OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

In our last +1, we  talked about the importance of making the connection between your two ADDs: your addiction to digital devices and your attention deficit disorder. Today we’re going to focus on the phrase “make the connection.”

In our last +1, we talked about single-mindedly focusing. Today we’ll talk about its opposite: “continuous partial attention.” First, note: As we’ve discussed, having the ability to shine the spotlight of our attention is pretty much the secret sauce of awesome.

Step 1. What’s important now? (Sounds obvious but take a moment and decide: What’s THE most important thing you need to be doing right now? Might be x, y, or z work thing or it might be shutting down completely and spending time with your family. Whatever it is, know it. And, do it! Everything else is a distraction.)

A few +1s ago, we mentioned one of Brian Tracy’s books called Eat that Frog. “Eat that Frog”? Yah. Eat it. First thing in the morning. Before you do anything else. Nom nom nom. Basic idea: If the worst thing you have to do in a day is eat a frog, and you eat that frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day goes downhill from there, eh? (Hah.)

In our last +1, we talked about Phil Stutz’ great phrase: “Endlessly evolving process.” Phil likes to draw upward spiraling loops to describe the flow of evolving into the best version of ourselves. In fact, his spiraling loops are almost identical to Ray Dalio’s spiraling loops. Remember his? We unpacked his 5-Steps to Success model not too long ago.

In our last +1, we talked about zero-based thinking and reflected on the powerful question of asking ourselves whether, knowing what we now know, we’d have started doing some of the things we’re doing. To pull that dynamic process off, I think it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind.

Brian Tracy is one of my favorite old-school self-development teachers. I can still remember listening to his CDs back in the day when I was first getting into all this stuff. And, we've covered a number of his books including Maximum Achievement, Eat that Frog, Goals!, Focal Point and No Excuses.

Somehow we’ve spent a year together with these Optimize +1s and we haven’t even talked about the ancient etymology of one of my favorite words: Optimize.

In our last +1, we talked about shadows and attending your own lectures. Let’s continue the theme and talk about a great idea from The Power of Full Engagement. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz give us another really powerful way to deal with that dis-integrated murky stuff we project onto others.

Please extend your pointer finger and shake it as if you’re lecturing someone — saying something like, “You shouldn’t do this, this and this! Do that, that and that!” Thank you.