You Are Heroic with Brian Johnson

93 Million Miles + 8 Minutes 20 Seconds This morning I was on the Trail moving for 30 minutes. I banged out my last couple sets of 11 burpees to hit my 101 for the day. I jumped up to hang from the tree branch that is my pull-up bar to hammer out my 11 pull-ups. I rowed my 1,000 meters to hit that Target. Target swipe. Target swipe. Target swipe. Target swipe. Target swipe. I know I've said it before but I'll say it again…. It's truly amazing to me how good I feel hitting those Heroic targets in our app every.single.day. "That's like me!! Forging Antifragile confidence. TODAY." But that's not quite the point of Today's +1. This is… As I was turning the corner on our trail, I was struck by the beauty and warmth of the sunlight peeking through the trees and, at the risk of getting Rumi about it, I felt the Sun gently caressing my mind and body and soul. It was a beautiful moment. I was in awe. Then I looked up at the Sun and thought to myself, "Wow. The Sun is 93 MILLION (!) miles away. It took 8 minutes and 20 seconds for its rays to make it to Earth. That's astonishing." Then I reminded myself of the fact that you could fit over 1 million Earths into the Sun. Then I thought to myself, "What's really crazy is the fact that the next closest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 LIGHT YEARS AWAY!!" Wow. I'm in even deeper awe. And… I am humbled by the vastness of the Universe and the preciousness of this gift that is my life. Then I thought of Michael Singer. He's the one who recently reminded me of just how vast our Universe is in his great book Living Untethered. Singer's teaching is all about how to, as per the sub-title of his latest book, move "beyond the human predicament." One way to do that? Reflect on JUST HOW VAST our Universe is. It's an incredibly powerful way to maintain perspective on our little challenges. And… That's Today's +1. If you feel so inspired, the next time you look up at the Sun, consider using it as a trigger/prompt/cue to practice your philosophy and put the virtues of gratitude and humility and awe into practice. Then take a deep breath, feel your feet on the Earth and get back to work. Day 1. All in. Let's go. Target swipe: Appreciate someone or something

From Doing the Right Thing for the Win! In our last few +1s, we've been talking about The Law of Cause and Effect. We started with Michael Singer's wisdom. Then we went old school with Jesus and Epictetus. I promised we'd talk about what modern SCIENCE has to say about applying the basic ideas of The Law of Cause and Effect to the process of optimizing our lives. That's what we'll do Today. But… First… As we journey back from 2,000 years ago to today, let's pause briefly and see what another one of my favorite teachers had to say about the subject. In 1841, the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay called "Compensation" in which he did his thing by integrating wisdom from the East with our Western perspective. He tells us: "Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed." Yep. There you go. The Law of Cause and Effect. Now… On to the science! Here's the short story. Research shows that people who can MAKE THE CONNECTION between the things they do and the Energy/Productivity/Connection they feel NOW are MUCH MORE likely to actually DO THE THINGS they say they want to do than people who don't make that connection. Michelle Segar calls it having "the right why." In her great book, No Sweat, she tells us that people who succeed in consistently engaging in healthy behaviors like eating well, moving their bodies and getting good sleep have CONCRETE goals rather than abstract goals. When you ask people who ACTUALLY DO the things they know are best for them, they will, essentially, tell you that the reason they do them is TO FEEL GREAT NOW. Unfortunately, most of us (75% of the people in her research!) have abstract goals like "getting healthier" or "losing weight." Those might be good reasons but they're not EFFECTIVE reasons. As it turns out, Michelle tells us that: "The vast majority of the participants whose goals were weight loss and better health spent the least amount of time exercising overall—up to 32 percent less than those with other goals." Why? Because the people who ACTUALLY did the things that were good for them made CONCRETE connections between what they did and how they felt. They exercised to enhance the quality of their daily lives—to create a sense of well-being, a feeling of being energized and centered. They found a way to get *immediate* gratification out of their exercise—which is a LOT more effective than pursuing some future, abstract target. As Michelle tells us: "Human beings, it turns out, are hardwired to choose immediate gratification over long-term benefits." She describes the "lose weight" and "get healthy" goals as too fuzzy and abstract and clinical and calls them the "Wrong Why." When we lead with those Whys, our exercise becomes a chore— which then leads to a failure. Who does chores with sustained enthusiasm?! So… Want to give yourself the best chance at getting more Energized, Productive, and Connected by doing the things that will help you enjoy those fruits of your Heroic behaviors? Again… MAKE THE CONNECTION between what you do RIGHT NOW and how you feel RIGHT AFTER. Then give yourself the gift of Heroic levels of Energy, Productivity, and Connection. The Law of Cause and Effect. Let's use it. And change our lives. TODAY.

