OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

Returning to our Hero’s journey theme, imagine yourself at the start of an epic journey. You’re looking out across a canyon. You can see a shimmering oasis on the other side of the canyon. It’s epic. Super bright and shiny and awesome. And it’s yours. You know it. You can feel it.

Barbara Fredrickson is one of the world’s leading positive psychologists. She wrote a book called Love 2.0 in which she challenges us to upgrade our Love OS. Here’s the short story. Most of us think of love as something reserved for the precious few people in our lives — our family and our most intimate friends. That kind of love is (obviously) wonderful, but Barbara describes that as Love 1.0.

Today we hit another fun milestone: +1 #400. (Go us!!) To celebrate, we’re going to do something a little different. First, context: Not too long ago, we chatted about the fact that you might think you’re at a “8” but you might actually be at a “2.”

In our last +1, we talked about a wise daughter-in-law who planted her seeds and reaped a bountiful harvest.  Another great teacher once told a similar story not too far west of India. You might have heard of him and his Parable of the Talents. Let’s take a quick look.

We’re on a roll with some mindfulness wisdom via Goenka, so here’s one more story.  Once upon a time an Indian woman with a large family passed away. Now, Goenka tells us, in classic Indian culture, the woman controlled the family finances so the widower needed to select one of his four sons’ wives to become the new head.

Continuing our fun little recap of wisdom picked up at an S.N. Goenka Vipassana retreat, let’s talk about impermanence. We’ll do so via another classic Goenka mantra (all of which, again, are spoken in a beautifully drawn-out, lyrical Burmese accent, btw): “Anicca, anicca, anicca.”

Continuing our theme of S.N. Goenka-inspired wisdom, let’s chat about something he calls “Strong Determination.”

In our last +1, we talked about the renowned Vipassana meditation teacher S.N. Goenka and his mantra: “Work diligently. Diligently. Work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently. And you’re bound to be successful. Bound to be successful.” Goenka had another mantra that’s worth chatting about: “Start again.”

“Work diligently. Diligently. Work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently. And you’re bound to be successful. Bound to be successful.”

Dan Pink tells us that To Sell Is Human. Although only 1 in 9 Americans is technically in sales, he says that the other 8 in 9 spend a ton of their time in “non-sales selling.” In fact, the research he commissioned shows that we spend around 40% (!) of our time (or 24 minutes out of every working hour!) trying to move people to do things—whether that’s pitching an idea to colleagues or trying to change someone’s behavior.