Brian
Johnson

1. 2 Key Objectives – 0:26

• 1. Capture Everything – You have a lot of things going on in your mind, so you need to capture everything in a trusted system. When you have a thousand things going on, it’s like having 100 tabs open on your computer.
• 2. Next Actions – Take the ideas and things you have going on and articulate them on the front-end into actionable steps. That way you know the next things you need to do.

2. Make It up, Make It Happen – 2:15

• There’s only two problems you can have. Knowing what you want but not knowing how to make it happen, or not knowing what you want.
• But it comes down to making it up and making it happen
• Outcomes + Action. What do you want to see happen and what can you do to make it happen.

3. 2-Minute Game – 3:28

• All the time management gurus tell us that we need a standard. If something takes us less than 2 minutes to do, we do it.
• Don’t keep saying you’re going to do something and keep putting it off, just do it and it’s done.
• It’s nuts how much velocity is created in our lives but not avoiding little things
• Willpower outpredicts intelligence in acedemic performance by a power of 2.

4. Inbox 0 – 5:44

• How many emails are sitting in your inbox right now? If it’s more than zero you’re being suboptimal
• If you have 1,000 emails, you have 1,000 open loops in your mind taking up space and brain power. So you want to shut those programs down by getting to inbox zero.
• It’s not that it’s hard or takes longer than 2 minutes, but it can seem overwhelming. The emails that remained were ones it was hard to make a decision on. But setting inbox zero is a decision muscle-builder.

5. Wild Success – 8:35

• Have you imagined wild success lately? What does wild success look like to you?
• Clearly define a purpose and brainstorm some things that would be necessary for that success to occur. Then identify your next action item.
• Which is essentially what we need to do to get things done

“The Psychology of Optimal Existence”

1. The Contents of Our Consciousness – 1:39

• How can we determine and choose what we focus on to enter “the flow?”
• It takes practice to make oneself happy/miserable. It’s done by ordering the consciousness to be in control of feelings and thoughts

2. Knowing and Doing – 3:09

• It’s not enough to know how to do it, one must do it
• Theory is rudimentary, practice is advanced. It’s important we do what we know
• What’s the number 1 thing you know you could be doing to live a more extraordinary life and is now a good time to start doing it?

3. Flow – 5:19

• The levels of challenge and skill need to be proportional. Flow is when your skills match the challenges you’re facing
• If skill is greater than challenge, we’re bord. If challenge is greater than skill, we’re overwhelmed. But when they allign, we’re in flow

4. Cultures Building Flow – 8:11

• Every 25 or 30 years, a tribe in India would relocate the entire village. They felt they were meeting their challenges too easily and becoming stagnant. So to keep their edge, they would move to a new area to face new challenges to keep them sharp.
• Consciousness is a skill most people haven’t learned to cultivate

5. Flow in Leisure Time – 9:03

• TV has been correlated to mild depression. Sitting and doing nothing bores us and we’re facing no challenges

1. The Gift (=A) – 1:23

• Too often we see someone performing at a high level and we think they have a “gift”
• But we all have the same gift: Adaptability
• The people who have achieved the most are those who have tapped into our ability to improve through practice
• Get rid of this toxic myth of “innate talent”

2. Practice^n-p-d – 3:10

• Naive practice myth – that you just keep on showing up and you get better. Just putting in the time doesn’t make you better
• Purposeful practice – 1. Having a goal (knowing specifically how you want to improve) 2. Focus (intensely focusing on what you’re doing to trigger the adaptability) 3. Feedback (getting feedback to adjust what’s working/not working) 4. Comfort-zone (never leaving the comfort zone doesn’t trigger adaptability)
• Deliberate practice (the gold standard) – available in established fields with measurable excellence to compare against (most people who aren’t chess grandmasters or professional athletes remain in purposeful practice)

3. Mental Reps – 6:57

• What’s changing in our brains when we utilize deliberate practice?
• The creation of mental representations creates the illusion of extraordinary memory
• Creates new connections that allow for deeper senses of understanding and improved performance