Horticultural vs. Clock Time Revisited In our last +1, we continued our conversation about The Law of Cause and Effect by inviting Jesus to the party to share his thoughts. As you may recall, he told us that we can't expect to grow grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles. In other words: If we want a noble, virtuous life, we must do noble, virtuous things. Now… It's not possible for me to think about figs without thinking about another ancient wise man who happens to be my all-time favorite teacher, the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Epictetus was born (into slavery!) in what is now Turkey in the year 50 AD—not too long after or far away from where Jesus taught. Epictetus reminds us that, even if we're doing it right and growing figs on a fig tree, we've gotta know that IT TAKES TIME for those trees to bear fruit. As we discussed in an old-school +1 on Horticultural Time vs. Clock Time: When you want to grow something and you plant a seed, do you start your stopwatch and then go into your backyard an hour later to dig it up to see how it's doing? Or, do you know it takes some time for that seed to germinate and then sprout and then grow and finally to reach its fruit-bearing stage? Of course, we honor the rules of horticultural time and give that little seed the time it needs to naturally move through its required stages of development. Which is one of the reasons why Epictetus told us that: "No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen." Today's +1? Remember… Our Heroic optimizing occurs on HORTICULTURAL time, not clock time. Let's sow the seeds of virtue. Let's tend them wisely. And, let's give them time to blossom, bear fruit, and ripen. +1. +1. +1. All day. Every day. Especially… TODAY.

Thorn Bushes and Thistles Won't Do the Trick In our last 1, we talked about The Law of Karma. Also known as The Law of Cause and Effect. Same thing. All the great teachers have talked about it. And the entire field of modern science is, of course, grounded in this causal relationship between things. In short: If THIS then THAT. Today we're going to rewind the clock a couple of thousand years and see what another wise teacher has to say on the subject. Then we'll explore some more related ancient wisdom in our next +1. Then we'll talk about how modern science tells us we should be thinking about it as it relates to setting goals for our optimization. So… Let's rewind the clock to almost exactly 2,000 years ago. We're heading to the ancient land of Israel. Jesus is giving a sermon on a mount. In Matthew 7:16, he tells us: "You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?" Of course, in that context, Jesus is talking about how to discern false prophets from true ones, but we'll use the wisdom from his metaphor at the highest level and see if we can apply it to our lives. So… Pop quiz! Are grapes gathered from thornbushes? NO. Are figs gathered from thistles? NO. Will the fruits of a good, noble life grow from the branches of less-than-awesome behaviors? NO. We need to remember The Law of Cause and Effect. If THIS then THAT. If we want to feel more Energized, Productive and Connected, we need to DO THE THINGS that lead to those outcomes. This is, of course, a very simple truth. And… We'd be wise to keep it in mind as we MAKE THE CONNECTION between the things we're doing and the outcomes we're experiencing. When? TODAY. Happy harvesting, Hero!

