Are you looking to become the best version of yourself and make a positive impact on the world? The Optimize philosophy is based on the Latin word “Optimus,” which means the best. The program is designed to help you become the best version of yourself, or a “eudaimonia” in ancient Greece, which means a person who is committed to optimizing and actualizing their potential. This concept is echoed by Aristotle, who said that a eudaimonia is a person with a good soul.
Herology: Becoming a Hero
Hero means becoming a protector. Heroes have strength, but their secret weapon is love. The world needs heroes now more than ever so that you can serve heroically and empower others to do the same.
The Game We’re Playing
Mastery is all about understanding the game we’re playing in life and how to play it well. If you could go back in time and ask Aristotle and Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, what the ultimate purpose of life is, they would both give you the same answer: eudaimonia. This concept translates into English as “flourish”. By understanding the game we’re playing and how to play it well, we can become the best version of ourselves and make a positive impact on the world.
Closing the Gap
To be a master, you need to close the gap between who you are and who you could be. This gap is where regret, anxiety, and disillusionment exist, and closing it can lead to joy and happiness. As Abraham Maslow said, “What one can be, one must be.” By becoming a self-actualized, optimizer, and eudaimone, you can become a hero and make a positive impact on the world.
Cultivating Heroic Qualities
Being a hero is not just about performing heroic deeds but rather cultivating certain heroic qualities. These qualities are anti-fragile confidence, heroic courage, and responsibility. To be a good hero, one must focus on mastering themselves in service to the world.
Anti-Fragile Confidence
Anti-fragility is the idea that the more one is kicked around in life, the stronger one gets. This concept is better than being either fragile or resilient. Anti-fragile confidence means having intense trust in oneself, not that everything will go perfectly, but that one has the ability to respond to whatever life throws at them.
Heroic Courage
Courage is the virtue that vitalizes all other virtues. Without it, one cannot act in the presence of fear. Heroic courage means being a protector, having strength for two, and deriving courage from love. Being a blazing fire rather than a flickering candle, one can consume all obstacles and become stronger from them.
Responsibility
Responsibility is about taking ownership of one’s life and being accountable for their actions. It is about responding to life’s challenges with wisdom and purpose. As Victor Frankl and Stephen Covey have stated, the ability to respond to situations is the most powerful tool one has.
To cultivate these heroic qualities, one must focus on energy optimization. Zest is the most important virtue, and it is necessary to get one’s energy right. One way to optimize energy is through participating in a Spartan race or another similar activity.
In summary, to become a hero, one must cultivate anti-fragile confidence, heroic courage, and responsibility. This involves taking ownership of one’s life, being accountable for one’s actions, and responding to life’s challenges with wisdom and purpose.
Achieving Mastery through Emotional Stamina and Anti-Fragile Confidence
Life is not a dress rehearsal, it is happening right now. It is important to cultivate what Phil Stutz, a renowned coach, calls “emotional stamina,” which is the ability to endure tough times. This is what enables us to achieve anti-fragile confidence, where we get stronger the more we get kicked around.
The worse we feel, the more committed we should be to our protocol. Emotional stamina via your protocol is an essential point to keep in mind. When we are feeling off, bad things tend to happen. But being committed to our core practices means we can keep going even in tough times. So, it is crucial to have a protocol to follow. The question is, what do we do when we are at our best? We need to do more of that stuff and less of what we do when we are not on.
Our best should be our new baseline, as Josh Waitzkin puts it in “The Art of Learning.” The worse we feel, the more committed we are to our protocol, which leads to emotional stamina and anti-fragile confidence. Then something amazing happens; our highs get higher, and our lows get higher. Even though we still have ups and downs, they are much higher than before. We become the kind of person who thrives on tough times and turns them into opportunities
We start with the night. Many people think that their day starts when they wake up, but it actually starts the night before. This is why we need to cultivate a healthy pm bookend routine. The compound effect of Darren Hardy says that you have more control over your bookends (am and pm) than any other time of your day, so you better rock them.
The first thing you should do is have a digital sunset. Blue light exposure before bed can prevent us from falling asleep deeply and waking up feeling not so good. Sleep is essential and is the bridge from despair to hope. If you want to feel hope in your life, get a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the population do not get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night.
After a good night’s sleep, we move on to our am bookend routine. We should not turn on technology first thing in the morning. Instead, we need to have some pre-input winds to energize us for the day ahead. We should be proactive instead of reactive, which means focusing on meditation, deep work, and family time. This is how we win the day.
The core theme in energy, as it relates to carpe diem, is to have energized tranquillity. We need to be simultaneously super-energized and super-grounded. Instead of running around all day every day, we should manage our energy by oscillating during the day. Energized tranquillity is what helps us fall asleep at night and not wake up in the middle of the night.
When it comes to work, we need to increase productivity and meaning. We have something called a “genius work equation” that extends Cal Newport’s “deep work equation.” To tap into infinite power, we need to get our energy right and focus on what is most important right now, consistently. This is a big theme in our work, and we call it “soul force” in a broader sense.
In conclusion, achieving mastery is not an easy task. It requires us to cultivate emotional stamina and anti-fragile confidence, prioritize our bookends, and manage our energy throughout the day. It is not about doing more; it is about doing the right things consistently.
Unlocking Self-Mastery: Fundamental Techniques for Permanent Change
The path to self-improvement is often challenging, but it becomes more comfortable when we learn how to manage ourselves. In this article, we will discuss fundamental techniques for achieving self-mastery and making permanent changes.
Eliminating Triggers
We often get distracted by triggers that keep us from focusing on our goals. For instance, if we want to reduce the time we spend on our smartphones, we need to make them invisible. One way to do this is by keeping our smartphones turned off and in a different room. We should not be ashamed of using these techniques to eliminate triggers; instead, we should see them as ways to strengthen our willpower and control our behaviour.