4. 10,000 Rule? – 8:39

• It’s not a rule that you have to do something for 10,000 hours to master it
• If you want to achieve extraordinary performance, you need to put in the deliberate/purposeful practice, not just show up

5. Homo Exercens – 10:45

• The thing that differentiates humans from other species is that we can strive to better ourselves
• Homo Exercens – “The Practicing Man,” the man or woman who’s committed to improving themselves via practice
• Basically, if you want to be at the peak, you have to get there through practice. We all have the “gift” to be able to improve
• If you want to achieve excellent performance, you have to put in the time and practice

1. Sheep vs. Strategists – 0:59

• In biology, sheep only respond to what’s in front of them. And many people are like sheep, only responding to the most recent stimuli
• A strategist is stepping back and asking “what’s the vision and what’s the strategy for my future?”
• If all you’re doing is going through your life like a sheep, then you’ll have a tough time living a life of deep purpose

2. Ikigai – 3:03

• Japanese word referring to a reason to get up in the morning
• That purpose gives you energy and vitality
• Linked with some of the most long-lived populations

3. Rats Swim – 4:34

• An interesting study from the ’50s about how long rats could swim before giving up
• Was found that typically, the rats would swim for 15 minutes before giving up and sinking
• Then he tested what would happen if he pulled them out before the 15 minutes for a break and put them back. If given breaks, they could swim for 60 hours (or 240x more endurance). This is potentially attributable to a sense of hope.
• Hope is the belief that your future is going to be better than your present. And having hope in a better future creates energy

4. Greatness x2 – 7:20

• The two steps of greatness are 1. KNOW! that you can achieve greatness (or believing that you can go the distance) and 2. Decide what you’re going to commit yourself to (finding the courage to dive head-first into one thing)
• If you could do anything and you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you go for. It’s less about specifically what you want, but more about finding the courage to do it.
• 99% of people don’t think they’re capable of greatness, so they set lower goals
• There’s more competition for low-hanging fruit

5. Singularity – 11:02

• The physics of your purpose
• A singularity is infinite density and infinitesimal volume combined at the center of a black hole
• When you’re willing to commit that intensity with that singularity focus, everything gets sucked into it
• It takes a ton of energy to do great work and you can’t dissipate it on trivial distractions 

1. Pseudo-Work – 2:07

• The distinction between “kinda working but mostly hanging out” (psudo-work) and real work
• The thing you need to pay attention to is Work = Time spent doing it x Intensity
• Students who spend a lot of time grinding but don’t have a lot of intensity still end up doing mediocrely
• If you dial up your intensity, you have to put in less work
• Deep work time-blocks create masterpiece days

2. Procrastiation – 5:06

• None of these straight-A students eliminated procrastination completely
• You’re gonna have the urge to procrastinate, but you can develop effective strategies to combat it
• It’s not about getting rid of the urge
• Strategies include being well-rested and well-fed (research agrees). The fastest way to deplete your willpower is to be tired and hungry

3. When?  Where?  How Long? – 6:41

• When should we study? Where should we study? And how long should we study?
• When? Early. The earlier the better. You’re best between when you wake up and before dinner. You want to use your best energy wisely, then enjoy your evenings.
• Where? In isolation. Go find somewhere where no one’s going to find you and turn everything off.
• How long? Don’t work for longer than an hour in one stretch. We want to be focused and intense, which can be draining and lead to procrastination.

4. #1 Tip = Q – 8:42

• If you want to study effectively, the worst way is to re-read your notes. This gives you the “fluency illusion.”
• Shut your book, get out a blank sheet of paper, and quiz yourself. The science says the best way t study is to self-test. Shut your notes and see if you can say it out loud.

