Want to Master Yourself and Serve Heroically? (Here’s Mastery Series Module O from Optimize Coach!)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. This is an introduction to one of our Mastery Series Sessions. We have 25 classes like this as part of our 300 day optimized coach certification program in which we help people move from theory to practice to mastery so they can master themselves, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Now, We've had nearly 2,000 people from nearly 70 countries go through our Optimized Coach program. About half of the people who go through the program are coaches who want to take their coaching practice to the next level or they are aspiring coaches who want to become full time coaches. The other half, and it's weird because almost exactly half want to do one or the other, are going through the program because they want to master their lives and become better executives, educators, doctors, entrepreneurs, moms, dads, and humans. Even though they don't plan to be professional coaches per se. You can learn more about the program at Optimize Me Coach. For now, I'm excited to share the introduction to one of those Mastery Series sessions. I hope you love it and if you're feeling it, we'd be honored to welcome you to our Optimize Coach program. Let's change the world one person at a time together, starting with you and me today. Hi, this is Brian. I am thrilled to welcome you to our Optimized Coach program and to our Mastery Series. I am holding a very thick stack of notes. This is my life's work in about a I don't know how inch thick stack that is. It is a brick. 300 day program. Our mastery Series. As many of you know, I have spent half of the last 20 years. I'm going to drop this brick. I've spent half of the last 20 years as a founder CEO. I've raised over $10 million, built and sold two businesses. And the other half of those 20 plus years as a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, studying, teaching and striving to embody the universal truths of ancient wisdom and modern science. In the process, I've created over 600 philosopher's notes. @ this point, en route to a thousand. We have 50 optimal living 101 classes. We have over a thousand optimized plus ones. But this is where we bring it all together in our mastery series, seven modules, 25 sessions spread over 300 weeks to help you move from theory to practice to mastery. We are absolutely committed to helping you master yourself so you can serve heroically and empower others to do the same. That's how we're going to fulfill our mission. To change the world, one person at a time, together. Starting with you and me today. So I am excited to give you an overview. This is module zero, the introduction to our mastery series. I'm going to walk you through those seven modules. Those 25 sessions give you a quick look at what's in store. Then we're going to wrap it up with a series of exercises, reflection exercises and practical activities. Action steps, our very first tool. We're going to have a lot of tools we want you to have ready at hand to go give the world all you've got. But first, we got to step back and look at our name. Right? So optimize is from the Latin optimus, which literally means the best. Now of course, in our case, we're talking about you as the best version of you. Now, in ancient Greece, if you asked those guys, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and even the ancient Stoic philosophers, Epictetus, seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc. If you said, hey, what do you call that best version of a human being? They'd say, we call that a eudaimon. So we go optimize equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon, which literally means a good soul understanding. That is our first module we'll talk about in a moment. But we don't stop there. It's not enough just to become the best version of yourself. And do what? Take a six pack selfie? You're going to post to Instagram? No, no, no. We want to use our gifts and use our self mastery in service to the world. We want to become and live as heroes. Now that has an ancient Greek etymology as well. The ancient word hero didn't mean tough guy or gal or killer of bad guys. It meant protector. A hero was a protector. A hero had strength for two. A hero's secret weapon was love. That's what our program is all about. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon equals hero. In fact, reach into my pocket full of goodies. Today, if you come join us at the graduation, you will get a lanyard with your name tag on it and it says optimize. See if I can get that. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon equals hero. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals udaimoan equals. Here, you're going to hear us repeat that again and again throughout our work. We want that best version of you. We call it the optimus U. To show up more and more consistently in service to the world. Now, our seven modules, I will give you a very quick look, then we'll take a little deeper dive. Then, of course, we'll jump in with module one in our next session. Module one is eudaimonology, the study of a good soul. Did you know the word psychology literally means the study of a soul? We jokingly say that they wouldn't have had to add positive before psychology had they started with eudaimonology in the first place. The study of a good soul. In this module, we're going to invite proxies for ancient wisdom in modern science to the party. Aristotle and Martin Seligman, the founder of the positive psychology movement. We're going to ask them, hey guys, what's the ultimate purpose of life? Come on, what is it? And they're going to give us one word answers. Then we're going to say, okay, that's awesome. Makes sense. How do we actually do that? And then they're going to say the exact same thing again. It's kind of fun. Ancient wisdom, modern science. If you look hard enough, you see these are universal ideas across all cultures, across all time. Eudaimonology is module number one. Then that's not enough, right? We want to become heroes. So we got to study hero ology. That's module two. Now, as you may know, I happen to be in a documentary featuring wisdom from Joseph Campbell, along with Deepak Chopra, Robin Sharma, Laird Hamilton, some other great luminaries. Right now, what we're going to do in hero ology is we're going to spend three sessions together operationalizing the wisdom from Joseph Campbell and others on the hero's journey. We are all here to live a modern expression idiosyncratically of our own unique heroes journeys. We're going to think about antifragile confidence. This is going to be a big theme of our work together. Antifragile. Not fragile, not even resilient. Anti fragile. We're going to define that and have fun with it. Confidence. Antifragile confidence. Confidence literally means intense trust. Not that everything will go perfectly, but that you have what it takes to respond to whatever life throws at you. That's true confidence. We're going to talk about heroic courage again, looking at the etymology of hero and courage and applying it to our lives, then responsibility. We as heroes can't afford to be victims. We need to move from victim to creator to hero. We'll talk about how to do that. Viktor Frankl says, I'll tell you right now, in between stimulus and response, there's a gap and what we need to do is get really good at stepping into that freedom. He says in that gap is your freedom to choose to express the best version of yourself. Antifragile confidence, heroic, courage, responsibility will be the themes of our hero ology. We're also going to talk about the fact that it's not supposed to be easy. When you go on a hero's journey. You fight dragons, you don't sidestep lizards. And sometimes you get cut up, you get wounded, you get hurt, you fall down, you fall short of your ideals. Fantastic. Get back up, apply some healing balm. We're gonna give you all the tools and provisions you need for your hero's journey. Self Compassion 101 is the cornerstone or the ingredients to our healing balm with no shame. We're gonna use everything as data to get a little bit better. That's module two, hero ology. Then all that's nice and warm and fuzzy. But we got to go to module three, which is the big three times two. We got to put it into our lives. Okay, that's nice. How do I live this stuff? Well, I'm a huge fan of Stephen Covey. I've learned a lot from Tony Robbins. Those guys say similar things. Stephen Covey says you got to know your roles in life and your goals. Robbins says you got to know your categories of improvement and then go get them. Now, those are awesome, but they're also potentially infinite and overwhelming. So for one of the very few times, I agree with Sigmund Freud, who tells us the good life is work and love. If you express yourself fully in work and love, you're doing pretty well. I think that's awesome. Big two, but I offer you need to get a third thing right, which is energy. If your energy isn't dialed in, you're gonna have a tough time showing up fully in your work and love. So we've got a big three. Energy, work and love. We're gonna talk a lot more about that. Then we times it by two. We wanna know you at your best identity wise. Who are you at your best energy, work and love wise? We're gonna talk about this a ton of what virtues do you embody? And then what are you going to do today to be in integrity with that? Which leads us to the fourth module, Carpe diem. Today's the day to move from abstract to concrete theory to practice to mastery. We're going to spend two full months, six sessions, helping you get the fact that if you want a masterpiece life, you need to create Masterpiece days. At the end of this, you will be moving towards certainly becoming a master of creating masterpiece Days. We're going to help you systematically architect a protocol so that you do what you do when you're on and stop doing the stuff you do when you're not quite so on. Six sessions. We'll talk about that in more detail in a moment. Then we're going to move on to our fifth module, algorithms. We could call this Self Mastery 101. It might be my favorite subject. How do you use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms? We're going to look at the science of behavior change. If you've had a tough time changing your life, we got to go to the behaviors. As BJ Fogg out of Stanford says, it's not that you have a character flaw, per se, it's that you have a design flaw. You haven't been taught how to properly change your behaviors. We're going to fix that, and we're going to help you install your number one habit, delete your number one Kryptonite habit and literally, fundamentally, permanently change your life. Then we're going to spend four sessions on that big picture. Install, delete. Then our head coach, Michael, who will be joining us to help us move into practice on each of these ideas and sessions, is going to give us the power algorithms. Yours and optimize power algorithms module 6. We bring all of that together and we go deep on our fundamentals. The fundamentals. All the power you need is always already there. We just need to quit leaking it out, and we need to harness it in service to the world. Right? So we have seven core fundamentals. We're going to spend three months on the fundamentals because this is the way that we fundamentally, permanently change our lives. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, and prospering, which literally means to go forward with hope. Which we will do as we enter the final module, Module seven, which we also affectionately call Module Infinity. Optimus U. It's time to practice your philosophy. Keywords. Practice your philosophy. We're going to challenge you to take everything you've been learning and put it into your own philosophy. As Nietzsche says, there is no the way. When asked what the way is, he said, there's no the way. Here's my way. What's your way? We're going to give you some universal ideas, but you need to run it through your lens and figure out what your life philosophy is. Then have it those tools and weapons and guides ready at hand as you Go navigate your life. Those are the seven modules. That's a super quick look. We'll take a little deeper look and then we're going to wrap everything up with what we call a dojo decision. We're going to check in on your level of commitment. And then we're going to have three reflection exercises. We're going to take a quick trip to heaven and then a quick trip to hell. And then we're actually going to go to the end of our lives to our own funeral. End of life celebration. Then we're going to come back to today and run what we call the ultimate algorithm. I'm going to boil down all of our work together 300 days into 30 seconds. One algorithm, three step process. How's that sound? Kind of fun, huh? Seven modules, one breath. Actually, let's do that. Let's take a breath. We're going to teach you how to breathe properly. That'll be a fundamental part of this. But for now, I'll take a break by us taking a break together. Do what's called flipping the switch. We call it flip the switch. So flip the switch right now. Strike what Amy Cuddy would call a power pose. Go from Clark Kent. If you've been hunching over to a Superman posture. Nice and wide. That literally changes your underlying physiology. One of the fastest ways to get your power dialed in. Flip the switch. We call it Flip the switch. Pull a thread, an imaginary thread through your spine. Through your head up. So you lengthen your spine. Chest up, chin down, whatever your superhero pose is. Right. Breathe in through your nose. Very important. We're going to stop breathing through our mouths. Fight or flight. We want a calm, energized perspective. In through your nose. Nice, slow, gently down into your belly. Important. The diaphragm is your number one most underutilized muscle and underappreciated muscle. Got to work that guy out. In through your nose, down into your belly, Back out through your nose. Exhale slightly longer than your inhale. That's how we flip the switch on not only power and confidence, but our parasympathetic relaxation nervous system. So I'm going to be quiet for a second. Let's do that together. And smile. Always end with a smile. Very important point. So Eudaimonology officially taking the paper clips off. We're getting real here, folks. We talked about how this is basically the culmination of everything we've done. I didn't mention the fact that one of the ways I like to summarize our philosophy is look, if you're capable of doing this, but you're only actually doing this. And there's a gap between what you're capable of being and what you're actually being. It's in that gap, that regret, anxiety, disillusionment, depression, existence. You close that gap, boom. And guess what? There's no room for that. What do you feel? You feel a joyful sense of flourishing. That level of eudaimonic joy is what we're all about. I also didn't mention a great line from Abraham Maslow. What one can be, one must be. He says, that's our philosophy in one sentence. I'll get to our philosophy in one word in a moment. So eudaimonology, you is good. Daimon is soul. Good soul. That's what Aristotle and the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers said is what it's all about. Living as that best version of ourselves. I like to say high fiving your inner soul, closing that gap. So we've got to start by knowing the game that we're playing. Our society, as you might have noticed, is kind of in an all out war against mastery. We've got a lot of what could be called vicious versus virtuous behavior. So we've got to step back out of that society. You'll hear me say often throughout our time together that it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That's Krishnamurti. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So we've got to study what it means to have a good soul. And as I said in the prelude, if we were going to look at and when I've spent my life studying is what does ancient wisdom have to say across all traditions? And what does modern science have to say about the same subject? And then how do we make this practical in our lives today? How do we develop a protocol via this mastery series? Now, again, if we were to ask ancient wisdom philosophers and spiritual teachers and modern scientists what's the ultimate purpose of life? And we decided to use Aristotle and Seligman as proxies for ancient wisdom and modern science. Again, we all know Aristotle, big three, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Martin Seligman, as you probably know, is the founder of the positive psychology movement out of the University of Pennsylvania. One of the most renowned living philosophers really created with his colleagues the positive psychology movement. So, okay, Aristotle, Seligman. Guys, what's the ultimate purpose in life? Seriously, what is it? Well, you go to Aristotle and he'll answer you in one word immediately. He'll tell you that the summum bonum, the highest good. He would say the ultimate purpose in life is to live with eudaimonia. Eudaimonia. You become a eudaimon. You live with eudaimonia. Now, we weakly translate that word into English as happiness, but it's much, much, much deeper than happiness as we conceive of it. We're not talking about hedonic happiness. We're talking about eudaimonic happiness. The more direct translation happens to be the name of Martin Seligman's most recent book. He wrote a book called Learned Optimism, then Authentic Happiness, then his most recent book, where he really captures the basis of what he calls, well, being theory is called flourish. You know what that is in Greek? Eudaimonia. They give us the exact same answer in one word. Eudaimonia. Flourish. That's the ultimate purpose of life, to flourish, to express the best version of ourselves in service to the world. That's the ultimate game we're playing. But again, it's easy to get confused in our modern world and think it's following the latest reality TV star, making sure we keep up on Instagram feeds or whoever's doing what, fictional or athletic drama, et cetera. No, no, no. The ultimate game is to express the best version of ourselves and to live with eudaimonia, or to flourish, as Seligman says. Now, you ask the same two guys, how do you do that? That sounds nice, but how do you do that? Aristotle again answers you in one word, and he gives us the one word. That would be the one word summation of all of our work together. 300 days, one word. Here it is all. Arete is the Greek word that we translate as virtue or excellence. Arete, virtue or excellence. But it has a deeper meaning. It means something closer to closing that gap between who you're capable of being and who you're actually being, moment to moment to moment, expressing that eudaimonic best version of you right now. Can you be the best version of you when you do? That's called arete, and you experience eudaimonia. And again, that's our entire philosophy in three words. Eudaimonia via arete. Now, you go to Seligman and you say, hey, what do you think? And he'd say, well, you know how I started the positive psychology movement was I got some of my smartest colleagues and we poured over all of the ancient wisdom traditions, right? From Judaism and Christianity and Islam to Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism and Hinduism. All, all these ancient traditions, the wisdom traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, et cetera. And what we found was they all said the same thing. They all said to live with a core set of virtues. So they founded the whole positive psychology movement on this idea. We'll talk about those virtues in a moment. But they basically said, you want to flourish the most fundamental thing. And there's a nuance, other things that go on, of course, but the most fundamental thing is put your virtues in action. Eudaimonia via arte flourishing by putting our virtues in action. There we go. That's the game we're playing and that's how you play it well. And helping you play that game well is of course what our whole program is all about and what Eudaimonology is all about. We gotta operationalize virtue, get fired up about virtue. In new daimonology we have fun saying, you know, a lot of people are wine connoisseurs. Awesome. You can kind of notice this and that about wines. I'm not that guy. I am a virtue connoisseur. We're going to encourage you to become a virtue connoisseur. And we're going to introduce you to the cardinal virtues of ancient Greece and Rome, of modern science and the optimize for cardinal virtues and the associated top scientifically most proven to boost your well being virtues. Right. So again, very briefly we go into this in depth in Eudaimonology. But this is important, so let's have fun talking about it. Now. In ancient Greece and Rome they had four cardinal virtues. Wisdom, then something they called temperance, and then courage and then justice. Those were their four cardinal virtues, right? Now modern science looked at their virtues and everybody else's virtues and they said, yep, those four. Everybody agrees. And we're going to add two more. Humanity and transcendence. Again, longer chap, but those are there too. So they have six. Then they break those down into 24. Then they help us find our five unique ones that will help you find. And I look at those and I say, okay, that's nice, but let me see what we can do to modernize that and make it even more really salient and just stick out in our minds and practical. So I take those virtues and say, look, our four cardinal virtues for optimize are the following. Wisdom. Totally agree, of course. And wisdom, by the way, is the virtue. All the other virtues are just expressions of wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Philo Sophia Wisdom is knowledge of how to live. So we want to know how to live. And then you express Virtues, naturally, when you're wise. But wisdom and then temperance is a really weak word for what they really mean, which I would say is self mastery. It's not just eating enough, not too much, not too little or whatever, not drinking too much. Temperance. It's self mastery in every aspect of your life. Wisdom, self mastery. Then we have courage, of course. And then I look at justice and humanity. On the science side, justice is a very weak word. So we're not talking about legal justice. When you read the ancient texts, it's love is what they're talking about. Being a good human being, True affection and care and love. So we have our four. Wisdom, self mastery, courage and love. Then science has five virtues which have been most robustly, empirically proven to be associated with your flourishing. The number one virtue. Can you guess what the number one virtue is that is most highly correlated with your flourishing? What is it? Because I'll tell you what, we're going to spend the most time on this virtue. What would you guess? Very few people get this question right. The only people who get it right when I've run this. At our graduation, we had over 500 of our first class of 1000 came to our graduation to celebrate together. Do a Spartan race together. One person knew she had gone through the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at University of Pennsylvania. It's zest. It's a weird word, zest for energy. Your life force, your vitality. We call it soul force. Your energy is your number one correlate to your well being. Pretty simple. If you have a hard time getting out of bed, then we're going to have a hard time living your greatest life. So we got to get your energy dialed in. Zest. Then hope is the number two most powerful virtue. Tied for the third. Gratitude. We're going to talk about the science of both of those very briefly. Hope has three parts. You believe your future is going to be better than your present. If you don't, you're hopeless. Literally. You believe you have the power to make it so. They call that agency. So you have a goal and you have agency and you have a pathway, a plan, and a willingness to take multiple pathways. That's the science of hope. We're going to map that out again and again and again. You will be a master at cultivating hope in yourself and your loved ones, your clients, your colleagues, et cetera. Then we have gratitude. The scientists arm wrestle for which ones in the second spot behind zest. We'll let them debate that. But we have our top three zest hope gratitude. Gratitude boosts your well being by 25%. Simply keeping a gratitude journal. Crazy. Guess what we're going to do? Keep a gratitude journal. We'll talk about how we approach that. It also boosts the amount of sleep you get by 30 minutes a night. It boosts the amount of time you spend exercising by 33%. Gratitude's big. We're gonna engage in that consistently. Then we have curiosity. Curiosity is an openness to life, a willingness to see what's working, what's not working, and get to work to make yourself a little better as you spiral up. That's curiosity. Then the fifth is love, which we include in our cardinal four. And that is our compass that we have a worksheet on right now. We're actually producing a compass right now, a physical compass. Then I cannot personally wait to get. You, my friend, are becoming a virtue connoisseur. Here's the virtue compass. You'll see this in your worksheets, in your workbook, etc. Again, we've got a beautiful set of worksheets and a workbook for you. Michael, our head coach will be walking you through. I'll do the theory, then he's going to do the practice, give you all the worksheets, walk you through it. Kind of kick you in the butt to go live this right now. And we're going to paste this two weeks on, one week off. Two weeks on, one week off with a little