heroic meditation, which is part of our new heroic app, which is coming soon. April 9th. We're launching countdown is on. 60 plus days we train heroes. Check us out. Heroic Us. I am hitting the studio tomorrow. We've already got 5,000 people signed up. We are now offering the first 10,000 people who sign up will get 50% off forever. At Heroic US. We're going to charge probably $70 a year going forward, but right now you can get the first year and every year thereafter for 35 bucks if you're part of the first 10,000 people to sign up. We're already over 5060 plus days from launch. We'd be honored to have you join us. Cruise on over. We're going to help you move from theory to practice to mastery together in a social training platform. Again, learn more at Heroic Us. Last week I hit the studio for the introduction. Objective zero to basic training. So again, heroic is all about moving you from theory to practice to mastery. Together we have seven objectives in basic training in which I basically distill my Life's work. All 600 of those philosopher's notes, all thousand plus ones, all, you know, 50 101s that I distilled into our optimized coach program, which, as you may know, has been scientifically proven to change people's lives. We've had now 10,000 people from like a hundred and something countries sign up, half of whom want to be coaches, the other half just want to be masters. And I'm basically taking that program and distilling it even more and then of course, connecting it to practical tools to actually help you move from theory to practice to mastery. Anyway, nice to meet you, Hiro. You got to know the ultimate game. Objective one. Objective two, we got to forge antifragile confidence. Objective three, we got to optimize our big three energy, work and love. Objective four, make today a masterpiece. Today's the day. And then I go off on what our app will do. New Year's commitments are interesting. New Day's commitments are much more powerful, folks. So we have a am commitment process. Takes a minute and then you hit your targets all day, every day. Again, our app is designed by Metalab, the same company that built Slack, built Tinder, Uber Eats, Elon Musk's new business, Neuralink. We are taking personal growth to the next level. We're really excited about. That's our intention anyway. Objective five, Master yourself. We've got three disciplines I talk about in the intro and throughout my work. Structural, reactive, expansive. Then we dominate the fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering. All so we can do one thing. Activate your heroic superpower. We call it Soul Force. We have an equation for it. But if you think about who you admire the most, these are some of my favorite people. Right? What do they all have in common? They all have what Gandhi called Soul Force that Martin Luther King described in his I have a Dream speech. You also have a ton of Soul Force latent within you, and our app is all about helping you activate that more and more consistently. Kind of like a super engaged Eckhart Tolle power of now sort of thing. Anyway, that's a long prelude, actually, to what I intended to chat about, which is Objective one. So after we answer the call in the introductory session, in which I say, look, our world is facing historically significant challenges. We need you to show up as the best, most heroic version of yourself if we're going to have a shot at making a difference and changing the world together. So once we've answered the call, I encourage us to get really clear on knowing the Ultimate Game. One of the reasons we're struggling so much as a society, not just from the global pandemic of COVID 19, but from anxiety, depression, diabetes, cancer, etc. Political polarization, social injustice, environmental degradation. We don't. We're not playing the right game. So we're going to talk about this in Objective 1. You got to know the Ultimate Game to do this. We're going to invite Aristotle and Martin Seligman. I realize this is chicken scratch. I can bring you into my notes and you can see that each one of these ideas, this is kind of a style I've kind of mastered over the years. Creating content where each of those ideas has its own little thing. And I do multiple reps of this. I've got a tray down below me here. A lot of paper goes into getting this distillation of what I want to teach. But basically, if you asked Aristotle and Martin Seligman what the ultimate game of life is, they give you the exact same answer. Thousand second timer. I've already done, I think, 99 burpees so far. I do a set of burpees every 16 minutes and 40 seconds. That goes off. I keep my old school Timex watch. I use my Suunto watch for training. But anyway, every thousand seconds, I get up and I move there's a whole science around that we will talk about when we dominate the fundamentals. Sitting is the new smoking. But simply getting up like that changes your underlying physiology in some pretty astonishing ways. Longer chat. Anyway, ancient wisdom, modern science, agree the ultimate game of life is to live with eudaimonia, which Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, described as to flourish. How do you do that? Well, as you may know, I got a couple tattoos these days. That's Aristotle's one word answer to how we live with eudaimonia. To have a good soul to flourish, as Martin Seligman would put it, you got to live with arete, which literally means virtue or excellence, but has that deeper meaning expressing the best version of yourself not once in a while, but moment to moment to moment. You want to close the gap between who you're capable being and who you're actually being. The moment you do that, you live with arete, you are Bam. Other tattoo heroic. And