5. S.P.A.C.E.O.U.T. – 10:47

• Space out your studying time, no matter what you’re doing
• Your mind can only work so hard so long. For memorizing, never try and do more than an hour at a time.
• You’re better off taking that time and splitting it up
• Your mind works best with frequent check-ins (“distributed learning”)
• Do intense real work over time instead of cramming

1. Prioritize(ing) – 2:20

• We need to prioritize prioritizing
• Our brain can only handle so much at one time and it gets easily depleted
• Take control of your “AM Bookend,” starting the day with the most important thing
• Engage in the creative/deep work before you waste brain power on email/less important parts of the day

2. IQ -15 or -5 – 5:50

• A study was done where they determined constantly emailing or texting effectively reduces your IQ by 15 for males and 5 for females; an average of 10 IQ point reductions
• You’re bombarding your nervous system with too much stimulation
• We get more stimulation in a week than our ancient ancestors got in a lifetime

3. Basal Ganglia – 8:06

• The part of your brain that puts things on routine/autopilot
• We want to find as many ways as we can to move things from your prefrontal cortex to your basal ganglia

4. Director – 11:28

• To put on a beautiful performance, you need a strong director
• “Mindsight” – a form of mindfullness; the ability to look inside your mind
• The “Director” can say “that thought isn’t particularlly helpful” or “we need to prioritize prioritizing”
• Also cultivating reapprasial, or the ability to step between tasks

5. Seasaw – 13:19

• Being cool under pressure; when things heat up, how do we stay cool?
• Your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system act like a seasaw
• When you experience high emotions, there are several courses of actions: suppress it (not helpful), express it (also not super helpful), be dramatic about it… but if you label it and mindfully observe it (eg “I notice I am feeling fear”)
• The Director needs to be in charge

1. 2 Modes – 0:51

• 1. Focused and 2. Diffuse
• Focused mode is when you’re working with good attention on what you’re doing
• Diffuse modeis more like climbing a mountain. If focus mode is the summit, then the diffuse mode is the base camps set up along the route. It’s turning your brain on and off instead of trying to be “on” all the time.
• Training recovery has to be a part of your learning strategy
• The best way is sleep. If you’re not getting proper rest, you’re not going to be able to learn optimally.

2. Procrastipain – 3:40

• In scans of our brains when we procrastinate, our brains light up and experience pain in thinking about what we’re procrastinating
• But when we engage in it, the pain goes away
• The anticipation creates the pain, the doing doesn’t

3. P vs P – 4:56

• Process and Product (ie, systems vs results)
• Procrastination is like an addiction. You get a short-term kick of feeling good, but the long-term effects are dangeorus.
• It’s a keystone bad habit. When you figure out a keystone habit, all the other habits fall into place around it. And setting negative keystone habits like procrastination sets you up for other negative habits surrounding it
• Show up and put in a little bit of time; break that cycle of procrastination

4. I’m Excited – 7:49

• When you’re feeling stressed, you have a natural stress response. And you can choose to either say “wow I’m stressed I hope I don’t choke” or “wow I’m stressed and I’m excited for the challenge.”
• Get excited about nerves. Your body is turning on to perform. It’s how you interpret your nerves that determines how they affect you

5. Like I’m 5 – 9:09

• If you want to learn something, teach it. 
• Many times we think we should only teach once we fully understand something. But many times, learning comes as a result of explaining a concept to another person.
• One of the best ways to drill it into out consciousness

1. Stoicism 101 – 3:19

• The most important thing within Stoicism is distinguishing that which is within our control vs. things that are outside of our control
• And the only things within our control are our thoughts and behaviors. Our responses to stimuli. It comes down to knowing the things within our control.
• We can control how we act moment to moment

2. Euthymia – 5:40

• A Greek word thats translates to “tranquility”
• This idea of a grounded, calm confidence, an “energized tranquility”
• To do this you need to know who you are and what’s important to you and how to get there
• Second-guessing is the enemy. Also constantly comparing yourself to other people. These two factors destroy tranquility.

