Want to Prosper? Here's 10 Big Ideas from Mastery Series Module VI: The Fundies - Part 8: Prosper
17 Dec 2025 · 13 min
Podcast episode (Optimize Mastery series) in which Brian Johnson presents ten big ideas about prospering — defined etymologically as “to move forward with hope.” The session outlines vocabulary (pro- words), the science of hope, practical goal-setting (soul goal and wildly important targets in energy, work, love), eudaimonic accounting, investment strategy, profit, antifragile propellant, and becoming a professional optimizer. The speaker encourages concrete targets, agency, and plans as the path from despair to flourishing.
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You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize Mastery series. Today we're ready for the seventh and final Optimize fundamental Prospering, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating. Now it's time to move forward with hope. To prosper. That's what the word literally etymologically means. Prosper. To move forward with hope. The opposite of prospering is not being poor per se, unless you're talking about being poor in spirit. The opposite of prosper is despair, to not have hope. So we need to move forward with hope as we invest in Optimus U Public Benefit Corporation and give the world all we've got as we light an heroic fire and shine brightly. That's today's session. As always, we've got 10 big ideas. Let's take a quick look. Then we will officially jump in. First, big ideas. We're going to talk about that idea that prosperity literally means to go forward with hope. We're going to dust off the science of hope, remind ourselves that it is one of the big three cardinal virtues most scientifically proven to boost our well being. We've got zest, energy, which is why we spend so much time eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing. Then we've got gratitude, which is why we just spend so much time celebrating. After accepting, being grateful and really celebrating. Now it's time to get our hope on. 1, 2, 3. A target, a better future, a goal, the agency to believe we can achieve it and the plans to go do it. That's really what we're going to architect today. Helping you get clarity on your sole goal, your wildly important targets and then what you're going to do. Energy, work and love wise and your number one thing that's most firing you up, that you're going to move forward toward with hope. We're going to spend some time. Second idea is vocab lessons. We're going to look at 11 words that start with pro. So we got prosper, we've got profit, we've got process, we've got protocol, we've got professional. There's a lot of words that start with pro. All of those share the root. To move toward. To move forward towards something. It's a powerful idea. So we're going to talk about that. We'll talk about some other vocabulary words and affluence, security, some great ideas from Eric Butterworth's Spiritual Economics, which I highly recommend. Check out the notes and the book. The third idea is Optimus U Public benefit Corporation. You are a public benefit corporation. We're going to talk about what that literally means and why Optimize Enterprises is one and why I think we all are here to benefit the public. Master yourself, serve heroically. That's what it's all about. Empower others to do the same. We're going to talk about the fact that you are your number one asset. Then we'll introduce you to your CEO, your Daimon and the chairman who the CEO. And you report to God, whatever you call that higher power. We'll also talk about multiple stakeholder orientation, purpose driven businesses and other aspects of conscious capitalism. Fourth big idea is your investment strategy. You want to prosper spiritually and materially. Well, what's your investment strategy? The word investment literally means to clothe yourself in. You clothe yourself in what? In being worthy of creating value in other people's lives. So we're going to talk about profound dignity and we're going to talk about profound service. That's our ultimate UN investment strategy. That'll be fun. Fifth big idea is eudaimonic accounting. There's traditional accounting, then there's eudaimonic accounting. How's your soul doing? We want to appreciate your assets. We're going to capitalize mistakes. All the mistakes you've made. Those aren't expenses on your life's income statement, they are assets on your life balance sheet. These gray whiskers. I earned them. We want to capitalize all the mistakes and use that wisdom going forward. We're also going to pay off liabilities. I'm going to suggest that the only real liability you have in your life are the bad habits you're letting run your life. We're going to pay those off by creating newer and better habits. Talking about algorithms again. Sixth big idea is you're right on schedule. Quit comparing yourself to other people or arguing with reality and thinking that you should be somewhere other than where you are. Again, we need to accept before we can move forward. So let's do that. Then we're going to create a prospectus, which literally means to look forward. Prospectus. To look forward. We need to get clear on where we're headed and then create the process and protocol to get there. The seventh idea is profit. So the word profit literally means to make progress. You set up prospectus, you move forward with hope and. And then you profit. You make progress or that's a plus one. Or you regress, you go backwards minus one. So we're going to talk about profit. You as you want to Be an optimized coach or a coach professionally and doing it full time. We need to figure out your minimum viable profit. What do you need to do in order to pay the bill so you can continue doing it? We want to light that fire and get you clear on it. As we move to the next idea, which is lighting idiosyncratic heroic fires, we're going to talk about the fire movement. Being financially independent, retiring early vis a vis the heroic fire movement, which is financial integrity. We play with the fir e financial integrity. Realizing eudaimonia. So we all have an idiosyncratic relationship to money. But we want to have the financial strength for two and the intelligence to do what we need to do to get ourselves in order so we can go continue realizing eudaimonia. We'll