there's the 512051. Can we in help create a world in which 51% of the population is flourishing by the year 2051? That's obviously what I've dedicated my life to, Tattooed my body with my most important goal, and that's again, what our entire movement is all about. As you know, if you're already part of our community, if you're not again, heroic us, et cetera, I should also say that our business is owned by our community. So we made history, as you may know, with the first crowdfunding Equity, crowdfunding of $5 million via the new regulations last year. We're raising another round right now, and if you would like to invest as little as $100, you can learn more. If we get qualified by the SEC to do what we intend to do, you can learn more about that at Heroic Us Invest, where I have a very long letter in which I share our vision, our mission, our brand promises, and our strategy of how we can and believe we will change the world 1% at a time, together. Starting with you and me and us today. Back to the programming. Here you got to know the ultimate game, Eudaimonic versus Hedonic will go off on this. Then you got to know that this is not a new challenge. This is a 2,500-year-old dilemma. We're going to talk about sets of twos. Five sets of twos. So two times five plus one. Two different heroes, two different goddesses, two different buses, two different mountains, and two different motivations. This is going to be a really fun one. We start with the choice of Hercules. We talk about Gandhi's bible, the Bhagavad Gita in Arjuna, we talk about the goddess of virtue and the goddess of vice. We. We talk about some fun experiences I've had. Anyway, we'll go off on this. It's going to be awesome. But the point here being this isn't a new challenge. It's a 2,500-year-old dilemma that just happens to be exacerbated by all the technology, attention, economics, social dilemma, et cetera. But here's something interesting. If you can go up a choice of Hercules, he's basically confronted by two goddesses. The goddess of vice pretends she's the goddess of happiness and say, hey, follow me. It's going to be easy, right? Why don't I just go to that little page? I got a little bigger picture there, I think. Prepare to be unimpressed by my sketch work here, folks. 2,500-year-old challenge. All right, choice of Hercules, Socrates and the Stoics loved this story, right? Vice dressed up as virtue, caca, or however you pronounce it, that was vice in ancient Greece, dresses up as happiness. And she tells Hercules, hey, follow me. Come up this mountain and life's going to be easy. It's going to be awesome. You're going to love it. Another goddess is sitting there at this choice point in Hercules life, and she steps forward and she says, no, no, it's going to be tough, Hercules. You're going to face challenges. But those challenges and overcoming them in service to something bigger than yourself will make you worthy of the admiration of the gods. You'll feel Eudaimonia, but it's not going to be easy. Her name was Arete, and those are the two pathways we can take that I'm going to extend into the two mountains that David Brooks talks about, the first mountain and the second mountain. Which one are you going to take? What society seduced you to go down? It's going to be easy. Just scroll through Instagram again or watch the super bowl and invite some friends over. And that's what life's all about. And again, that's all great, but there's more to life than just the hedonic good mood. As Ward Farnsworth puts it, you want to create a good life. Good mood, good life. One mountain, the other mountain. Extrinsic motivation, which is the other thing, or intrinsic motivation. Are you trying to get rich and wealthy and hot and famous and all that stuff? Again, nothing's inherently wrong with that. But if you are predominantly focused on that mountain, you will be less psychologically stable than people who aren't. Even if you're succeeding in that path, that quest, you want to focus on the intrinsic stuff, climb the right mountain, which is the mountain of becoming the best version of yourself in service to something bigger than yourself so you can experience eurdaimonia via arete, become a better person in service to something bigger than yourself while deepening connections, etc. Anyway, two heroes, two goddesses. I'll tell the buses story and then two mountains and two motivations. But here's the fun thing. If a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, you want to make sure your first steps in the right direction. Because if you go in the wrong direction, you can go a thousand steps or a thousand miles and be 2,000 miles away from the right destination. So understanding what the ultimate game of life is is really, really, really important. And if you want to flourish and experience a great life. And again, society has seduced us to think something else is important, but it's not a new challenge. Every single culture across all time have recognized this challenge. And they've also come up with the exact same solution to it, which is again, be the best version of yourself in service to something bigger than yourself so you can make a difference in the world. Cold Start Problem Phenomenal book. We're launching the social side of our training platform in October. That's good. Basically, how to create a platform with strong network effects and dynamicism there. Longer chat. Other business books. Business. I'm sorry. Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0. Jim Collins is my favorite strategist. And then Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is another great book. Longer chapter. Anyway, you got to know the game you're playing. You got to know it's not a new challenge. Then we're going to introduce you to your new BFFs heroic you. When you join our team, the first thing you get is your own heroic portrait. Because we want to challenge you to show up as the best, most heroic version of yourself. Literally, you join team Heroic, you get that boom. We need to connect you to that best version of yourself. That's the ultimate game, to more and more consistently express it. And we also want to connect you to your heroes. So my question for you in the basic training will be, who are your heroes? I'll ask you right now, who are your heroes? When I meditate for an hour every morning, which I'll teach in basic training, we'll talk about more. I bring Each of my heroes to my mind, and they give me wisdom every single morning. Well, we want to make those our new best friends. Science says you're the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. So spend time with your best self. Spend time with your favorite heroes. This is an ancient stoic practice. Your ideal sage who inspires you. Think about them. Try to be more like them. Because all the qualities you admire in them are latent within you. We just need to express them more. And then your other BFFs are your new buddies. Again, science says roughly. It's not quite it. What science says you are the average of the people you spend the most time with. It's actually shocking. But roughly five people you spend the most time with. Let's just say for the sake of that fun phrase, well, who do you spend the most time with? We're really excited to architect our social platform with that in mind, so we can surround you with the people who bring out the best in you and you and they. And we can support one another in showing up more and more consistently, etc. Anyway, meet your new BFFs. Then we introduce you to our heroic compass. Let me see here. I have two iPhones. One little dinky one here that I use when I'm with the kids. I open that. How do you spell bus? Is it two S's? Yes, it's two S's. Anyway, the app has a virtue compass in it in which we basically, you can kind of swipe up and find or swipe down rather than. And find the virtue compass at any moment in the app. And you'll see that the rings are eudaimonia via arete, the ancient wisdom on the ultimate purpose of life. And then flourish, it's hard to see by putting your virtues in action, the modern science take on the ancient wisdom. Then we've got the cardinal virtues. Wisdom, self mastery, courage and love, Hope, gratitude, curiosity and zest. These four on the cardinal points of our compass are the cardinal virtues of ancient wisdom and modern science. And then hope, gratitude, curiosity and zest are the virtues most highly correlated with flourishing according to modern science. And zest, by the way, is the number one virtue. We call that energy. Super powerful stuff. So I introduce you to that virtue compass. It's the first thing we designed with Metalab. I'll talk in more detail about the ancient wisdom that we've modernized. Wisdom, self mastery, courage and love. If all you did in life was figure out how you can live with more wisdom, more self mastery, more Courage and love. You'd be doing pretty well. And all those extrinsic things would come to you in abundance as well. But you'd be winning the real game. Wisdom, as we'll discuss in the class, is the ultimate virtue. It's the virtue that basically has you ask, which virtue do I need more of right now? A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It's a beautiful word that's been thrown into an ivory tower and become abstract. In the ancient times, as we'll discuss in the class, philosophers were warriors of the mind. They moved from theory to practice to mastery. They didn't sit there and catalog ideas. They weren't librarians of the mind, as Donald Robertson brilliantly puts it. Anyway, wisdom, self mastery. Did you know self Mastery out predicts IQ by a factor of 2 for academic performance in kids? Yeah, call whatever you want. Willpower, self control, self mastery, etc. But it's insanely powerful and you can teach it. We are obviously obsessed about teaching it in the app. That's how you move from theory to practice to mastery. We've got three forms of discipline I won't go into. Now. Courage. Aristotle said this was the most important. Virtue comes from the same word as heart. Corre in French, I believe. Pardon me, that's not how you say it in French, but Latin. French. Heart. Courage. Just as your heart pumps blood to your arms and legs and vital organs, courage vitalizes all the other virtues. We're also going to talk about the fact that, yes, there's too much of a good thing. There's a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. Of course, too much courage isn't a good thing. Too little courage isn't a good thing. We want to find the virtuous meaning. Love. We're going to redefine it and then practice it all day. We've got a fun retake on that. Those are the cardinal virtues. And then we've got hope, gratitude, curiosity, zest, and love again, which is the hero's secret weapon. These are the top five virtues most highly correlated with your flourishing according to positive psychologists. Thank you. Positive psychologists hope there's a science to hope. A really fierce, grounded, practical science. You got to have a goal. You got to believe your future can be better than your present. You got to have agency. You got to believe you can actually make that future a reality. Then you got to have pathways. Path A doesn't work perfect. Go for path B. Path B doesn't work perfect. Learn a little bit more, go for Pathway C, etc. We'll talk about this. Super cool. There's a vice of excess and hope, which is magical thinking. I don't throw shade often, but high secret. We want to ground our levity into gravity is how Barbara Fredrickson puts it. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about Gabrielle Oettingen's practice of whoop wish outcome, obstacles planned. You want to see what could go wrong in life. That's how you have real hope. Also know that if you don't have hope, you're hopeless, which is one step toward or at depression. Hope is really important. In fact, it's the second tied for second most powerful virtue, right behind Zest. Gratitude's right there. Tied with it eye popping stats is what the leading researcher talks about. Robert Emmons if you keep a gratitude journal in his study, you will be 25% happier than those who do not. You will sleep 30 minutes more than those who do not. You Will exercise 33% more than those who are not great Grateful. Try to be grateful and depressed. Not possible at the same time. Don't believe me? Try it. Obviously depression is much more nuanced than that, but try it. Live in gratitude. Live in gratitude. Live in gratitude. Stop looking at all the things that aren't right. Start looking at all the things that actually are amazing. Even in the midst of all the challenges and the despair, etc. We want to cultivate gratitude, which is also part of cultivating hope, etc. Then we want to bring curiosity to our lives. The metaphor I like to use here is the flashlight versus the hammer, which is a David Brooks idea. It's basically the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. If something goes wrong in your life, you can either hammer yourself over the head, thinking something's wrong with you and creating shame, or you can shine a flashlight on it and say, huh, wonder what I could do a little differently because I'm not getting the results I want. That's a growth mindset. Win or learn. Learning is winning. Therefore, win or win. We'll talk about how I teach this stuff to my kids as well. Just did it yesterday. Yesterday I watched the Michael Jordan I have Failed over and over and over again. Nike commercial, which Carol Dweck talks about. I watched that with Emerson as he was teaching himself how to catch a quarter off of his elbow and he kept on missing. Perfect. I said, be willing to miss. That's how you're going to learn. Hey, let's watch this video where we can talk about the importance of shining a flashlight on making mistakes and how the greatest basketball player ever missed more shots than he made. It's amazing what happens when we have curiosity in our lives. Zest is the next virtue we'll talk about again. This is the number one virtue, which is why, if you know my work, I focus so much on energy, energy, energy, energy. Applied to our work and our love. Your physiology drives a lot more of your psychology than you think. And then we come back to love. Love counts twice, folks. Love, love, love, love. This is actually what I'm most excited about in the entire app. I'm really, really proud of this. I think we figured out a way to operationalize love. Creating micro moments of awesome, responding to bids from your loved ones and celebrating those in your life again. There's a science to all of that that we will go off on in basic training and. And then, most importantly, we will operationalize. So we're going to commit in the morning to being our best selves. Setting a clear intention, having a checklist, atul gawande style. A simple checklist in your life. He says we'll make surgeons much more effective. We'll make airplane pilots much more effective. Well, guess what? If we want to arrive at our destination, we need to have, wow, we just blew through some thousand seconds plus. Let's go. We need to have simple checklists of things we're going to do. So every morning, I commit in our little prototype of our app. Tap, tap, tap. I'm going to create a micro moment of awesome with my kids. We'll lean on some Barbara Fredrickson wisdom on that. I already have. I've already done that. Let me show you actually real quick what that looks like. So here's the app. Let's see if I can gracefully get there. I will put that over there just in case. I got some stuff I'd rather not share with you as much as I like you. Let's see what we got here. Nope, that's not it. All right, here we go. So here's the morning commitment. Today's the day. Hiro let me actually go back. Can I go back? I think I can. So then this is a little video of pause that of the AM commitment process. So when you. When my aura ring is sinking, I spend a minute recommitting to being my best self in my energy, my work and my love. I have identities that we will teach you how to create. In my energy. I'm an athlete. We put lines over that because it's an ancient Greek word which means one who competes for a prize that's what an athlete is. I compete for the ultimate prize of being my best self in work, my identity as a leader, in my identity in love as a soulmate. Etymologically, that has deep meaning for me. You learn more about anyway, I tap on athlete, right? And then I see the virtues I'm committed to embodying today. Boom. I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be grounded, I'm going to be strong, I'm going to be calm, I'm going to be confident, I'm going to be energized and I'm going to be tranquil. Then I'm going to do this. I'm going to hit a digital sunset, turn my electronics off. I'm going to exercise, do a cold plunge. I'm going to meditate. These are the things I'm going to do to be that best version of myself in integrity with those virtues. Boom. That's energy, work. I'm a leader. I'm focused on what's important now. I have fierce ambition, personal humility, indomitable will, anti fragility. I'm going to recommit to my sacred vow. I'm going to do the most important thing. I'm going to shut down early. I'm going to