3. “I Don’t Care” – 7:41

• You don’t need to know everything about everything. The philosopher’s attention was on their mind. So the modern stoic wouldn’t spend all their time checking every notification and watching every press conference.
• The extension of not knowing is not caring. “I don’t care who that pop culture figure is”
• “Do your best with others in mind”
• Think about what you’re blowing up your mind with and how it may benefit from some “I don’t know/I don’t care”

4. Life Boxing – 10:33

• These Stoic philosphers often used boxing and fighting analogies
• They’d ask “what kind of boxer are you if you get hit once and walk out of the ring?”
• So if you get hit in life and just give up, then what kind of boxer are you? What are you training for? The whole point is to be training to deal with a strong opponent. You want life to challenge you, forcing you to rise to your absolute best. It’s about being a warrior of the mind, not a librarian

5. Acquiescence – 13:25

• The Art of Acquiescence is not fighting reality. They roll with the punches.
• Like Nietzsche’s “Amor Fati,” or “Love Your Fate.” 
• When you try and get rid of something in your life, you gave up all your power. So you need to love what is and make the most of what is.
• Think of things in your life you may be fighting, and how you can learn to love that and be a better person by overcoming it

1. Adaptive Stress – 1:34

• There are different types of stress we can put ourselves under. We can have a low level (under-training) or a high level (over-training)
• They have similar effects. They both lead to fatigue, lack of energy, lack of motivation
• So you want to stay above directly between those (your maintenance stress level) into your adaptive stress zone
• Works in your physical life, your mental life, and your emotional life
• You push your muscles past the point they can easily bare and force an adaptive response. Which is the cornerstone of growth.
• Atheletes are typically over-trained, but with non-sport life, most people are emotionally over-trained and physically over-trained. To deal with that, get your physical training up

2. Btwn. Points – 4:24

• The time between points. Sport psychologist studying tennis players found that the time between the points is what differentiated champion. In a 2 hour tennis match, 80% of the time is between points (ie, they may only play for 30 total minutes)
• But the toughest competitors were good at making waves and oscellating and recovering between points.
• We need to train recovery as much as we train stress/the work

3. Ultradians – 6:49

• Circadian rhythms our our 24 hour rhythms. They’re our strongest connection to the world
• But there are also micro-rhythms throughout the day lasting 90-120 minutes. They’re called ultradian cycles. They can be effective work cycles, but you need to take the recovery into account.
• We need to cultivate the skills to recover better. Consistently violating our rhythms is the easiest way to over-train and create a sense of burnout.

4. Physio Recovery – 8:57

• If you want to optimize your potential, the base is your basic physiological needs
• Your exercise, your nutrition, your rest, and your relaxation
• “Fatigue makes cowards of us all”

5. Emotion Phone – 10:37

• You don’t have as much control over your emotional toughness
• But by focusing on physical and mental toughness, you can create emotional toughness
• If you have emotional pain, it’s like a phone is ringing. You can choose to answer or ignore it. And you can look into what need the ringing is telling you you need to fulfill
• Then do whatever you can to address the need

1. Sawyer Effect – 0:37

• What doesn’t motivate us? Contingent rewards (ie, if you do this, then you’ll get that). When you make something ocntingent, you remove the internal motivation to achieve a goal, which is the most powerful.
• The Sawyer Effect – Tom Sawyer had the task to paint a fence and wasn’t excited about it. So he acted like it would be the coolest thing ever, and his friends wound up paying him to do the fence
• When someone pays you to do something, it implies it’s not worth doing on its own
• Example, chores and allowances. Chores and allowances are great, but shouldn’t be combined. If you want your kid to never take out the trash, pay them to do it

2. Motivation 3.0 – 3:28

• Motivation 1.0 – Survival. The basic operating system operating humanity. The fundamental drive is just to survive
• Motivation 2.0 – If you do x then y. The introduction of carrots and sticks. 
• Motivation 3.0 – The best businesses have moved to intrinsic motivation. The drive is to express yourself.