Applying the Needs Work Equation
As we strive to make permanent changes, we should also apply the Needs Work Equation. This involves neutralizing our reactions when we don’t do things the way we want. We should reflect on our mistakes and consider what we could have done differently, rather than focusing on our failures. This approach helps us to learn from our mistakes and get better.
Embracing the Fundamentals
One of the most effective ways to make permanent changes is to embrace the fundamentals. There are seven fundamentals that we should focus on: eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, and prospering. These fundamentals can help us optimize our performance, improve our health, and achieve self-mastery.
Building a Strong Foundation
To actualize the taller building of our best selves, we need to dig a deeper foundation. In the same way, we need to build a strong foundation to reach our peak performance, virtue-wise, and spirituality-wise. This requires us to optimize our eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, and focusing habits, which can be viewed as spiritual practices.
Consistency is Key
Greatness is consistency in the fundamentals. We need to commit ourselves to the fundamentals that apply to our respective domains. By doing so, we can develop the habits that will help us reach our goals.
Harnessing Our Power
We often underestimate the power that we possess. We have the ability to unlock our potential and make permanent changes. To do this, we need to harness our power by cultivating habits that help us optimize our physical, mental, and emotional states.
Self-mastery is achievable if we take the time to understand ourselves and develop habits that help us achieve our goals. By eliminating triggers, applying the Needs Work Equation, embracing the fundamentals, building a strong foundation, committing to consistency, and harnessing our power, we can achieve permanent change. These techniques are universal and can be applied to any domain, whether personal or professional. The path to self-mastery may be challenging, but it is achievable.
The Fundamentals of Optimal Health
Maintaining a healthy body should not be as hard as it seems. However, our profoundly sick society makes it challenging. However, following some fundamental practices can help you achieve your optimal weight and reach a state of health that you thought you could never achieve. Here are the fundamentals of optimal health:
Movement Transcends Exercise
Movement is essential for your body. Exercise alone cannot cover it all. Being a perpetual motion machine is what you should aim for. You can consider exercise as taking a little bit of Ritalin, a little bit of Prozac and getting hope molecules. The more you move, the more active you become, and the better you feel.
Sleep – The Foundation of Health
Sleep is the foundation of health. According to sleep researcher Matthew Walker, getting 7-9 hours of recommended sleep reduces the risk of cancer. But, the actual amount of sleep you get is different from the time you spend in bed. It is essential to understand this difference. The most crucial practice for optimal sleep is a digital sunset. Put your electronics away at least an hour before you plan to sleep. This practice helps in reducing cortical, a stress hormone, and boosts melatonin, a hormone that promotes sleep.
Breathing – The Most Fundamental Practice
Breathing is one of the most fundamental practices for achieving optimal health. Breathing through your nose into your belly and exhaling slightly longer than your inhale can trigger calmness and confidence. Breathing practices help in optimizing your carbon dioxide levels, which, paradoxically, fuel your cells with oxygen. Breathing through your mouth all the time is a sign of chronic fight or flight, which is not good for your health. By just breathing through your nose, you can create an energized tranquillity that can change your life.
Focus Your Attention
Your ability to focus your attention is the most important hallmark of flourishing human beings. To focus your attention, you must train your spotlight on what is essential and identify what you want to do consistently. Having a wandering mind can make you unhappy. So, it is crucial to learn how to focus your attention and achieve your goals.
Celebrate Life
Many people work hard to achieve their goals but never celebrate their accomplishments. Celebrating your life is one of the most fundamental practices for optimal health. We must accept ourselves, our realities, and our failures, and we must express gratitude for what we have. Celebrating every moment of life is essential to enjoy it to the fullest.
Prosper with Hope
Prospering with hope is the final fundamental practice for optimal health. The word “prosper” etymologically means to go forward with hope. It means moving forward with a positive mindset and the courage to face life’s challenges. Achieving prosperity is not about having money, but about being virtuous. Operationalizing wisdom, self-mastery, courage, love, hope, gratitude, curiosity, and zest are essential virtues to achieve optimal health.
By following these fundamental practices, you can achieve optimal health and a state of well-being that you never thought you could achieve.
Living Life with Intensity and Urgency
We need to ask ourselves how we are approaching everything we do, whether it’s our energy, work, or love. Technically, it’s fine to just go through the motions of life, but it’s time to wake up and realize that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. We need to show up in the dojo of life and go for mastery because it is infinitely more important than the dojo of martial art.
We need to hit a point of what chemists call activation energy where things just change. For example, water won’t boil until it reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Similarly, you can rub sticks together, but nothing will happen until it hits an activation energy of 451 degrees, and then boom, you have the fire.
Sometimes, we think we’re at a nine, but we’re really at a two. We need to check in with ourselves and ask if we are truly going for mastery or just going through the motions. Joseph Campbell, a hero’s journey exemplar scholar, tells us that we need to approach life like a person whose hair is on fire. We need activation energy and intensity to move from being librarians of wisdom to warriors of wisdom. We need to approach life with urgency, just like the superheroes in action movies do. This isn’t a dress rehearsal; it’s the real deal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, living life with intensity and urgency is crucial to achieving mastery in all aspects of life. We need to approach everything we do with activation energy and urgency, just like a warrior. It’s time to wake up and realize that life isn’t a dress rehearsal, and it’s time to start living with purpose and intention.
Shivam Pandey is a professional content & copywriter with 6+ years of experience. He specializes in writing on technology, business, digital marketing, lifestyle, travel, etc. He works closely with B2C and B2B businesses providing web content & copywriting services.