talk about that. The ninth idea is antifragile propellant. Propellant. Did you know the word problem literally means to put forward to throw forward a problem. It's not a con blum to throw backwards. You throw it in front of you. You use it as a tool to get better. Well, we want to be anti fragile. Use our problems as propellants. I'm going to playfully bring in some fast and furious wisdom from the movie series and some wisdom from the last dance. Michael Jordan and his bowls in that story. Antifragile propellant. Remember, a fire makes use of everything thrown into it. It gets bigger with everything thrown into it. We want to take our problems, throw it right into our fire. And then the 10th big idea. Turn pro. Turn toward life. Go forward. We're going to encourage you to consider becoming and being a world class professional optimizer. Going out, mastering yourself, serving heroically, empowering others to do the same. That's how we're going to prosper. That's what we're going to talk about today. All right, our first big idea. We want to prosper. We need to go forward with hope. The opposite of prospering is not being poor in a material sense, at least etymologically. It's not having hope prosper. Despair. To go forward with hope, to curl up in a ball in despair. Minus one plus one. Are we stepping forward into growth or are we stepping back into despair? Safety. We want to get really, really clear on that. We want to know that hope has two parts or prospering has two parts going forward, which is actually probably the most important part. And with hope, we know that our feelings follow our behaviors at least as much as the other way around. So sometimes you may not feel incredibly hopeful, but Taking action elicits that and gets you on a virtuous spiral up. Whereas if you don't take action, you can be in a vicious spiral of despair. So again, this is why the worse we feel, the more committed we are to the protocol, which helps us feel physiologically that hope. Remembering a good night of sleep, something as simple as turning off your electronics early, is a very prosperous thing to do because that helps you walk over the bridge from despair to hope. Again, all these things are interrelated. And I want to drill into the science of hope with more detail, more precision. And Michael will be helping us really drill in and going from theory to practice to mastery on this with some worksheets. And I want you to end this session with clarity on what you're willing to go all in on. You may not have 100% clarity yet, but I want you to start thinking about what am I going to go all in on? Because hope is this idea, as we know. 1, 2, 3. We believe our future is going to be better than our present. We have a goal that we're working toward. We have a sense of agency that we can make that so. And we have a plan and a pathway, and we're willing to take multiple pathways. Right? That's it on a high level. But we also want to know that happy people have projects. They have very specific things that they're working on. So we don't want to abstractly know that our future will be better than our present. We want to know because we're going to go crush this goal. We are teleological beings as, as Aristotle and the ancient philosophers in Greece taught us. Telos, target. We take aim at a specific target. So my question for you is, what's the specific target that's firing you up right now? We can approach that by saying, okay, what's my soul goal? We talked about this in different contexts as we've been building up to it, but take a fresh look at it. Your soul goal, My soul goal, and I think the universal soul goal is let's actualize our potential and service to the world. Fantastic, noble, etc. What are your unique, wildly important targets? Energy, work and love wise. On a high level, what are they? Right. So again, energy wise, I'm excited to be able to do a Spartan race 365 days a year plus 50 years. Can I do it? Plus, you know, at 101, that's inspiring for me. Energize, tranquility, boom. Wildly important target. Second thing for me for work now, I'm Very specific on this and it's more near term for me. I want 1000 philosopher's notes as I record this. I'm 198 days away from turning 50 and I am all in on that particular target that has some associated things that I'll do with it. But boom, there we go. I'm going to do that by the time I'm 50. I'm going to do a lot of other things that I think will really catalyze us to the next level. I'm very inspired by that. Clear target gives me hope. I know our future personally with our family, with our business, Optimized Enterprises. Public Benefit Corporation is going to spiral up as I continue to do this work. And then love wise, I'm excited to celebrate my 50th anniversary. My kids will be in their 40s, super important to me right now. Those are my energy work and love. What are your wildly important targets? Energy, work and love wise. Make notes of it. Then think about what's the number one most wildly important target that kind of drives the whole show. That doesn't mean you forget about the other ones. You actually go even more into those. But you really laser in on that one wildly important target. That's the big lever that you know as you go hit it, you can do extraordinary things, whoop it, make sure it passes the test. Know what the price is you're going to have to pay. Then figure out what behaviors you're going to do engage in. We'll talk more about this as we go. First pass though, take a look at that. Get some clarity on what that wildly important target is. Know that you can hit it or not. If you don't think you can, agency wise, go back to the lab, come up with something that fires you up that you believe you can hit. Then go create a plan to go hit it again. We're going to help you get some details on that. But that's hope to go forward with hope to prosper. The opposite is despair. We're going to move forward with hope 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 Coach. And here's a fun little video we put together featuring some of our Optymyze Coach graduates describing what they got out of our program and why they loved it so much. You can also check out hundreds of other testimonials at optimize me, Coach. Have an awesome day, and let's do this.
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