How to Apply the Law of Cause and Effect As we've discussed, Michael Singer is one of my favorite spiritual teachers. After reading The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered, I decided to follow Joseph Campbell's advice and take a deeper dive into his work. I went to Amazon to see what else he's written. I found a couple of books he wrote nearly 50 years ago. One of those books is called Three Essays on Universal Laws. The book has a chapter-essay on each of his three Laws: The Law of Karma, The Law of Will, and The Law of Love. Today we're going to chat about his (and my) take on The Law of Karma. Singer tells us we can also call this the Law of Cause and Effect. The basic idea is really simple. He tells us: "For example, when we walk up and touch a hot stove the body gets burned, and thus, we learn 'a lesson.' Or if we stay up too long without sleep the body gets sick, and, again, we have been taught 'a lesson.' This holds true for staying out in the rain, eating the wrong kinds of food, staying too long underwater, and so on. By means of the Law of Cause and Effect, which will invariably repeat itself given the same conditions, we learn many 'lessons' concerning the care of the body. For there are certain activities which are in balance with the use of our bodily tool, while others are not." Now… As I was working on that Idea in the Note I was creating, my 1,000-second timer went off. As you know if you've been following along, that's the prompt/trigger/cue for me to get up and, if it's my AM1 Deep Work block (which it was as I typed this), bang out a set of 11 burpees. So, that's what I did. As I hammered out the 11 burpees I thought about WHY I do them. It's simple. I KNOW (with ZERO doubt!) that I feel more Energized when I go to bed early, spend 9-10 hours in bed, meditate, do my burpees, and hit the other 30+ Energy Targets I set up in my Big 3 protocol in the Heroic app. And, I REALLY like feeling REALLY Energized so I can show up as my best, most Heroic Self in service to YOU and to our Mission so... It's easy for me to do the right thing. All day every day. Except, of course, when I don't. (Hah!) Alas, I'm still human and, tragically, I will not be the first perfect human being () and there are plenty of times when I'm lazy and the little demon takes over (pushing my Daimon aside!) and I do things that I know aren't optimal which leads to feeling *less* than Heroically Energized. Then I step back half an inch, let my Daimon view the situation from what Singer beautifully calls "the soul's point of view" (aka the "Objective Observer," aka the "Witness") and… I MAKE THE CONNECTION between doing X and experiencing Y. I shine a spotlight on what needs work, remind myself of what works when I do it and then take a hammer to the construction project that is my life as I strengthen the habits that help me stay plugged in and weaken the habits that don't. THAT's the Law of Cause and Effect in action. In short: If we do THIS, then we experience THAT. That's also one of the THE most important things Alexandra and I are trying to teach our kids. We want them to have the Wisdom to MAKE THE CONNECTION between eating sugar and getting sick; between not exercising or sleeping well and feeling tired and cranky. And, of course, we want them to FEEL the joy of doing the little things that they KNOW help them feel GREAT. Call it whatever you want: The Law of Karma. The Law of Cause and Effect. It's real. We need to MAKE THE CONNECTION between the thoughts and behaviors that help us (and our kids!) create the lives we want and the thoughts and behaviors that do the opposite. Then we need to cultivate our structural, reactive and expansive disciplines as we use our willpower wisely to install the habits that will run on autopilot via empowering algorithms. When? TODAY. Let's go, Hero!

Feed the Good Guys In our last couple +1s, we hung out with a couple of wise Indian masters and their gurus. We talked about what to do if we're afraid of ghosts (approach them!) and how to deal with the bitter process of changing our behaviors (keep chewing!). Today I want to chat about ghosts for another moment. This time we'll go a little further east and visit Vietnam where the great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh was born and raised. When I searched my Mac for "ghosts" to find the Yogananda wisdom I was looking for, I saw that Thich Nhat Hanh ALSO talked about ghosts in his great book No Mud, No Lotus. Here's the passage. He tells us: "The Buddha said that nothing can survive without food. This is true, not just for the physical existence of living beings, but also for states of mind. Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we're feeding our suffering while we're walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We're not living our lives." Know this: Nothing (including ghosts!) survives without food. So… Want the ghosts to go away? Then… QUIT FEEDING THEM. Eckhart Tolle echoes this wisdom in The Power of Now. He tells us: "Once you realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick?" In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz uses another metaphor to bring the point home. He tells us: "Deposit only positive thoughts in your memory bank. Let's face it squarely: everyone encounters plenty of unpleasant, embarrassing, and discouraging situations. But unsuccessful and successful people deal with these situations in directly opposite ways. Unsuccessful people take them to heart, so to speak. They dwell on the unpleasant situations, thereby giving them a good start in their memory. At night the unpleasant situation is the last thing they think about... Confident, successful people, on the other hand, 'don't give it another thought.' Successful people specialize in putting positive thoughts into their memory bank." Let's starve the bad stuff and feed the good stuff. TODAY. + + + btw: We talked about a similar idea in this +1 on Starving Fear of Its Favorite Food.

