OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

Continuing our chat about How to Prosper, let’s talk about another facet of our session on the subject with our Mastery-Coaches. We’re going to take a step back and go big-picture Today (and for the next couple of days) then dive back into the super-practical side of things…

Today I’d like to revisit our “How to Prosper” theme for a moment (or two) longer. In almost all of the Mastery-Coach sessions, I emphasize the importance of being Antifragile—using life’s (inevitable!) challenges as a source of fuel.

In our last +1, we talked about the fact that problems (when viewed from the right Optimizing mindset) are simply balls we get to throw forward as we play the game of life.

Before we took a (longish) tangent into the power of words, we were talking about our session on the sixth Optimizing fundamental: Prosper.

In our last +1, we spent some time with Todd Herman, Batman, Dora the Explorer and YOUR most heroic self. Today we’re going to connect all that goodness to wisdom from the classic peak-performance book The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey.

Not too long ago, we talked about Ellen Langer’s fascinating (!) research on the power of pretending you’re an air force pilot. Play the role well and… Voila! The quality of your vision goes up.

Continuing our brief exploration of the power of placebo-words (and expectations), I’d like to go back to Harvard and walk from Benson’s lab in the Medical School back to Langer’s Psychology of Possibility Lab for a couple more bits of wisdom.

In our last +1 we talked about placebos (“I shall be pleasing”) and nocebos (“I shall cause harm”). I promised to talk about what I consider one of the all-time most crazy-awesome studies. (Hah.) (Seriously.)

In our last couple +1s, we’ve been spending time with renowned psychologist Ellen Langer talking about the power of words and the power of placebos.

In our last +1, we revisited Ellen Langer at her “Psychology of Possibility” lab at Harvard to learn that words matter. As you may recall, simply priming people with words associated with old age (via a crossword puzzle!) will cause them to walk more slowly to the elevator than those who weren’t primed with those words.