OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

Brian Tracy is one of my favorite old-school self-development teachers. I can still remember listening to his CDs back in the day when I was first getting into all this stuff. And, we've covered a number of his books including Maximum Achievement, Eat that Frog, Goals!, Focal Point and No Excuses.

Please extend your pointer finger and shake it as if you’re lecturing someone — saying something like, “You shouldn’t do this, this and this! Do that, that and that!” Thank you.

Conquering Cancer 102 (Intro)

Susan Peirce Thompson wrote a great book called Bright Line Eating. She has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of eating. 

Matthew Kelly has written a number of great books. We have Notes on three of them: Perfectly Yourself, The Rhythm of Life and Off Balance. In Off Balance, Mathew tells us that if we want to change the trajectory of our lives (and/or careers), we need to change the period of time we think about.

When I worked with Steve Chandler, one of the themes of our work together was “creating wealth through profound service.”

Eric Butterworth was a Unity minister in New York City. He wrote a great book called Spiritual Economics that helped me integrate my spiritual and material ambitions. I HIGHLY recommend it. As we discuss in Abundance 101, the primary theme of his book is the fact that we shouldn’t try to go out and make money per se. 

A couple +1s ago we talked about taking a systems approach to disease vs. just a symptoms approach. We referenced Dr. Junger’s metaphor of a wise gardener tending to the roots.

Continuing our Anticancer theme, let’s chat about another brilliant idea from David Servan-Schreiber’s book, Anticancer. Imagine this. It’s 1942. Hitler has amassed an army of one million Nazi soldiers. They’re pushing to take over Russia — which finds itself so undermanned that adolescents and schoolgirls who have never used a firearm are joining the fight. 

Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel Prize for her research on telomerase — the enzyme that nourishes our telomeres. She wrote a book called The Telomere Effect with another world-class researcher named Elissa Epel in which they tell us just how powerful our telomeres are. Today, we’re going to meet our telomeres.

In our last +1, we took a quick look at Warren Buffett’s three-step goal setting process and then chatted about how it fits into our Big 3: Energy + Family + Service.

Conquering Cancer 101 (Intro)

Rick Snyder was the founder of research into the science of hope. And, he was one of the pioneers of the positive psychology movement. In fact, he literally wrote the textbook on “Positive Psychology.” He documented just how important hope is to our overall well-being and tells us that there are three primary components to having high hope: Goals + Willpower + Waypower.

Michael Gelb is one of the world’s leading authorities on creativity. He’s also an aikido and qi gong master and best-selling author of a number of books including one of my all-time favorites: How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. 

In No Mud, No Lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that when he was a young monk he thought the Buddha never suffered. Then, as he matured, he realized that OF COURSE the Buddha suffered. He had a body so he had to at least occasionally get a headache or a stomachache. And, when a friend died, he’d feel sad. He was a human being. Therefore, he experienced pain and suffering.