Wisdom From Another Indian Sage and His Grandmother In our last +1, we talked about Yogananda and his guru's wisdom on what to do with ghosts/aka how to live fearlessly. As you may recall, the trick is to APPROACH our challenges rather than try to avoid them. The story is so good, we'll quickly review it. Yogananda's guru tells him: "My mother once tried to frighten me with an appalling story of a ghost in a dark chamber. I went there immediately, and expressed my disappointment at having missed the ghost. Mother never told me another horror tale." Hah. Genius. The moral of the story? "Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you." As I read that moral from an Indian yogi, I thought of another one of my favorite Indian sages, Eknath Easwaran. In his great book, Your Life Is Your Message, he tells us about a lesson he learned from his Indian guru—who happened to be his grandmother. The short story? Young Eknath was complaining about how hard it was to meditate and to change his habits. He tells us: "I complained about it to my spiritual teacher, my grandmother. She was a very plainspoken teacher, with none of the euphemisms of the intellectual, so she simply led me to a nearby amla tree. The amla is a beautiful tree, a little like the mimosa, with a small fruit. She picked a fruit and said, 'Here, take a bite.' I started chewing. It was pretty awful. I said, 'I've got to spit it out, Granny. It's sour, bitter, unpleasant.' She just said, 'Bear with me. Keep chewing for a while.' So I went on chewing, and to my surprise the amla fruit began to get sweeter and sweeter. Similarly, meditation and the allied disciplines require sustained enthusiasm every day—even when it seems icky. Especially when it seems icky! If you keep at it, you will find those same disciplines becoming sweeter and sweeter. When meditation time comes around you will find yourself hungering for the inner peace and calm it brings. The time will even come when you want a double helping." Approaching our fears? Rewiring our brains as we create new, virtuous habits that help us flourish while eliminating the old, vicious ones that don't? Of course… The process isn't always pleasant. It's often painful. It tastes "icky." Until… We have the Wisdom to see that approaching our fears and embracing the inevitable challenges of the journey and doing the hard work to win the ultimate game that brings us the sweet reward of tapping into our infinite potential. Let's do that. TODAY.

Here's What to Do… Not too long ago, we talked about how I read a book. I made the point that the most important part of how I read a book is how I decide what book I will read. I also talked about the fact that, as I followed Joseph Campbell's wisdom to immerse myself in the wisdom of an author who "grabs me" by reading everything that author has written AND everything by the authors who inspired them, I found myself going deep into Michael Singer's wisdom AND deep into the wisdom of one of his biggest influences, Yogananda. In fact, I read five of Yogananda's little books/booklets in very short order. They are PACKED with wisdom. I was blown away by Yogananda's PRACTICAL spirituality and I could see why Steve Jobs was such a big fan that he reread his Autobiography of a Yogi once a year and why he gifted that book to his friends as THE last thing they got on their way out of his memorial service. (Think about the significance of that for a moment.) So… We'll be talking more about Yogananda in the future as we bring his wisdom from the East to our modern lives in… I was going to say "the West" then I realized we have Heroic members from basically EVERY country in the world so we'll make it …. wherever we are in the world! Now… Here's a fun idea from a little booklet called Living Fearlessly. Yogananda shares a story of him asking his guru to tell him some stories from his childhood. Here's the exchange between a Master and his fiercely ambitious student. "'Guruji, I would like to hear some stories of your childhood.' 'I will tell you a few—each one with a moral!' Sri Yukteswar's eyes twinkled with his warning. 'My mother once tried to frighten me with an appalling story of a ghost in a dark chamber. I went there immediately, and expressed my disappointment at having missed the ghost. Mother never told me another horror tale. 'Moral: Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you.'" Those are the very first words of that little book. Want to live fearlessly? Be like Yogananda's guru and look fear in the face. Then, it will cease to trouble us. Yogananda left India and came to the United States as a 27-year-old yogi guru in 1920. His mission was to integrate the wisdom of the East with the West. To help bridge the gap in cultures, he talked about Jesus as the perfect embodiment of spiritual truth. And, one of the American philosophers he references the most is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson echoes this wisdom about what to do with our fear. As we discuss in our Notes on The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Self-Reliance, Emerson liked to say that "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." His advice on how to conquer fear was straight-forward: "Always, always, always, always, always do what you are afraid to do." What happens when we go straight toward the ghosts in the dark chambers? Well, Emerson tells us: "Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain." Modern science, as we often discuss, agrees. We must APPROACH rather than AVOID our fears. As we discuss in The Upside of Stress and The Telomere Effect, when we are willing to act in the presence of fear and see that the stressors in our lives are not THREATS to our well-being but an opportunity to practice our philosophy and forge antifragile confidence, we change our underlying physiology from a "threat response" to a "challenge response." Do that often enough, and the ghosts will stop being quite so terrifying. Let's do that. TODAY.