midterm break. Back at it. And you're going to spiral up integrating these things, moving from theory to practice. We don't want you to just think about these ideas. We got to put them into practice. Let's put one of those breaths into practice again. How about that? Kind of on a roll. This is kind of fun. Let's keep on rolling, but let's take another breath. You remember the three principles. Nose, belly, exhale slightly longer. Let's go. Every single time I do that, flip the switch. What's up? Optimus module 2 is Hero Ology, the study of a good hero. Again, we want to master ourselves so we can serve heroically and empower others to do the same so we can change the world. I mean, we're unabashed in our ambition to literally change the world. And we can only do that if each of us are being the change Gandhi style. We want to see, which is why we spend so much time on what we call client number zero coaching program. Three parts. Client number zero, that would be you. Client number one, how do you use the optimize protocol with your clients and then dollar number one, how do you build a business becoming a coach if that's your thing. And again, half of us going through this program, almost oddly, almost exactly half are doing this because we are existing coaches want to go to the next level or want to create a coaching business. The other half just want to master their lives, become a better executive, become a better mom or dad or human being. Right? Whatever the case, we need to operationalize this, be the change we want to see, et cetera. Now, hero ology, we're going to, as I discussed, break down the science of living in a heroic Life. Hero's Journey 101. If you haven't watched Finding Joe yet, that documentary, check it out. Findingjo themovie.com I happen to be in that with Deepak and Robin Sharma and Laird Hamilton, Tony Hawk, some other great people sharing ideas on how we go about living an heroic life in the modern world. Well, we're gonna spend three sessions over a month plus on this, right? We're gonna start with the fact that it's supposed to be hard. Quit pretending that it's supposed to be easy. That's actually the greatest source of your suffering, that this shouldn't be happening. What are you talking about? A, it should be happening. And B, if you're committed, because it is happening, if you are committed to living heroically, we need to get really good at moving from victim to complaining, criticizing, gossiping, etc. To Creator to hero. We have something called targeted thinking. We'll talk a lot about short story there is. Anytime you find yourself rattled, just say what do I want? What do I want? Right now I do this with my seven year old son and my three and a half year old daughter. What do you want? I hear you and that's a bummer. But what do you want? What can I do for you? What do you want? And then what do we need to do to get it? Two step process, targeted thinking. But the three things we're gonna talk about here are anti fragile. Confidence, heroic courage and responsibility. Antifragile. I already mentioned you can be fragile. Imagine a package being shipped in the mail. Fragile. Don't handle me roughly. I'll break. Ah, right, we're all fragile at times. We don't want to hang out there. Resilient is like, okay, you can kick me around, I'm pretty strong. But don't go too hard, right? And maybe you bounce back a little bit faster. That's resilient. But we want to be anti fragile. This is A word Nassim Taleb coined in a book by the same name. He talks about it in the context of economic systems and governments, et cetera. On a very macro level. I talk about it, we talk about it on a micro level. You. We want you to be anti fragile. The opposite of fragility is not resilient. Again, that's better than being fragile. But the best place to be is the more you kick me around. Imagine writing this on the box. That is you kick me around, please. Because the more you do, the more challenges I face, the stronger I get. We have a mantra for that. It's not om O m, it's O mms. Obstacles make me stronger. Ohms at our graduation, we all did it together, right before we did the Spartan race. It was awesome obstacles, but literally, with the right mindset, make me stronger. Why do you go to the gym? You go to the gym to lift real weights, not styrofoam weights. So when life throws you challenges, channel Epictetus and say, thank you stoic gods, for giving me a wonderful opponent to get stronger against. He sent you a young buck, Epictetus says, a young wrestling buck, to make you Olympic caliber. And we, when we have an anti fragile attitude, we adopt that. Another thing to think about. Nassim Taleb tells us wind challenges. Wind extinguishes a candle, but it fuels a fire. Imagine that. Big wind, candle's out. Big wind, fire just got bigger. We're going to work on this hard. And one of the themes is going to be the worse you feel, the more challenging life is. The more committed you are to your protocol, the more you double down on the things you know that work for you. But that requires, you know, what your protocol is, which is what we're going to unpack in carpe diem and beyond antifragility, then confidence again means intense trust. Confidere in Latin, I believe. Right. Intense trust. Not that things will go perfectly, that your plans will work out perfectly the first time. We know that won't happen, but we know that we have what it takes to respond to whatever life throws at us and get stronger each step of the way. That's anti fragile. Confidence. We're going to unpack that. Throughout our program, we've gotten a ton of feedback that that is absolutely life changing. So then we move on to heroic protector again. Hero in ancient. In our version of the ancient Greek, we spelled H E R O a line over the E, a line over the O. Kind of cool. Hero means protector. A hero has strength for two And a hero, very importantly, is willing to do the hard work to have strength for two. Our program's 300 days long. As a nod to the ancient Spartan heroes at Thermopylae. Right, we have a Spartan race at the end. As a nod to the ancient Spartan warriors, we're willing to do the hard work to be protectors. Having strength for two, whether that's your child or your spouse or your local community, we need you to have that strength. You are called to be a hero. I was going to say in our philosophy, but just generally, period. Optimize equals optimist. Best equals eudaimon equals hero. Maslow. What one can be, one must be self actualize. Then you transcend the self and you give yourself back to the world. That is by far the most important part of the hero's journey. Bringing the boon back is what Joseph Campbell calls it. Serve profoundly. And then courage, heroic courage, Courage in the ancient etymological sense, it's related to the word for your heart. So just as your heart pumps blood to your arms and other organs, courage is the virtue that vitalizes all the other virtues. Aristotle said this is the most important virtue. Without courage, none of this matters. You got to have a willingness to act in the presence of fear. This is how Robert Beeswas Diener, one of the world's leading scientists on the subject of courage, puts it. We're going to come up with a courage quotient, willingness to act in the presence of fear. It's not about no fear. It's about feeling the fear and doing what needs to get done, whether you feel like it or not, because it's the right thing to do. Heroic courage. Then we have responsibility again. Stimulus, response, gap. In that gap is our freedom that. Thank you. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor who wrote his logotherapy while going through that horrific event. And when he said you can take anything from a human being, but one last thing, the freedom to choose your response to any given situation. Now, Frankl attributes a lot of his philosophical insights to ancient Stoicism. We're going to make that connection. That's rule number one. Some things are in your control, some things aren't. Accept those things that you can't control. Serenity, prayer style. And then choose to step in between stimulus and response. Stephen Covey Habit number one. Be proactive, be response able. Close the gap mindfully, more and more consistently. That's hero ology. Now we're ready for the big three times two. But we're kind of on a roll with this whole breath thing. I Didn't know we'd do that, but it kind of works, doesn't it? So let's go. We're going to teach you to create a count. By the way, there's a certain count that will help your heart rate variability. It's called coherent breathing. I do a 6 in, hold one 8 out. I'm a little over 6ft tall. The recommendation is around four breaths per minute. That's what I do. We'll figure out yours. There'll be something between four and six breaths per minute. I'm going to do a 6, 1 8. You may want to bust out a stopwatch. We're going to have you do that further on. But for now, nice slow, calm, quiet, rhythmic. In, down, back, out, slightly longer. Creates a sense of energized tranquility. You're simultaneously on grounded. There's a buoyancy, which is another really important theme for our work together. Barbara Fredrickson has studied positivity and love and other things. Leading positive psychologists. She says you can have too much of a positive thing. You can be too. Have too much levity and fly away. We don't want that. We don't need any manic, ungrounded. I can do anything. No, no. Ground it into reality. You need to be have levity and what she calls gravity. Then you're buoyant, you're naturally up. You're not ignoring reality. You're energized and tranquil at the same time. Super important idea we'll come back to again and again and again. So module three, we've got eudaimonology, hero ology. Now let's put it into your life. Let's translate this into your terms. We know the game we're playing, how to play it well, heroically. Who are you at your best again? We did the origin story already. Cave roles and goals. Tony Robbins. Categories of improvement, Freud. Work and love. Energy, work and love. That's our big three. We're going to come back to this so many times. Energy, work, love. Energy, work, love. And then we times it by two. Identity, virtues, behavior. So I'll ask you right now and again we're going to go into depth on this. Who are you at your optimist best? Energetic self, energy wise. When you're at your best, who are you? I distill that into one word. We're going to challenge you to do a word or a phrase. For me it's athlete, another great Greek word with little lines over the e's. It means one who is in a competition. For a prize. I love that athlete. I'm energized. I can show up and do a Spartan race. When I think of this identity, I think of this. I can do a Spartan race 365 days a year. Boom. Out of bed. You want me to do it? Good. I'm done. Let's go beast the long one. And I want to be able to do a Spartan race. I'm going to be 50 in four years, right? At 75, at 101, God willing. I want energized longevity. Boom. That's my identity. Energy wise, what's yours? And then what's your best identity? Optimist. Best you work wise. We want to know that identity means repeated beingness. You want to know who you aspire to be. Then you want to act like that version of you. Then you become more and more like that version of you. So who are you at your best work wise? For me, I'm a philosopher in one word. A world class philosopher and teacher is what I aspire to be. Deeply committed that I can see that best version of me. And I hustle every day to be that version of me. Then love. Who are you at your best love wise? What's your identity? Are you married? Do you have kids? How do you relate to the world love wise? For me, I'm married to Alexandra, who we'll get to spend a lot of time with together and also virtually in her one on one sessions in the coaching Q and A. And my two kids, Emerson and Eleanor. Right now, my identity, summarized in a little phrase, is soulmate at the most deep sense of soulmate. You, Daimon. Again, right now, our daimons are hanging out. The best version of me is coming through. Speaking to the best version of you, Daimon de Daimon. We're soulmates right now. So my idea of a soulmate is for my wife, my kids, for you, for our team. It's a fun idea. It's a fun identity to play from. And then we have identity, virtues, behavior. So what virtues does that best version of you embody? Because guess what? Remember Eudaimonia via arete flourishing by putting your virtues in action. When do you do that? Right now. The happiest among us do that. So what virtues does that best you express? Energy, work and love wise. We're going to teach you how to keep a journal on this. We have a journal we'll share with you and we're going to challenge you to do it every single day, even if you only spend a minute on it. One word for Each of these, you'll get good at it. It's