OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

I dropped out of law school before a semester was over but I do remember one Big Idea from Contracts class. Lawyers like to say that a contract is a good one when there are “bright lines”—when it’s super obvious what everyone is agreeing to. Fuzzy lines? Not so good. We want super crisp, obvious, BRIGHT lines.

We all have areas of our lives we want to Optimize. Stephen Covey tells us to think about our “Roles and Goals.” Tony Robbins calls it “Categories of Improvement.” The challenge with those is that we can get confused with a near-infinite number of Roles and Categories. I like to boil it down to my Big 3: Energy + Family + Service.

Here’s another simple way to keep your motivation high: Journal. Sonja Lyubomirsky is one of the world’s leading scientists studying well-being. She tells us that one of the most robust ways to boost our optimism and positive thinking (actually, she says it’s "The most robust" strategy) is to journal daily—reflecting on our hopes and dreams, visualizing our success and reflecting on the steps we will take to make it all happen. Ten to twenty minutes per day.

Stephen Covey's seventh habit of Highly Effective People is "Sharpen the Saw." He tells us about the importance of renewal if we want to stay at our best and shares this parable to bring the point home: Imagine walking into a forest. You see a guy sawing a tree. He's working and working and working but not getting very far. His blade is clearly dull.

In our last +1, we chatted about the scientifically-proven power of gratitude: Simply writing down 5 things you're grateful for can boost your happiness up to 25%. (Wow.) 

Here’s another way to practice the magic of gratitude right in the moment when you need it most.

The Tools guys call it “Grateful Flow” and it’s one of their ways to deal with any negative feelings you might be experiencing—overwhelm, depression, that sort of ick sauce.

Patrick McKeown is one of the world’s leading experts on optimal breathing. When I interviewed him recently, he made a very interesting point. He said that we spend all our lives in school learning how to think but that we’re never taught how to STOP thinking. Fact is, most of our “thinking” isn’t thinking at all. We’re simply looping the same unproductive thought over and over again.

Gold-medal-winning mental toughness coach and author Lanny Bassham is all about focusing on the PROCESS of goal achievement. He tells a great story about one of his clients—a pro golfer.

In his great book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb walks us through the fact that there’s a big difference between being fragile, being resilient, and being ANTIfragile.

In short:

If you’re fragile and life hits you hard, you break.

If you’re resilient and life hits you hard, you withstand more and… eventually…  you break.

At this point, most of us know that Roger Bannister was the first person to break the 4-minute mile. Very smart people of his era said that it was impossible. Period. End of story. He, of course, wasn’t so sure.

But here’s what’s awesome: Do you know how Roger trained to do the impossible? 

Hint: He broke down his goal into bite-sized pieces.

In our last +1, we had fun applying Rumi’s wisdom that God turns us from one feeling to another so we have two wings to fly and not one.

 

Today, we’ll look at another one of my favorite gems from Rumi.

 

He tells us: “If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?”