3. Autonomy – 4:40

• An umbrella way of looking at intrinsic motivation. If you have autonomy, you have control over what you do.
• But if everything you do is controlled, there’s an element of coersion. So if someone’s carrot and sticking you, engagement is diminished and performance is reduced 

4. Mastery – 6:24

• The 3 laws of mastery: 1. Mastery is a mindset 2. Mastery is a pain and 3. Mastery is an asymptote
• Mindset – If you think your talent is fixed, you won’t put in the effort to get better
• Pain – It takes a lot of deliberate practice to get better. You aren’t going to grow and get better if you never leave your comfort zone.
• Asymptote – If you had a straight line and a curved line that approached it but never quite hit it, that’s an asymptote. You’re constantly approaching mastery, but you’re never going to hit it

5. Purpose – 9:27

• Great leaders can be summarized in once sentence. You don’t want to have a muddled paragraph. Know your one sentence and what your legacy would be.
• That big question captures the essence of what you want to achieve. The little question is “did I get a little bit better today?” And that’s the essence of creating and cultivating our purpose

1. Beast – 1:35

• The author started her research on grit at West Point, a very difficult military school. It’s very very difficult to get in, but something like 20% will drop out within the first 7 weeks.
• So the author created a survey to determine a candidates grit score that was able to more accurately predict if candidates would remain
• The determined “grit score” would predict who would make it through the “Beast barracks” of West Point
• It turns out that grit predicts a lot of the things we want to see in our lives
• Grit is passion + perseverance
• The psychology of achievement: there’s really only two variables, talent and effort. And Talent x Effort = Skills. Then Skills x Effort = Achievement. So effort counts twice.

2. Effort Counts – 4:01

• Grit is passion + perseverance
• The psychology of achievement: there’s really only two variables, talent and effort. And Talent x Effort = Skills. Then Skills x Effort = Achievement. So effort counts twice.
• Talent is important, but not as important as putting in the effort to achieve
• Gritty people put in a ton of effort over an extended period of time

3. Gritty Passions – 5:34

• Gritty people who endure with passion love what they do
• There’s a difference in the kinds of passion
• You’re not gonna find any gritty people that are like “I hate what I do.” If you don’t have the passion, you’ll be unable to find the grit to keep on
• You don’t want it to be fireworks where you’re fired up then move on to something else. It’s passion that endures and guides our lives.

4. Grow Grit – 7:34

• Grit can be grown from the inside out or outside in
• Properties of gritty individuals: 1. Interest (you need to have a passionate interest in something that fires you up over a sustainable amount of time) 2. Practice (interest isn’t enough, you have to deliberately practice an stretch out of your comfort zone) 3. Purpose (deep passion requires connecting what you love to do with what you want to bring to the world) and 4. Hope (resolve to make one’s life better in the future)

5. Wise Parents – 9:32

• Wise parents combine high standards with warmth (kind and supportive). Knowing their kids are capable of a lot and encouraging them to do it. Authoritative parents have high standards and low warmth, and permissive parents have low standards and high warmth.
• The Latin root of the word “parenting” is “to bring forth.” A parent brings forth the potential of a child. And the best way to do that is with high standards with high warmth.
• So as parents and coaches and teachers, what can we bring out in groups we’re leading?

1. All Good – 1:41

• The first thing to reach your potential is to train your mind
• Think of everything as “all good mental training” and use that as a mantra
• “How can I step in between stimulus and response?”

2. 60/40 – 3:03

• When the author is 60 miles into 100 mile run, he’s not feeling particularly great, even though he loves running
• But he knows that’s going to happen and keeps going to finish the 100 miles
• The point is that how he feels at that moment isn’t dictating his actions 
• Show up, do the work, and take the next baby step

3. 4:30 am Rule – 5:22

• Whether you get up at 4:30 or not, note that your day begins the night before
• When you’ve made the decision to get up at 4:30, it doesn’t matter how you feel when the alarm goes off, you get up
• That’s the mindset of a champion, knowing that “there’s nothing that’s gonna prevent me from getting up”
• You make a pre-commitment, do it long enough to get through the honeymoon phase, through the fight-through phase, and create a second-nature habit

4. 100 Miles – 8:31

• If at 60 miles in we don’t want to do the next 40, how to we keep going?
• Breaking down a larger task into multiple smaller tasks. “What’s the next, most important thing that needs to be done?”
• What is your big goal and how can you knock out something to get to that goal? What are the 3 most important things you can do today? Organize tomorrow today