The Most Frequently Asked Question in Heroic Coach In our last +1, we talked about some Ryan Holiday wisdom from his new book Discipline Is Destiny. As you may recall, we brought Cato the Elder, Ben Franklin and Marcus Aurelius to the party to talk about the importance of focusing on all the ways WE can get better rather than worrying about all the ways other people need to improve. Cato told us: "I am prepared to forgive everybody's mistakes, except my own." Ben Franklin told us: "Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices." Marcus Aurelius told us to be: "Tolerant with others, strict for yourself." We could add Jesus' wisdom to the mix. He told us to quit worrying about the speck of dust in your brother's eye and to focus on the BEAM in yours! Same thing. This is a really important Idea. And… It's funny because as I created that last +1, I thought of what is probably THE most frequently asked question from people going through our Heroic Mastery Series/Coach certification program. It goes something like this… "I'm really into this stuff and I can already feel my life changing as I start to move from Theory to Practice to Mastery. It's amazing!!" Then they continue with… "But…" Then I often know what's coming… "The problem is that my [wife/husband/kids/extended family/colleagues/insert someone other than them!] REALLY needs to work on this stuff and…" I laughed as I typed that. And I usually laugh when I start my reply to our Hero-in-training. I typically talk about prescribing medicine for your neighbor, unilaterality and "How am I that?" as I encourage them to avoid proselytizing and simply focus on DOING THE WORK—letting our example be the primary lesson rather than the lectures we're all tempted to give when we're on fire with our own self-development. Then I tell them about the fact that MY OWN WIFE doesn't want me to coach her. (HAH!) (Trust me, Alexandra doesn't want me to coach her unless she explicitly asks me for the support. After fifteen years, I'm almost getting that fact! ) Now I've got another frame to use. Let's be prepared to forgive everybody's mistakes, except our own. Let's search others for their virtues and ourselves for our vices. Let's be tolerant with others and strict with ourselves. And, let's notice EVERY TIME we're tempted to do the opposite. Then use that prompt/trigger/cue as an opportunity to cultivate our reactive discipline—stepping in between the stimulus and our old, habitual response as we choose a better response and practice our philosophy. Not someday. TODAY!!! Trust me. Your loved ones will thank you. And, paradoxically at first glance but obvious at the second or third glance: This is the fastest way to actually convince your loved ones that you're on to something and that you have wisdom worth paying attention to. Day 1. All in. LET'S GO!

Strict with Yourself I've said it before and I'll say it again. Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite writers. We've featured a bunch of his books including The Obstacle Is the Way, The Daily Stoic, Ego Is the Enemy, and Stillness Is the Key. He's currently working on "The Stoic Virtue Series" in which he's creating a new book for each of the cardinal virtues of Stoicism: Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom. We briefly chatted about the first book in the series: Courage Is Calling. Today we're going to chat about an Idea from the second book in the series: Discipline Is Destiny. We're going to talk about an Idea that didn't make it into the Note. It's from a chapter called "Tolerant with Others. Strict with Yourself." Ryan tells us: "'I am prepared to forgive everybody's mistakes,' Cato the Elder said, 'except my own.' Ben Franklin, many generations later, would put forth an even better rule: 'Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.' Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, Tolerant with others, strict for yourself." That's Today's +1. Let's be tolerant with others—looking for their VIRTUES and forgiving their mistakes. Let's be strict with ourselves—looking for our vices and getting to work on them. We have more than enough work to do on ourselves. Let's do it. TODAY.