going to be hard at first, like anything. My seven and a half year old son, I say, how do you get good at anything? Practice. Yeah, everything's hard till it's easy. But we're going to help you get clarity and make it easy to identify your, your identity than the virtue. So for me, athlete, is my identity. Energy wise, my number one virtue. I'm disciplined. And then my number one virtue for work, I'm prolific. I pride myself on consistently showing up. And then my number one virtue for soulmate is I'm connected. I don't have technology in front of me. When I'm connecting, I'm connected. I'm present. I'm right there. And then we say identity virtues. What are you gonna do today? What are your behaviors? The number one thing you're going to do? Energy, work and love. So for me, I got a protocol. I hit the trail. I do my burpees and push ups and pull ups and all this stuff. Right. What do you do? And then work wise, I've got my deep work blocks that I create and how many hours I do. Then love wise, I've got my time with my kids and other things I do am and pm. So big three, Energy, work and love times two. Identity virtues, behaviors. This is going to become algorithmic. And guess what, it's really, really hard to have a series of bad days when you actually do this. If you identify who you are at your best and this takes three minutes when you get good at it, who am I at my best? Energy, work and love wise. What virtues do I embody? Just give me one. Okay, cool. And what one thing am I going to do today? It's hard to have a circus in your life. When you do that. Your highs get higher and your lows get higher. You quit doing this. When you have a protocol that you work consistently, this operationalization of virtue via the big three times two will be a big part of our work together. Here's my journaling this morning. So then we say playfully. All right, all that's nice. I like it. You kind of got me. But when should we put this into effect? And we say today's the day, which is why our fourth module is called Carpe diem. Seize the day. Today's the day. Before we go to that, ready for another breath? Practice? One more breath. I'm going to do two. All right, we're on a roll. Let's not stop. Carpe diem. Two and a half months, six Modules. I'm sorry, Six sessions within this module each. Again, theory, practice. That's how that stack got so thick. Each of them is going to have 10 ideas, each of these different sessions, right? So we're going to start out with the big picture, the biggest. Then we're gonna break it down into different elements. The big picture is straightforward. We need to cultivate what my coach, Phil Stutz, calls author of the Tools in Coming Alive, check out those notes. Calls emotional stamina. Emotional stamina, where you can handle what life throws at you. I call that antifragile confidence. In one of our early sessions, he said, you know what? You got a lot of emotional stamina right at the end. Next session, I said, what did you mean when you said emotional stamina? And he says, well, you're able to endure whatever life throws at you. You turn it around really fast. And he says, the way you do that, whether you know it or not, is you work your protocol. And then he made one of the key distinctions of my life that I'm going to hopefully impart to you. And I want to tattoo this on your consciousness to the extent you're open to me doing that artwork. The worse you feel, he says, the more committed you are to your protocol. Imagine that. The. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. Now, I don't know about you, but when I used to go up and down, thankfully, a while ago, although, again, we're never going to be perfect. We're always going to have highs and lows. But when I used to be really up and down, and I used to be really up and down, the worse I felt, the less I worked my protocol. That's when I did all this stupid stuff. That's when my demon took over and I forgot I even had a daimon. And he says, this is the trick. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. Now, that begs the question, do you know what your protocol is? Do you know what you do when you're on? Because world class performance, optimizing and actualizing, mastering yourself in service to others, etcetera, is all about consistency on the fundamentals. You got to know your protocol. So we're going to help you architect masterpiece days so you can experience that level of emotional stamina. Antifragile confidence. Again, if there's one thing I hope to give you in this work together, it's that the more you get kicked around, the stronger you get. And you can only do that if you don't flinch and you lean in and you say, you know what? I really feel like doing all the stupid stuff I used to do. I used to blow myself up with inputs watching different shows and stuff at night, on the nights that I was most stressed and I most needed a good night of sleep. Now you couldn't pay me to do that. I've got a firm shutdown complete in work and digital sunset. Sun goes down, my electronics go down so I can wake up the next morning feeling great. I've said actualizing my potential is more important than entertaining myself. And I noticed that I do stupid stuff when I'm most stressed and can at least afford to do it. And then I spiraled down, I flip that switch and go the other way. Now that is literally. If you can actually get this, you will never get it perfectly. But you even move forward 5% on this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% up. The gains are huge. This is as close to an invincibility cloak as you can have. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol, means the harder life is pushing you, the better you get. That's crazy. Awesome. I'm a virtue salesman. Protocol salesman. Then we move on. And I say, look, if you want a masterpiece today, the number one thing you need to get is today. Started yesterday. Your PM bookend drives the start of your day, which then drives the rest of your day. Darren Hardy tells us you have bookends in your life, in your days, AM and pm, and you have more control over the bookends than you do the rest of the middle of your day. We say, you gotta own it. You gotta crush your PM bookend, which is one session, then your AM bookend, which is the next 1pm sneak peek, digital sunset. The number one thing most people do that kills their morning is they're up late, allowing blue light into their consciousness, which rattles up their cortisol, decreases their melatonin, makes it less likely to get a good night of sleep, and boom, they wake up feeling lethargic. And they don't make the connection. Science says unequivocally that a good night of sleep is a bridge from despair to hope. The recommended hours of sleep is 7 to 9 sleep, not time in bed sleep, which we'll talk about. Difference between those two, if you consistently get less than seven to nine hours of sleep, you double your risk of cancer. We're gonna help you get a good night of sleep, boosting the hope. They also say that one hour more of sleep a night is the best diet you could be on sleep matters. What's blowing it up is your electronics. Shut them off. Digital sunset pm Then you go to AM and we're gonna challenge you to have what we call pre input wins. Don't roll over and turn on your smartphone. Everyone does that. It is no measure of well being and health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Most people are mildly anxious or significantly depressed or have a chronic disease, et cetera. Frightening number of people. So we've got to choose different, more optimal behaviors. And one of the most powerful is that digital sunset. Then keep your electronics off, do something useful. Energy, work and love wise, get some pre input wins on your big three. That sets the tone for the rest of your day. It's a powerful idea. Then we're going to systematically walk through energy, work and love to create masterpiece days. The big theme energy wise is we want energized tranquility, not enervated anxiety. You need to be on and then off. Recover. You can't be on all day and then expect to be able to turn your brain off at night and not wake up in the middle of the night. It's not how it works. Discipline yourself to really recover. Create energized tranquility work. We're going to increase your productivity and your meaning. We've got something called a genius work equation, which is all about your ability to cultivate energy, your ability to focus on what's important now and then do it consistently. Very powerful equation. We're really excited about kind of Cal Newport's deep work equation to the infinite power. And by the way, Cal Newport joins us as one of our guest luminaries, kind of visiting faculty, shares some great wisdom on how he structures his days, gets into deep work, does one on one coaching with our coaches. It's awesome. Again, tons of luminaries, dozens. Cal Tal, Ben Shahar, Sonia Lyubomirsky, Gabriel Oettingen, so many of our favorite teachers, Mark Devine, Dan Siegel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then we look at love, Carpe diem style. How today can I bring love to my life? And we playfully look at all the different forms of love. Traditional love 1.0, but also 0.0 for yourself, 2.0 for people you meet during the day. 3.0 giving people encouragement, 8.0 loving your work and then infinity.0 loving life, everything in it. We're going to talk about that. And then while we're there, love 0.0, the most loving thing you can do for yourself beyond accepting yourself. Where you are right now, which is also a big part of our work, is to identify what your number one self care habit is. Michelle Seager out of the University of Michigan, one of the world's leading researchers on the science of behavior change, tells us you got to know your number one self care habit. What is it? What do you do when you're on and if you don't do it, you just have a wobbly day? For me, it's sleep. If I don't get a good night of sleep, I've discovered I'm just a different person. Therefore, guess what I do? I prioritize my number one self care habit. I get a good night of sleep. At least I give myself a shot at getting a good night of sleep consistently. Never going to be perfect, but that's important. So what's your number one self care habit? Think about that. We're going to help you get real clear on that and then crush it. So eudemonology, hero ology, Big three times two. Carpe diem. Now we're going to step back and talk about self mastery in our fifth module, algorithms. But first we're going to run the algorithms. If we finish an overview of a module, then we're going to take a breath. It's an effective algorithm for optimizing energy. All right, let's go. I don't know about you, but if you're doing that, do you feel the groundedness that occurs? Kelly McGonagall, who wrote the Willpower Instinct and the Upside of Stress and the Joy of Movement, all three awesome books, tells us the fastest way to boost your willpower is to take a deep breath. Boom. Stimulus. Response. Gap. Freedom. Breath. Your breath control is how you get emotional control. All Navy SEALs Peak Performance Gurus will say the same thing. Master your breath. You master your emotional relationship to life. And you can put your energy where you want, when you want, how you want. Algorithms. Now, we called this algorithms instead of Self Mastery 101 because I love the idea of algorithms. And if you believe Yuval Noah Harari, great historian and author, check out the notes on his books. And Ray Dalio, the great investor, entrepreneur, thought leader, et cetera. Algorithms are the future. Algorithms are, they say, the number one language we should be teaching our kids. It's going to run the show. Look at a Tesla. Look at your robot vacuum. What do they do? Algorithms. If this, then that just a series of algorithms running them via artificial intelligence. So we again apply this to our individual lives and I say, okay, two AIs, artificial intelligence is cool, but there's something way cooler in the back of our minds. Ancient intelligence, AI, Ancient intelligence, hundreds of millions of years old in your brain stem. All mammals have it. A basal two actually basal ganglia. Now this basically takes whatever you do repetitively and says, oh, you must want to do that. We'll do it again, we'll do it again, we'll do it again. So we want to program that part of our brain, that ancient intelligence, by using our willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. When I interviewed Roy Baumeister, who is the godfather of willpower, the most cited social psychologist on the planet, he said willpower exemplars. And I think he could have more accurately said self mastery exemplars actually don't use their willpower much. They play offense, not defense. They use their willpower wisely to install habits so they don't need to think about it. Again, we do that via algorithms. If