5. Quit? – 11:47

• When do you quit? Is it okay to quit?
• There are a couple considerations. But if you know that the path you’re on isn’t the right path for you, then you may need to change course and quitting is the right decision.
• Quitting when you know something isn’t the right path is the right decision
• But when you know you’re on the right path, you categorically remove the option to quit. Sometimes you need to quit something to have the grit to do something better

1. G->G->U – 2:07

• Good to Great to Unstoppable
• If you’re good, you’re a cooler. If you’re great, you’re a closer. If you’re a cleaner, you have a relentless obsession to be your absolute best
• The first step is moving past this “eh, I’m good enough” mentality
• Good can’t be good enough, be curious about what greatness looks like
• We need to strive to be incessant, or ceaseless fighting to realize our ultimate potential

2. Pressure – 4:33

• This whole idea that stress is bad is wrong. We need that stress to be energized to be our best self.
• How you perceive your stress will dictate how you physiologically respond to stress. If you look at the stress as pushing you to be your best self, you begin to develop a “challenge response,” not a “threat response”
• We need to be comfortable being uncomfortable to maximize our potential
• “No pressure, no diamonds”

3. I’m All In – 8:11

• When we’re outside of the comfort zone, we make mistakes. Things don’t always work out perfectly.
• If things don’t work out, that’s okay. Readjust and keep going. The most confident thing we can say is “I’m going to go for this and it might not work.” But we learn and evolve.
• Leading researcher on the growth mindset says Michael Jordan had the right idea. Saying “I’ve missed 9,000 shots and failed over and over and over. But that’s why I succeed.” When he missed those shots, he went back and practiced that same shot over and over and over. You can only achieve greatness if you’re willing to “fail”

4. Effort = 2x – 11:02

• Jerry Rice set the all-time NFL receiving record one Sunday afternoon. After that, he did the same thing he did every night and morning. Replaying the game in his head, and waking up early and busting it harder than everyone else.
• Isn’t it interesting that the most “talented” player is also the one who works harder than everyone else?
• Talent is still a factor, but Talent x Effort = Skill
• Then you take that Skill, put in more Effort, and you get Acheivement. If Rice and Jordan didn’t work the hardest, they wouldn’t be the greatest

5. Dreams -> Reality – 15:04

• Effort counts twice. It’s not all about talent or dreams.
• There’s only one way to get to greatness and that’s work and relentless effort
• Your dreams can be a reality, you just have to be willing to put in the work

1. SDT – 1:34

• Self-Determination Theory has 3 aspects. 1. Autonomy (that you want to have control over your work environment, what you do, and you want to feel it matters) 2. Competence (you want to feel like you’re good at what you do and 3. Relatedness (liking the people with whom you work)
• Those are the 3 aspects of intrinsic motivation that leads to a high level of fulfillment
• No where on that list is there a pre-existing passion you have to build around

2. Mindset: P vs C – 3:21

• Passion vs Craftsman
• Most people operate with a passion mindset, but we need to operate with a craftsman mindset. Most people ask “what’s in it for me?” But the craftsman asks “what can I do to create an astonishing level of value in your work?”

3. Deliberate Practice – 4:36 

• Relates to the 10,000 hour rule (the amount of time it takes to achieve mastery)
• But not just any effort, you need deliberate practice. This is straightforward for atheletes or people with specialties. But most of us “knowledge workers” in the 21st century, it’s a little more ambiguous. We need to find deliberate things we can do and track to get incrementally better. And when so few knowledge workers do that, you become so good they can’t ignore you.

4. Career Capital – 6:21

• Phrase that describes rare and valuable skills. If you want autonomy, competance, and relatedness, you need those two things.
• When you follow the passion mindset without the craftsman mindset, you may not succeed. You may not have created enough career capital to create a sustainable job. You have to put in the work.
• It’s easy to think passion is enough. But you need to follow both your bliss and your grunt. Passion comes after working hard, not the inverse.
• It’s the craftsman mindset that lets you actually get paid for what you love to do.

5. Work Right – 9:10

• You need to differentiate between finding the right work (the passion mindset) and working right (the craftsman mindset)
• We want to show up deliberately over the long run
• Spend more time thinking about how you can serve more value than thinking about what you can get out of something.