OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time - Video

Jim Collins is arguably the greatest business thinker alive. He’s written classics like Good to Great, Built to Last and Great by Choice in which he applies rigorous research to what makes great companies great. One of my favorite ideas from his work is what he calls the Hedgehog Concept.

In our last +1, we talked about the importance of identifying and installing your #1 self-care habit. Today I want to talk about another SUPER important thing: Identifying your significant other’s (or kids’ or friends’ or colleagues’) #1 self-care habit. Fact is, great relationships are only created by two healthy people. 1 + 1.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts and one of the world’s leading advocates for mindfulness training. He’s demonstrated the phenomenal health benefits of integrating meditation into our daily lives and in this Note we’ll learn about meditation—what it is, how we can rock it and what we can gain from doing so.

Dr. Craig Malkin is an author, clinical psychologist, and Instructor of Psychology for Harvard Medical School. He’s also one of the world’s leading authorities on the science of narcissism. In this book, he shares “The bad—and surprising good—about feeling special.” The short story? Narcissism is a lot more nuanced than we might have been led to believe.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent half my time in Founder/CEO-mode and the other half in Philosopher-mode. Before going all in as a Philosopher, I built and sold two market-leading social platforms (raising $10m in the process). In this class, I share my Top 10 Ideas on how to create a great business and get paid to change the world. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, solopreneur, small business owner or leader in any organization, we hope you love it.

As we’ve discussed, Michelle Segar is one of the world’s leading researchers studying the science of how to Optimize our health behaviors. She tells us that one of THE most important things we can do is identify the #1 thing we do that keeps us energized and plugged in and ready to rock. She calls this your #1 self-care habit. So… Today’s +1: What’s YOUR #1 self-care habit?

Deep Work. As we’ve discussed many times, it’s increasingly more rare AND increasingly more valuable. The amount of high-quality work we produce will always be a function of a very simple equation: Intensity of Focus x Time. You want to get a lot of great work done in a short period of time? Focus your attention INTENSELY via Deep Work Time Blocks.

Alberto Villoldo tells us that we evolved to deal with one lion roaring at us at a time. That lion’s roar triggers a fight or flight response. We fight or we flee. And, hopefully, we live to talk about the tale later. But, the important thing to note is that the stress from that event, although extremely acute, is also extremely short-lived.

Why Meditate? According to Ricard, the ultimate reason is to transform ourselves so we can transform our world. That works for me! In this Note, we check out my favorite Big Ideas on working out our mindfulness muscles, looking at the power of neuroplasticity and highlighting the fact that it’s *all* about the consistent practice, working on our consciousness thought after thought and emotion by emotion.

At the end of our interview on her great book The How of Happiness, I asked Sonja Lyubomirsky to share one of the research studies she found most fascinating. Get this: Sonja and her team went out to a grade school and ran a little study. She had half of the kids do acts of kindness each week for six weeks. The other half was a control group.

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.

Phil Stutz and Barry Michels wrote a great book called The Tools. There are five Tools in the book and we may chat about others later but I want to focus on the first for now. Phil and Barry tell us that most people like to live within their comfort zones.

This book is REALLY REALLY good. In fact, I’m gonna say that if you take the time to read only *one* book on nutrition, read this one. Integrating scientific research plus his experience treating over 10,000 patients with common sense and fun, Dr. Joel Fuhrman has created a super-readable book with a challenging, yet approachable nutrition program that can completely change your life.

This is an introduction to our newest Master Class: Greatest Year Ever 101: How to Make 2016 the Best Year of Your Life and Create an Unending String of Such Awesome Years. :)

To the extent that there’s a gap between who you’re capable of being in any given moment and who are actually being in that moment, you will experience a level of discontent. Regret. Anxiety. Depression. As per our last +1, a bad-daimon. aka: Unhappiness.