this, then that super powerful. This might be again, my favorite subject. We have four sessions here. A big picture where I sell you on it. I talk about BJ Fogg out of Stanford's Tiny Habits, James Clear's Atomic Habits, Stephen Guy's great subject, a great book, Mini Habits and some other thoughts on behavior design on a high level. Then we actually break in and we spend a whole session, which might be the most impactful in our whole program by installing a habit. Then another one, which actually might be the most powerful, even more than the install is delete. So I ask you right now again, just to get ready. We're going to teach you the tools to actually master this. But think for a moment. What's the number one thing you're not currently doing that if you did it consistently, would most powerfully change your life? What is it, number one habit that you know, if you just could install this habit, literally, it would change your life. It'd be ridiculous. Maybe you've tried for a long time, maybe you haven't even tried because you couldn't think you could do it. What is it? We are going to help you do that. There are three steps to the process we're going to go into depth on. You need to make it obvious. The trigger that's going to cue that behavior. Like you want to meditate, for example, the trigger or prompt or cue different people call it different things. Needs to be obvious like a meditation cushion. If you want to meditate, put the meditation cushion right by your bed so you trip over it. You want to work out Put your running shoes right by your bed, right when you wake up, the trigger is right there. It's obvious. Then you need to make it easy to install a habit. Now, most people, when they start a habit, they say, I got to meditate. I'm going to do 60 minutes a day, or even 15 or 20 or 30. No, no, no, no. That's hard. Make it crazy easy. So easy it doesn't take any motivation to do it. Even on your worst days, you can do it. I'm gonna meditate for one breath, okay? I'm not gonna complain about it. I'm not gonna argue with myself on that. 60 minutes. Can't do it today. One breath. Okay, Dude, I can do a breath walking. This is what BJ Fogg calls tiny habits. Everyone leans on his work, right? Tiny. You want to floss your teeth. One tooth. But what happens is, when you start easy and you make it obvious, you tend to do more exciting. And then when you do it, you celebrate it. So Charles Duhigg talks about this, too. Cue routine reward, he says, but B.J. fogg's even better. He says, celebrate. Not sometime in the future, 30 days from now, when you've done it 30 days in a row, right now. The moment you do it, celebrate intensely and immediately say, that's like me. That's like me. To do that. Whatever you do to celebrate. And you literally squirt a little dopamine and you rewire your brain. Ooh, that feels good. I did that. I guess they must want me to do that again. My reward center is lit up. You get yourself to do the thing you know you most want to do, and you enjoy doing it. It's a big idea. That's install. So we are going to help you install your number one habit, and then, perhaps most importantly, which will change your life if we do it successfully together, we're going to teach you the system so you can do that again and again, not just for yourself, but for your family, your clients, your colleagues, et cetera. And if you want to change the world, behavior design is where it's at. We want to be the change. We got to change what we do on a consistent basis. The next session, we call it delete. Same question reversed. Same wisdom reversed. What's the number one thing you're currently doing that you know you need to stop doing? Again, we've all got at least one thing, right? Some big. Some small spectrum, whatever. No shame. We've all got it. We're all human. It's not because you're you. It's because you're human. I'm going to talk about common humanity. You're not alone. All good. But what is it? What's the number one thing that you just know? Your life would be radically better if you could stop doing this. Could be smoking, could be drinking, could be staying up. Like, could be anything, right? What is it? Well, we're gonna help you eliminate that. We call that a Kryptonite. And you want to know that that's actually the fastest way to boost your life. Stop doing stupid stuff. Quit letting your demon run the show. That's actually much more powerful than doing good stuff. Stop doing the stuff that's killing you, that's just leaking all of your energy. We're going to help you master that. Whatever it is, we're going to start small. In our first session, we're going to teach you the skills so you can conquer whatever it is that might be your Kryptonite. And then we're going to teach you the systems to repeat that process again for yourself, for your clients, for your family, your colleagues, etc. The quick take on that is, if you want to install a habit, you make it obvious, easy, and you celebrate it. If you want to delete it, you don't make it obvious, which is what you do right now. I used to be addicted to. To my smartphone. I still am. I'm pickled. I respect that. I had a cucumber brain that became pickled, which we'll talk about. You can't go back to being cucumbered. Once you're addicted, you're addicted. Smartphones, boom, blew me up. I'm vulnerable to them now. If I kept my smartphone out all day, every day, guess what I would do? I'd see the trigger and I'd pick it up. It'd be obvious. It'd be easy to do it. So I don't do that. I take the prompt, the cue, the trigger, and I remove it from my environment. I put it in airplane mode, turned off in my closet, buried in the upper corner. I got to reach for it when I want it. That's how you remove a habit. The fastest way to remove a habit, you're eating bad food, throw it out, don't buy it. Buy your willpower at the store next time. That's what researchers say. Use your willpower wisely so you don't need to use it when you most are vulnerable. Remove your prompt cue, trigger, then make it harder. Don't make it easy. Make it harder, and then. Which is related to the Invisibility, we'll talk about. And then if you fail, all good needs work it. Lanny Basham, Olympic gold medalist, wrote a book called With Winning In Mind. Amazing guy. He says if you fail and you miss the target, don't shame yourself and don't replay the miss. Simply go back to the moment where you made a mistake and imagine how you could have done it. Right. We call that needs working. It needs work neutral. Boom. What could I have done? That's it. And then you use that negative experience as a positive. Boom. You got better. You use the data wisely. That's how we roll. That's our third session. Then our head coach, Michael, takes over for the fourth session, and he's going to help you identify the algorithms that are currently running your show. We're going to identify 100 of them, top 10. Then he's going to give you power algorithms, help you identify your top 10 power algorithms, and R optimize top 10 power algorithms. That's a fun session. Nice work, Michael. Then five sessions in, we're more than halfway done now, but we've still got three months to go. We're going to go deep in the fundamentals, the foundation. You want to see how tall the building is going to be? Look at how deeply they're digging the foundation. Isn't that cool? So we're going to dig a deep, deep, deep foundation with our seven core fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, which we're going to do in a moment. Focusing, celebrating, and prospering. Breathing. Flip the switch. Let's go. One of my mantras actually just popped into my head uninvited. Thank you. So one of the mantras we'll talk about in gratitude and celebrating is if the only prayer you ever say is thank you, that that'll be enough. So I often throughout the day, if I'm walking or I'm meditating or I'm falling asleep, I'll say to myself, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just a mantra. I repeat, a mantra is a tool of the mind. Mantra. You can architect your mind by using your words wisely. So, anyway, thank you literally just bubbled up into my head, and I just felt gratitude for you and the opportunity to be here. So I appreciate you being here in general and particularly right now. I know we've already covered a ton of. And I just feel blessed to be in your life. So thank you. The fundamentals. Now, I draw a triangle, which represents Maslow's hierarchy, right? And I draw a circle at the top of it. With kind of light coming off the top representing Optimus U. But then I draw a circle around the base representing the foundation. The higher the building, the deeper we dig the foundation and the more flexibility we bake into the structure, by the way. So in the fundamentals we have eight sessions, a big picture and then the seven sessions on each fundamental. In the big picture. I basically sell you on why this matters. Virtue wise, which again is the ultimate game. Peak performance wise, you want to be great and then spirituality wise. Perhaps your main thing is spirituality. We have rabbis and chaplains and discovery, devout practitioners of different faiths as part of our program. Well, I'm going to suggest that the most spiritual things you can do are eating, moving, sleeping, etc. I mean, you wouldn't go into a temple or a church or a synagogue and spray paint the inner walls right now we'd all agree that our body is the temple of God, at least theoretically we agree with that. But aren't we spray painting our minds and our bodies inside with graffiti when we over consume ultra processed food and sugar, when we over consume inputs and technology and media, etc. To me, it's a spiritual practice. There's no more fundamental spiritual practice. And if you want to connect to the divine, you need to master these fundamentals and then you want to be great in whatever domain you excel in or you aspire to excel in. I as Robin Sharma says, greatness is consistency on the fundamentals, full stop. Doesn't matter. I mean the domain will dictate what fundamentals you practice, whether that's an athletic sport or an artistic endeavor or an entrepreneurial endeavor or parenting, whatever. You can have different fundamentals, of course, but your consistency on those fundamentals needs to be at a very high level if you want to be among the best. Now the amateur ignores that. They think they can get somewhere quick without mastery of the fundamentals. The pro and we're going to encourage you to turn pro. Be world class at what you do as a human being and in your domain. Work and love wise. The pro never gives up on the fundamentals. In fact, the higher they go, the more committed they are. We'll talk about some great exemplars in that realm, including John Wooden. So John Wooden is, according to espn, the greatest coach in history. So we're a coaching program, we're coaching you to coach others, etc. What's the greatest coach in the world do when he starts his protocol? He worked with, if you didn't know John Wooden, UCLA basketball coach, Go Bruins. My alma mater took him 16 seasons to win his first championship. Took him a long time, but when he figured it out, he figured it out. He. He figured out his philosophy. Then he won 10 of the next 12 championships, which is nearly unheard of. So it doesn't matter how long it's taken you, we're going to figure it out. Let's go capitalize all those gray whiskers into wisdom that we can apply in our lives. But John Wooden, the first thing he did with the nation's best basketball players before he let them on the court, he taught them how to put on their socks. Literally. He'd teach them, here, pull the sock up just like this over your toes, and then you get it over the heel just right. Then you roll it up this way. They'd look at him like, are you crazy? Really? You're gonna teach me how to put on my socks? You recruited me to come here to teach me how to put on your socks? Yeah, because if you can't put your socks on right, you might get a blister. If you get a blister, you might have to sit out part of the practice. If you sit out part of the practice, you're not gonna be as well trained and conditioned. We aren't gonna perform as well in a game. We're not gonna win national championships. Those socks matter. So I offer. These are your socks. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering. You don't get these basic, simple things right. Good luck getting the hard things right, especially when the world rocks. You don't believe me, go to Jesus. What did he say? The parable of the wise or foolish builder. Basically, he said, you need to practice your philosophy, what I'm teaching you. And if you don't, when the storms come, you're going to be like someone that. That built their house on sand. And then, boom, it washes away. You get wobbly and you fall apart. But if you're a wise builder, you build it on the rock of his teachings, the fundamental truths of his work, and then, boom. You can sustain that onslaught, that torrential downpour of rain, et cetera. Same thing here. Antifragile wise. You got to operate with consistency on your protocol. And it starts with the small things. I interviewed David Allen, getting things done told me there are no small things. Small things are everything. The sublime comes through the mundane is what he said. My coach says the same thing. Phil Stutz microtransactions, he calls them. Boom, boom, boom, boom. The smaller, the better. How focused can you be on this moment? Boom. That's what gives you your power. Close the gap, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Practice your philosophy, starting with the fundamentals. And then, perhaps most powerfully, we have a Ken Wilber idea I sell us on in the fundamental section. So he says that. Well, he says states and traits, you can have a state experience. I metaphorically represent this as imagine being shot out of a cannon. Boom. You go up, right? You do a weekend retreat. You walk on fire. You go to a yoga workshop, and you're an enlightened pretzel. You go to a meditation retreat, and you can levitate off your cushion. State experience. Perhaps you do a psychedelic drug. Not my thing. But state experience. Now, unfortunately, that state experience will not be preserved. You're going to drop down unless it's who you are and you've built up a stage of development. It needs to be a trait of who you are and how you show up consistently. Otherwise, you're going to go boom, up, boom, down. In fact, you might go lower than where you started because now you tasted it, you can see this infinite potential, but you don't know how to get back there. You got to go to another workshop. You got to go do this or go do that. No, no, you need to work your fundamentals. You need to build the scaffolding such that you get to a place where that state is who you are. And you can only get there through sheer hustle and mastery on the basic fundamentals, one sock pull at a time. This, again, is how we fundamentally and permanently change our lives, exercising all that mastery we cultivated today on the things that are most important. So, very briefly, seven fundamentals. Again, each gets their own session, and each has their own associated practice. So as an optimized coach, when we do our intake forms, we say, hey, what do you want from this program? Especially when we launch the first one. I read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, Every single one of them that came in our first inaugural class, a thousand optimized coaches from over 50 countries. The number one word, you know, they all said, I want this or that or that. But the number one word that came out again and again and again, that I underlined and underlined and underlined with my stack of printout of pages, wasn't quite that. It was more like that, hold me accountable. Accountability. Hold me accountable to being the change that I want to see. That's what I want from this program. So to be an optimized certified coach, you can't just go through the theory. We have a lot of theory to go through. At times, you will feel overwhelmed. Fantastic. Talk to someone in class two or three or whatever and you'll hear it. You'll get. You're gonna catch up. It's all good. Just keep on going. We've got the Mastery series, the plus ones, the PNS, the 101 classes, etc. All of which supports everything else. But ultimately it's about the practices. Each of our core fundamentals has a practice that you, if you want to be a certified coach, need to commit to. We'll have a basic floor and then a target, but that's how we're going to move from theory to practice mastery. It can't be an abstract thing. You need to actually do the thing which is what makes our program perhaps so distinct. And we deliberately chose this because we don't want to just teach you these things. We want to fundamentally and permanently change your life. And we need you to be a radiant exemplar. We need you to do the work on client number zero, such that who you are. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, what you do and who you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say. We want people coming to you and saying, what did you do? I just had a recent interaction with one of our coaches. Lost 22 pounds in the first six months and tripled his sales. People are coming to him. What are you doing? We have so many people. One woman struggling with Ms. Her brain is scanned every year. She had it scanned right before we started our work together. And at the end, her neurologist looked at her brain scan, which had changed goosebumps so dramatically that he said, what did you do? She said, optimize. Gives me tears in my eyes. So we need to actually do these things. We are going to challenge you to do some simple floor behaviors and some aspirational targets, etc. But anyway, eating. If you talk to any of the experts in these domains, they're going to say this is the most important. Eating or moving or sleeping, but eating important. The number one thing we're going to get out of this is our food system is dysfunctional. The junk food industry spends $12 billion a year on research. Junk science, Mark Hyman calls it in his great book Food Fix Junk, trying to convince us that their food isn't that unhealthy. It's very much like, frighteningly akin to the tobacco industry back in the day. It's actually enraging. There's only a billion dollars of independent research, whereas there's 12 billion on junk science. We're Going to have a long conversation on that. But the number one thing that the independent research shows is sugar is toxic. They call it cancer candy, candy for cancer cells. So we have a big three plus one food rules. Food rules three plus one. The number one rule is don't drink your sugar. If you drink sugar, sodas or sugared fruit juice or sugared anything, drink. Stop doing that. If you want to commit to optimizing your insulin, your leptin, your overall metabolism to reach your ideal weight, which is what it's all about, getting your metabolism right. It's disrupted if you're over consuming sugar. Rule number one, don't drink it. And again, parents, fruit juice is just as bad as soda. We don't want to give that to our kids. Give them whole foods, but don't give them pure sugar. Basically, that's rule number one. Rule number two in liquid form, Rule number two, food. Rule number two is eat real food. Playing around with Michael Pollan's food rules. Plus we say throw away the factory food. Eat real food. Throw away the factory food. Three types of factory food. We want to throw away ultra processed food. Food that didn't exist even 10 years ago. 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, right? All these ingredients, you can't even read those are made in a chemist's lab. They don't belong in your body. Yet 60% of our diet comes from ultra processed food. For every 10% of your diet that comes from processed food, your risk of chronic disease goes up by 14%. It's no joke, right? Some absurd 66% of our population is overweight or obese. 80% of chronic disease is preventable. And these are the levers to pull ultra processed food. Look at your label. If you cannot pronounce it or you wouldn't have that ingredient that you can't pronounce next to your salt and pepper and other little things in your house, don't eat it. It's a big rule. Then factory food thrown out, ultra processed. Then factory farmed animals for a lot of reasons. We hit three on that as well. Ethically inhumane. Nutritionally, they're totally imbalanced. They're sick, they're eating, they're taking antibiotics because they're eating the wrong food. They're meant to. Cows are meant to eat grass, not grains. They get sick, their Omega 63 gets imbalanced. We'll talk about this in detail now. We'll leave it at that. And then the third thing, well, I'll actually say it's not the cow, it's the how Mark Hyman says it's not the cow or the animal product per se that's so bad, it's how it's raised which disrupts it. You can actually get some positive benefits certainly nutritionally and even environmentally through grass fed etc. Longer chat. We'll save for that discussion then. The third factory thing we want to throw out as we eat real food and is vegetable oils. It may sounds good, doesn't it? Soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil. These are health foods, right? No, they didn't exist 100 years ago. Literally before the industrial revolution you couldn't squeeze a soybean to get oil out of it. Socrates has been hammering olive oil 2,500 years ago. It's been around for thousands of years. Soybean oil didn't exist 100 years ago. Now it accounts by some measures for 20% of our total caloric intake. Insane. Didn't exist 150 years ago. 150 years ago. 20%. Now that literally is crazy. You tell me millions of years of evolution. Hundred years, 20% of our calories and 60% from ultra processed that didn't exist. Throw it out. It's not wise. It disrupts your Omega 6 and 3 imbalance again. Go pick up a salad dressing label. I'll bet you number one ingredient is soybean oil. Longer chat will have an eating number one thing again. Sugar. How much are you consuming? And know that it comes in like 60 different names. We will have a nice long chat on that when we get to eating. Moving less intense, more simple. Draw a circle. Movement and within that is exercise. Katie Bowman idea. Movement transcends and includes exercise. You need to exercise because you get a little Ritalin, little bit of Prozac, Hope molecules. Exercise is as effective as Zoloft in reducing depression. If you're not exercising, it's as if you're taking a depressant literally. There's a step count threshold above which you're less likely to get depressed and anxious, below which you're more likely. You know what it is? Gas5649. How many steps are you getting? We're going to challenge you to measure it because what you measure improves. I strive for 14,285.7 which gives me 100,000 steps a week. I'm a nut. That's what I go for. We're going to challenge our coaches to hit 10,000 steps, 30 minutes of movement a day. Exciting. Yeah. Going to be a perpetual Motion machine. Then our third fundamental is sleeping. Again, you talk to Matthew Walker in his great book, why We Sleep. He'll tell you this is the very foundation of everything. The other pillars, right, Eating and moving sit on the foundation of sleep. It's that essential. Again, we've mentioned this, but sleep is a bridge from despair to hope. A good night of sleep goes both ways. You don't get a good night of sleep. Oh, hope. Ah, despair. Two thirds of the US population doesn't get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep. They also double their risk of getting cancer. Sleep matters more than you think. The number one tip there is a digital sunset. Turn off your electronics at least an hour before you go to bed. That's one of our coaching certification standards. Then we're at breathing. We'll take another break and actually breathe. Before we get into that. I guess we're doing this in one take, folks. I assumed I'd do a few takes, but we're kind of on a roll. So breathing oxygen is literally cell fuel. Every single cell, every single healthy cell in your body depends on oxygen as its primary source of fuel. Do you know what doesn't require oxygen, by the way? What? Cells in your body, Healthy cells need oxygen. Cancer cells don't. Isn't that interesting? Yes. Part of a longer conversation. They also feast on sugar. PET scan measures, tumors, et cetera. That's really measuring concentrations. It lights up sugar within your. It's crazy. We'll leave it at that. Longer chat. So oxygen is cell fuel. We need to breathe properly. Unfortunately, most of us breathe improperly and that is through the mouth. We evolved to breathe through your nose and playfully. Breathing experts tell us you should breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose, which would be never. The only time we used to breathe through our mouths was in a hyper intense fight or flight situation. Right now, we breathe through our mouths because of chronic stress, bad diet, bad posture, nearly all day, every day. And yes, we are now in a chronic state of fight or flight. Your sympathetic nervous system is triggered when you breathe through your mouth. The good news is you can calm your energy, your nervous system by breathing through your nose, deeply into your belly, back out through your nose, nice long exhale. We're going to have fun with that. And we invite Patrick McGowan as a guest luminary in our visiting faculty. Check him out. Moving on. Focus is our next fundamental. We want to shine the spotlight of our attention on what's most important right now. Again, scientists tell us that your ability to shine what they call your spotlight of attention. Focusing your mind on what's most important, on what you want, when you want, for how long you want is a hallmark of people who are flourishing. And they also tell us that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Think about that. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. We are going to train our ability to focus. Obviously, technology needs to be mitigated. Then we're going to celebrate. We do all this hard work, we don't want to forget. To celebrate. We have three parts to this fundamental acceptance, gratitude, and then celebration. We need to accept ourselves, all of our imperfections. We'll talk about the paradox of optimizing. You go for the best, but you know that you're never going to be perfect. You're never going to hit that perfectly, consistently. Tal Ben Shahar says, our ideals are guiding stars, not distant shores. We're never actually going to get there. Accept yourself, then accept your reality. Amor fatih, love of your fate. Then accept your failures. We're going to talk about the importance of that, bringing it back to Abraham Maslow. Then we're going to be grateful. We're going to talk about the science of it again, 25% and why that works and then how to work it. Gratitude, journaling, gratitude letters, grateful flow in the moment. Then we're going to celebrate right now, using every moment as an opportunity to cherish this precious experience that is our lives. Before we moving on, before we move on. We've been at this for a while. How long have we been going? Did I not start my watch? I didn't. I don't know. It's been a while. Prospering is our final seventh fundamental. The word literally means to move forward with hope, to prosper. The opposite is to have despair, to have no hope. When you have hope again, 1, 2, 3, better future agency pathways. You move toward life's challenges. When you are in despair, you curl up in a little ball. We want to move toward life with power and hope. That's going to be fun. We're going to do some eudaimonic accounting, appreciate your assets, and again, remind ourselves that the way to fundamentally and permanently change your life is to master our fundamentals. Those are our first six modules. I'm literally sweating now. Sitting here in a studio outside of Austin, Texas, in our barn. I'm going at it. I have never done this long of a take, but I'm feeling it. So let's keep on going. Take another deep breath. Then we're going to move to module 7. Got the AC pumping but it's a hot day. Optimus U, practicing your philosophy. Let's practice one more deep breath now. Module 7, Optimus U, we've done all of this work. Now what? Now it's time to practice our philosophy. We go all the way around the circle. We start here and then we do an O and we come right back to where we began. We remind ourselves of eudaimonology, hero ology, the big three times two, carpe diem algorithms, the fundies. And we commit to doing what needs to get done right now. And it's funny because when I prepared for this session the night before, I prepared for this session the evening before, I had a coaching session with Phil Stutz. We were talking about different things and, you know, kind of being on and how do we maintain that peak state consistently. And we ended that chat and he had a little, like, repeated it three times mantra. He said, the essence is, apply this, apply this, apply this. Have that voice in your head to practice, as I would say, your philosophy. Apply this, apply this, apply this. I said, that's amazing because that's precisely what I'm going to teach as part of our seventh module when I hit the studio tomorrow morning. So we celebrated that. He said, I love you, son. I said, I love you, father. He's my spiritual father. I'm his spiritual son. He's 30 years older than I do. We have this sweet connection on that regard. It's how we end every one of our chat. Love you, son. I'm proud of you. Love you too, dad. Thank you. Boom. But I had apply this, apply this, apply this in my head now. I had 10 minutes between the time that I finished that session at 5:50pm and 6pm When I was scheduled to show up for dad duty and the family, right? So I meditated for those 10 minutes. Drop down, recover. And then I went out. And the family was still out. Alexander was out with the kids. So I said, ah, I got a few minutes bonus time. Let's go. And I gave myself some dessert watching the Last Dance, starring Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson and the Bulls. Right? Great Netflix documentary. Highly recommend it. And 10 seconds into that episode, it's like episode 5. I was in the middle of it when I had stopped before. Ten seconds in, Phil Jackson, the coach comes on another one of the greatest coaches in history, and he says, you're only a success in the moment you perform a successful act, you have to do it again. You're only a success in the moment you perform a successful act, you have to do it again. That's what we're talking about. Moment to moment to moment. You're only a success in the moment you perform a successful act. Close the gap. Arete, arete, arete. Experience that joy of flourishing, and you're never exonerated. It's a word Phil Stutts uses. Exoneration. We all want to be exonerated. Come on, I've worked hard enough. I should be done. Sorry, that's not how it works. You're never exonerated. And your story that you should already be there is actually perhaps the greatest source of your suffering. Embrace the fact that it's always day one. As Jeff Bezos says at Amazon, it's always day one at Optimize. Start again, start again, start again. You're only a success in the moment you perform a successful act. You got to do it again and again and again and again and again. So again with this module, the essence is twofold practice. Keyword. And your philosophy. Key phrase. We're sharing our basic idea and protocol, but as Nietzsche says, when asked, what is the way? He said, there is no the way. This is my way. What is your way? So we're going to challenge you to really get clarity on what your philosophy is and specifically to sit down and write your own top 10. I'll coach you on how to do it. Your own top 10 win. What are the 10 most powerful things you got out of our work together over the 300 day period? And then you're gonna take a picture of that and send it to us. And Michael's gonna coach you on actually teaching that as well. What are the most life transformative lessons that you've gained in your life so far? At the end of our time together, we're gonna revisit that and get really clear. Then have those ideas, those tools, those weapons ready at hand to use on our hero's journey. All right, well, there you go. That was one epically long take. Almost ran out of gas there at the end. I was expecting to break this down into, you know, little takes each session. You'll see that in the future sessions between ideas. Each of our sessions has 10 ideas. Between each idea, I take a breath, take a sip of water, and then I come back and crush it. We kind of got on a roll there, and we just went with it. Hope you enjoyed. As you can tell, I am fired up about the work that we can do together, which leads us to what we call the dojo decision. So the dojo decision goes something like this. Imagine that you walk into a Dojo, and you're wearing a white belt. It's your first time in this dojo. You're studying a martial art. Now, you might have four black belts and other arts, but this is your first time in this studio. So you're starting as a white belt. Or this might be your first time ever setting foot in a martial arts studio. You, too have a white belt on. Now, the question for you is this. As you enter that dojo, are you there just kind of going through the motions, like you're happy to be off the couch and you're in the dojo, Check you out. Awesome. Which is fine. You know, we all need to take steps for it. Or are you in that dojo and you're going for mastery going through the motions versus going for mastery? Now, obviously, if you're going for mastery and you want to be a black belt in as efficient a time as you can, it's not going to be a week or a month or even a year. A real program is going to challenge you over a matter of years to see what you're capable of. Go from your white belt to your blue belt to your brown belt to your black belt or whatever. And you need to show up, and you will show up with a higher level of intensity and urgency and desire to master when you make that bigger commitment. So my question for you as you begin our program, are you just here to go through the motions? Which, again, is fine. We all have decisions to make, and this may or may not be the program to which you want to go all in on. Completely respect that. Or you just might want to live life at a different tempo. Completely respect that. But we want to be mindful that we're making a decision not just with this program, but much more importantly with our lives. And so, as we entertain how we're going to show up. And again, this is the Mastery series for a reason. We want to encourage you to go for mastery in your life in general and to the extent you feel inspired in this program in particular, because there's a difference. And we need to, in one way or the other, we would say reach that activation energy point again. You can boil water, put it on a stove and watch the water. Nothing happens until 212 degrees. Boom. At that activation energy, water boils. You can rub your sticks together as much as you want, but until you get to 451 degrees, 300 doesn't matter. 350, 400, 450 doesn't matter. You have to cross the activation energy point. Boom. Let there Be light, you have a fire. Which is why Joseph Campbell, again our hero's journey scholar, tells us, quoting Sri Ramakrishna, do not approach enlightenment, or in our case, optimizing and actualizing in service to the world, unless you approach it like a person whose hair is on fire seeks a pond. It's that level of 451, activation, energy, going for mastery, intensity, an urgency that allows us to step through into the next level of our potential. My coach, Phil Stutz, would say, it's as if God lives in this sphere and you live in this sphere and those two circles meet, there's a dot right where they meet, and you meet God by going all in, by living with this level of intensity. And again, we're not talking ungrounded manic intensity. We're talking levity, gravity, buoyancy. We are grounded, we're antifragile, we are embracing reality. But we're showing up with a fierce commitment to one more time, master ourselves, to serve heroically and empower others to do the same. To wake up and realize this isn't a dress rehearsal and go give the world all we've got. That's our dojo decision. Some other ways to think about it. Donald Robertson, one of the world's leading cognitive behavioral therapists, Stoic philosophers, who joins our faculty in a great session, has written a number of great books, including how to Think Like a Roman Emperor. He tells us that the ancient philosophers, true lovers of wisdom, were not librarians of the mind. They were warriors of the mind. They didn't look to catalog these ideas. They wanted to live these ideas. And even the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred text that Mahatma Gandhi, the most peaceful activist the world has known, changed the world through his peace activities. But he carried the Bhagavad Gita around with them. Do you know what the Bhagavad Gita is about? Again, it is a reluctant warrior on a metaphorical battlefield being counseled by his advisor, Arjuna, the reluctant warrior, Krishna, his advisor, and basically saying, make the choice, go for mastery, win the inner battle first. All the external battles, those are just metaphorical representations of the internal battle between our demon and our daimon. Will we step up and into our potential this moment or not? Again, that decision to enter the dojo isn't a one and done thing. It's a recommit, recommit, recommit. Moment to moment to moment. Let's live with arete, but close the gap. Experience eudaimonia. Flourish by putting our virtues into action and Moving from theory to practice to mastery. Today, that's an important decision. Then we're ready for our reflection exercises. We have three of them as promised. So it's time for another deep breath. We got some work to do. We're going to hop in a time traveling machine. We're going to take three quick trips. First to heaven, then to hell, and then to an end of life celebration, AKA funeral. So you ready time machine? Hop in it with me. There's room for two. Boom. Here you are. Awesome. Strap yourself in. We're going to go fast. We're going to fast forward into the future. You can go forward 2, 3, 5, 10, 25 years, whatever resonates for you. Perhaps think of a milestone. So for me, I'm turning 50 in just under 200 weeks. 