OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

In our last +1, we talked about Yuval Noah Harari and the fact that studying history allows us to reimagine a better future by seeing that a lot of the things we take for granted are neither natural, inevitable nor immutable.

Yuval Noah Harari is a very smart man. He got his PhD in history from Oxford and he’s written a couple of bestselling books: one called Sapiens (which provides “A Brief History of Humankind”) and the other called Homo Deus (which provides “A Brief History of the FUTURE” < emphasis mine.)

Wallace D. Wattles was an old-school Philosopher-Optimizer who wrote The Science of Getting Rich. He also wrote a little book called The Science of Being Great. (Both of those titles are, of course, finalists for best titles ever.) In The Science of Being Great he has a great line that has been tattooed on my brain since I read it. He said: “The world needs demonstration more than it needs instruction.”

Have you ever had food poisoning? Me, too. No fun, eh? How’d you get yours? (I’m having flashbacks of the time I got so sick in Bali I couldn’t get out of bed for days. Alas, the 180 consecutive days of massage made up for it. Hah.) Seriously though. My hunch is that you don’t make a habit of doing whatever you did that led to the food poisoning… And, on a less traumatic level, are there any foods that just don’t work for you?

We talk a lot about the value of going deep and creating, as Peter Drucker puts it in The Effective Executive “large quantums of time” to focus on ONE Thing as Gary Keller puts it. (In fact, as we’ve discussed, Keller tells us that creating “time blocks” where we single-mindedly focus on the most important thing is THE #1 “power tool” of time management.)

Every morning, as you probably know by now, I get up early, meditate, do my Deep Work, and hit the Trail (usually before the fam gets up).

On a recent Monday at 3:00 PM Pacific time, Phil Stutz and I had our weekly chat. I like to prepare for our time together by noting the events and challenges and celebrations that have bubbled up since our last chat.

Today we’re going to talk about walking. Walking is awesome. In fact, it’s so old-school epically awesome in helping thinkers think that our ancient friends even had a Latin phrase to capture its power: Solvitur ambulando. <- "It is solved by walking.”

In our last +1, we talked about the idea that the siren you might hear today wails for YOU. Then I suggested you actually IMAGINE yourself being put on that gurney at the end of your life.