read a philosopher's note. I'm going to have a clean desk ready for tomorrow. Boom. Leader. That's what I'm going to do. Soulmate. I'm going to be joyful today. I'm going to be grateful. This. I'm going to show up my love. I'm going to be celebratory, present, connected, encouraging. And then I'm going to do these things. I'm going to create a micro moment of awesome with a plus E1 plus E2 my wife Alexandra, my kids, Emerson and Eleanor. And I've already done that today, haven't with my wife yet, but my kids. We're going on an adventure. Soon after I get done with this marathon video, we're going to have an awesome day at 5 o'. Clock. I end my day going to deep love. I clean the kitchen. Little thing, but I clean the kitchen as a little act of love for my wife. And then I want to find little moments throughout the day with, as I said, Alexandra, Emerson, Eleanor. I want to do it with my team at work. I want to respond to bids, which is a longer philosophical chat I will briefly go into right now. John Gottman says that if you want to have a healthy and happy marriage, seven principles of making marriage work. Check out the philosopher's note at Optimize Me. If you haven't gone to optimize me yet. We've had like 150,000 people sign up since we made it free 100 and like something days ago used to charge $250 lifetime $100 a year for it. It's free. 600 philosopher's notes. This is the best book on relationships. Along with James and Susie Pawelski, John Gottman, the best researcher in relationships. He can watch people in his lab and predict with 90% accuracy which couple will get divorced and which will not. And that the principal measure he uses is whether or not you respond to a bid from your spouse. Nonverbal or verbal things like honey, can you get me? Is a bid. Your kid saying, daddy, look at what I made is a bid. The quality of your relationships will be dictated by the frequency with which you respond to those bids. You want to improve your relationships, immediately start responding to bids from your spouse or your significant other, or your kids or your friends or your colleagues. Create micro moments of awesome, little tiny moments of awesome throughout the day, which is again a Barbara Fredrickson thing, and then celebrate with your loved ones. Funny. It's not funny. It's actually sobering. The research shows that relationships, you can endure conflict, right? That's actually, it's a big deal. You want to navigate conflict well in a marriage, but if you can't celebrate well together, that's actually a really even more toxic thing. If your partner is really excited about something and they come to you and share that and you're like, whatever, or you find things that you know, just going to work with it, that's actually worse than some negative interactions can be. And again, nuance, conversation, etc. But it's super powerful. So we want to celebrate our own progress. We want to celebrate our kids and loved ones, et cetera, throughout the day. 1, 2, 3. Which again, notice in our app, I committed, I'm committing in the morning to doing these things. I want to respond to a bid from my loved ones. Then we've got some other things we do here that I do. Boom. I'll tell you what. You want to improve your relationship with your wife. Listen to her without interrupting, Listen to her without coaching. I already gotten feedback on how powerful that is from my wife. That's the AM commitment routine. It took me 10 minutes to tell you about it, but it takes a minute to do. Once you've clarified your identity, your virtues and your targets, which of course we walk you through, then when you actually do the thing you said you would do. Oh, I love that. You hit the target. This little swipe effect. Slack. I'm sorry? Metalab, as I said. Build slack and Uber Eats and neuralink for Musk, etc. They were also involved with Tinder. Now, when I knew that, I knew that Tinder's got their swipe right, swipe left, swipe right. And I just knew that we would be able to create something where imagine you set the target in the morning. We call this target practice for heroes. So I'm going to that one. 10, 100, 1,000, 10,030. It's something again if you follow my work. You know I do. Every day I do one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, 1000 meters of rowing, and 10,000 steps and 30 minutes of movement every single day. I've done it for years, except for days when I don't that I make up for the next day. Anyway, I commit to that in the morning. And then when I did it, I come to the app and I tap on the target there. And then a little thing is revealed, which is an arrowhead, which also happens to be the directional point on our compass, which also happens to be tattooed to my body. You pull it and you feel a haptic tension. Kind of like. What is it? Angry Birds? I've never played it, but that idea only. It's a bowstring at the tauttus point. Then boom, you release the arrow, you hit another target, you get a splash of dopamine for being the best version of yourself. How many of you hit today? What's your streak? What's your total hits? Boom. There we go. One more target hit. And that's how we're going to change the world. One person at a time together. Starting with you and me. And one virtuous act today. That was a long one. 30 minutes. All right, I got to go hit some of those deep love targets. Hope you're doing great. And one more time, we'd love to welcome you to our community heroic US founding members, first $10,035 a year, lifetime. We are committed to absolutely astonishing you. And we would be honored to be part of your life to help you be the best, most heroic version of yourself so we can change the world together again. One person at a time, starting with you and me and us today.