46, heading to 50. That's an important milestone for me. I have some very important goals I'm committed to hitting. I'm going to work hard between here and there. Being the best version of myself. Energy, work and love wise. What is it for you? Do you have a milestone that you might be approaching? Perhaps we can use that as our guide. Pick a time in the future. That's where we're going to go in our time machine. What is it for you? We'll put program it in. Alright, Got it. Perfect. Boom. We're there. Time machine is fast. Okay. Open the door and you know who we see right in front of us is the absolute best version of you at that point in time. So for me, I'd be looking at that 50 year old version of me. My kids would be 11 and 7. I'd be married for approaching 20 years. What have I done and who am I? More importantly, I want you to see that best version of you. You have practiced your philosophy. You have chosen to step forward into mastery again and again and again you've spiraled up into this expression, this radiantly divinely awesome version of you. The optimist. Best you. We would say. See them, feel them. Imagine how they show up. Energy working love wise. Feel their vitality, their calm confidence, their wisdom again. Their self mastery, their courage, their love, their hope, their gratitude, their curiosity and their zest. I want you to feel it. Then you get to spend. I'm going to step out, you get to spend some time with them. We'll have a couple of journaling exercises that Michael again our head coach, will walk you through. Imagine you have 30 seconds to spend with them. What do they tell you in that 30 seconds? What advice would they give you? What would they want to whisper into your ear that would be important for you to consider. What if you had an hour to spend with them and what if you actually took that hour and you imagined this and you spent a deep work time block before all the inputs after a good night of sleep and you said, you know what? I'm going to bring that Daimon, that best self into my life right now. Science says imagining your best self in five years and how awesome your life can be is one of the most robust ways to boost your hope. We know hope is important. This is a powerful exercise. Feel it, know you can create it, know it's going to be challenging. And know together we can do some amazing things. Then think about what one thing. If that best version of you could only tell you one thing right now in order to become that best version of you, what would they tell you? What would the one piece of advice be? Mine would be keep going. You got this. Let's go. It's three things, but basic idea. Let's go, let's go. You're on it. Just stay on the path. How about you? Now you got to say goodbye. We're going back to today. We're back. Okay. Awesome. That was fun, huh? Now we're not going to have as much fun. Now we're going to take a little different trip this time. We're going to fast forward and we're not actually going to see that best version of you. We're going to fast forward to the end of our lives. And unfortunately, we didn't pay attention in this model, this little thought exercise. We didn't pay attention to that optimist best daimonic daimon wisdom, Eudaimonic wisdom that was whispered to us. Instead of spiraling up, we spiral down, Right? There's. You can go like that or you can go like that. Now, some would say that this is one version of hell. Imagine yourself, you're on your deathbed. And again, I carry with me it's either on my desk or my pocket. I got this bunch of fun stuff in my pocket. Ryan Holiday, the Daily Stoic highly recommend it. We'll talk about it a lot. Here's a coin. Memento mori. Remember death. Classic ancient wisdom practice. Remember death. You never know when your last moment is going to be the wisest among us. Keep death as an advisor. And there's a humility and a you know what? I don't know if this is the last time I'm going to be able to interact with my kids and my wife and with you. I'M going to give my best. I don't want my last moment to be anything but my best. Memento mori. It's a humbling thing to keep our mortality in mind. Most of us don't want to do that. And then we fritter away moment after moment and day after day. So something like this exercise is a powerful, humbling reminder of not a dress rehearsal, not going to last forever. So, anyway, you're on your deathbed. Congratulations, we're all going to get there. And it's very clear that in this scenario, which will not be the outcome that we're going to go do, Right? But in this scenario, you didn't fulfill. You didn't even come close to fulfilling your potential. And you failed to honor your deepest truths and to operationalize this virtue by putting in the consistent effort. Now you're feeling that pain. And then right before you take your last breath, the door to your room opens, and in walks that optimist, best, almost annoyingly great version of you. At the last moment, you're just right there. Boom. And you see who you could have become, and it's hell. Because you can't do anything about it. Boom. You're gone. God. Now, the good news is, and again, some would call that hell to meet the version of you you could have become at the moment, you can no longer do anything about it. You're gone. Hell. Now, the good news is, if you're watching this, you're not. At that moment, we have the opportunity to significantly, fundamentally, permanently change our lives. And it doesn't matter how long. The great spiritual teachers say the light has been dark in your room. The moment you flip on the switch and you turn on the light, it's light. Now, I put an asterisk on that wisdom and say, yeah, and you might have some dusting to do, you might have some cleanup to do, some cobwebs to clean up, but that's true. Boom. You can change your life from where you are right now significantly, regardless of how long you have. And none of us know how long we have. So let's come back from that quick trip to hell, back to today. Shake that one out. Flip the switch. Power pose. Chest up, chin down. Threads being pulled through the head. We're breathing in nicely. In through the nose, down into our bellies, back out. Exhale longer. Clark Kent to Superman style. Let's go. Now we're going to go back through the future. Love that movie, by the way. Back to the future, kid. Coolest thing ever. We're going to Go back to the future. This time through the lens of you really showing up again. Never perfectly. Our ideals are guiding stars, not distant shores. We're never going to get there. Our potential is always paradoxically asymptotic, which means you're aligned, but you're never quite hitting it. That's how it should be. You're constantly reaching and growing, yet accepting and celebrating each moment of the way as you continue to actualize. So you're just awesome. You're showing up energy, work and love wise. You live a fulfilling, just complete life, perfectly, imperfectly perfect end of your life. Boom, same story, deathbed gone. This time we have a celebration of life, truly a celebration of life. You walk into a funeral, you see it's yours. And people are truly celebrating this wonderfully beautiful, humbly heroic life where you gave yourself fully to your family, your community and whatever it meant for you. On a broader sense to the world, what do they have to say? This is how Stephen Covey starts one of his habits. Begin with the end in mind, he tells us. Begin with the ultimate end in mind. You want to have habits of highly effective people. Well, be proactive and then also begin with the end in mind. And there's no more ultimate end than the end of your life. What are people going to have to say about you? What are the eulogies that people are going to read to you? We want to know what they're going to say because we want to have a blueprint for what we need to be living today. Because that's not an abstract ideal, that's a concrete reality of our day to day lives if we want that to be the outcome that we experience. So what do and imagine again? Michael will walk you through this with worksheets, et cetera. It's a challenging, beautiful exercise, life transforming potentially. Who says what? Imagine 1, 2, 3 of your loved ones. What do they have to say about you? And I want you to recognize the fact they're not going to talk about your material possessions. They're not going to talk about all the hedonic things you chase. They're going to talk about your virtues. They're going to talk about how kind and considerate and encouraging and consistent and loving and creative again and wise and mastered and courageous and loving again and grateful and hopeful and curious and zestful. They're going to talk about your core virtues. So what virtues do you hope they use to describe you again? This is the blueprint for all of our work together because what we want to do is pull that reality. Boom. Back to today. Today is the day to live with those virtues, energy, work and love wise such that that's the outcome you experience. And one more time. You do not need to wait until the end of your life for either heaven or hell. It's a moment to moment thing. You step forward, you feel great, you step back, not so great forward in this way. Daimon Demon when you have gaps between what you're capable of doing and what you're actually doing, it's in those gaps that pain, anxiety, disillusionment, Hell exists. If you aggregate a bunch of them and you know you could be doing this and there's a huge gap. At the end of those days, what do you want to do? You want to go numb yourself out? Now stated the other way, when you are consistently stepping forward again, never perfectly, but more and more consistently, how do you feel at the end of those days? Great. Heaven and Hell. It's a choice we're making in that dojo every single day. And those tiny little choices are not so tiny. We aggregate and compound all of these little plus one gains such that we get to a point where like who am I? This is amazing how far I have come over this period of time. We're going to take some significant steps over the next 300 days and that's still just going to be the beginning. It's always day one. There's always an opportunity to get even more in alignment with our deepest values. As Abraham Maslow says, there's such a thing called hedonic adaptation. You adapt to your hedonic material pleasures, but there's no such thing as eudaimonic adaptation. When you get on the they call that a hedonic treadmill. You keep on running, chasing all the extrinsic things, but you don't get anywhere. You need more and more and more to be happy. That doesn't not how it works on the eudaimonic side of things. He calls them deficiency versus beingness needs. When you get on the hedonic loop, there's no treadmill. You continue to go and you don't get bored. You don't adapt to it. You get excited about it and you build on all of your prior gains. And again, you aggregate and compound all these little gains over an extended period of time. You create magic. Which is why I'm so fired up and so inspired by the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lives that we have been able to humbly help optimize and actualize. Which is why I have such confidence in our ability to Work together to do great things. All of which leads us to the final part of this very long introductory session. Action. So each practice session, each of our sessions has a practice theory that I share. Practice that Michael walks you through. And the practice has two facets. Reflection exercises and action exercises. You reflect on things, develop self awareness. Then you go take action. Developing self mastery. Cool combination, right? Wisdom, self mastery, etc. So the practice for today is very simple. And you could say that we're going to summarize our 300 day program in less than three minutes right now. Or 30 seconds. Whatever it takes me to do. We call it the ultimate optimizing algorithm. Three steps. One, two, three. Step one. If your daimon, whatever you call that higher version of you, whispers to you or yells at you, some advice, listen. Step one, Step two. Then flip the switch, say hi, Optimus. Then step three, go do what that optimist best version of you, and give the world all you've got in the only moment that matters, which is right now. That's it. That's all of our work together. Listen to your daimon, assume the position of your best self and then go do whatever they told you to do. Easier said than done. Takes a lifetime to even approach mastery on that. But that's the ultimate game. And. And this, we believe, is how to play it well again. I am honored to have the opportunity to spend the next 300 days and God willing, whatever after that with you. Sending tons of love to you and your family one more time. Let's master ourselves so we can serve heroically and empower others to do the same. So we can change the world one person at a time together. Starting with you and me today. 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.