Ep491 Unlocking Personal Greatness and Anti-Fragile Confidence With Brian Johnson

Have you ever felt the pull of something greater, a calling that propels you toward personal greatness and global flourishing? Brian, CEO of Heroic Public Benefit Corporation, joins me, Julie Holly, to share his profound insights on the intertwining of philosophy and actionable strategies for life improvement. Through his narrative, we explore the undeniable power that comes with having clarity in one's purpose and the extraordinary impact a coherent life story can have on individual and family well-being.

Imagine living a life where each challenge is not a setback but a launchpad for growth, where resilience is not just about bouncing back but bounding forward. Our conversation delves into the hero's journey as a metaphor for personal evolution and the secrets to crafting anti-fragile confidence. Brian enlightens us on the paradox of 'shadow lives' and unfolds his systematic approach to unlocking the full spectrum of our potential. It's an enlightening dialogue that will leave you questioning the unexplored depths of your own capacity and the rituals that can foster unwavering excellence.

Wrap up your routine and join us as we reveal the art of a life protocol steeped in excellence. Drawing parallels from the world of finance, we discover how the compound interest of simple, consistent actions can accumulate into a transformative force in our lives. This episode isn't just a conversation; it's a clarion call to embrace every ascent and descent on your personal journey with integrity, to live each moment with arete—striving for your highest self—and to greet each turn with the tranquility that comes from unwavering dedication to personal growth. Join Brian and me in this poignant exploration of what it truly means to live heroically.

Access Julie's calendar, the investor club, Conscious Investor Growth Summit, social profiles and more when you CLICK HERE

Episodes referenced in the introduction:

• Repurposing Your Past
• 3 Things to Understand About Syndication
• The Gut-Health Connection: Holistic Approaches to Total Wellness with Brittney Oliver Baker
• Secrets to Achieving Level 10 Success for Busy Professionals
• Self-Directed IRAs for Savvy Investors
• Mineral Balancing: The Science-Backed Approach to Vibrant Health

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello Conscious Investor and welcome back. I'm your host, julie Hawley. For over four years, I've paired my background in real estate, investing, education and coaching to create powerful content for you each week. This podcast is where we take a holistic approach to investing by focusing on three ingredients to a life of personal freedom health, mindset and wealth. We'll talk about everything from passive investing through syndication and how to use your retirement accounts to boost your investing, to mineral balancing and gut brain health, and into topics that cultivate your inner strength and resilience so you can thrive regardless of any of life's current events. And yes, those are all episodes currently available and linked in the show notes below. Join me each Monday for a mindset episode and later in the week for an interview with expert investors and health professionals, so that you can experience your greatest health, strongest mindset and build the wisest wealth. Brian, I am so excited to have you on the show. Lots of rescheduling going on because you are moving and shaking, so welcome to the Conscious Investor Podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:09

Julie, I've been so looking forward to our chat. I appreciate your flexibility and, yeah, just excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:16

It's awesome to have you. We're going to dive on in and the question I always launch with is because you know it's awkward when we go through all these reading the bios and things like that. So we're just going to dive in and say like who are you, who are you Brian, and what is it you do?

Speaker 2: 1:33

I love that frame and there's so many ways to answer it, obviously. But you know I'm a husband and a father first and foremost. I've been married to my wife now We'll be together 18 years in April. Two kids, 11 years old, seven years old live out in the country outside of Austin I won't bore you with the details but like four dogs, 10 chickens, a cat, all that stuff. But I'm also the founder, philosopher and CEO of a company called Heroic Public Benefit Corporation. So I spent half of the last 25 years as a founder and CEO.

Speaker 2: 2:07

I built and sold two social platforms before Facebook, and when I wasn't doing that, I had enough time to take some time off and to read and write and think and teach. I became a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, and integrated ancient wisdom and modern science into some protocols that have been scientifically shown to help people change their lives. And with Heroic we kind of bring all that together. So it's an app where we help you move from theory to practice, to mastery. That's kind of our big thing is yeah, you know what you could be doing, but are you doing it consistently, especially when you don't feel like it? And and helping people you know go to the next level in their lives, um and uh, and make a difference in the world. Ultimately, we're mission driven. We want to help create a world in which 51 of humanity is flourishing by the year 2051. I tattooed my body, um, with that 30 year kind of mission, um, and it's.

Speaker 1: 3:02

it's what I've dedicated my life to I love all of this and I feel like we're very, very kindred spirits, by the way. So while you live in the South, I'm up on the Canadian border on acreage, looking at my window right now, to lots of pasture land. I've got my flock of chickens and the dog and the cat. Sometimes we have pigs, sometimes we don't. So it's like what animals are on the little hobby farm at the moment, any given moment. So what? No? So I'm on the border. I'm in North Idaho, the last stop before you get to Canada.

Speaker 2: 3:40

I got you Cool.

Speaker 1: 3:41

All right, I didn't know if I was going to be here next week.

Speaker 2: 3:43

I'm going to be in Toronto next week, so I'm like, oh wait, are you actually in Canada? Let's go.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Oh man, calgary is five and a half hours North of me, so Toronto is very far east. It'd be a haul, but also going to be married 18 years this year, which is super fun, and also have two kids. My youngest is turning 13 this weekend as we're recording it.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Yeah, so I'm like, oh, wow, and I happen to be a lover of philosophy Also. There are so many reasons why we're aligned. Okay, so conscious investor. I'm sorry I'm going to reel all my enthusiasm in just a smidge, because there was so much meat that Brian just unpacked just in describing, like, who he is and what he does. And that is why I ask guests that question, because the story, the narrative we get to pen our lives and how we communicate, that is so powerful and I love that you have a timeline, that you have a goal, that you know your buy box for life. It's very, very clear. That's where I want to start. I want to ask you so many people and I think you and I are going to be in agreement on the how critical it is to have clarity as to what is driving your life. How did you discover that level of clarity for yourself?

Speaker 2: 5:03

I start to laugh because iteratively, painfully, you know, depends on what arc you look at it on. You know, and now I can get a pretty coherent scientists would call that a coherent narrative. You know we have a clear sense of who you are, where you've been, what got you to this point and where you want to go. So the coherence of our narrative to your point is really important. It's important for our lives, it's important for the health of our children. You can predict a child's attachment, orientation to their parental figure, which is one of the most powerful predictors of their well-being. You can predict their attachment, or lack of, to their parental figure based on one thing more than anything else, which is the parents' coherence of their own narrative. If the parent has made sense of their life story and they've integrated the traumas we've all had it into an integrated sense of self and they know where they're going, that child will be healthier. I mean, there's obviously a lot of reasons why that would be the case, but anyway, I appreciate you highlighting that.

Speaker 2: 6:09

And yeah, it's been messy. I mean, I'm the youngest of five kids, catholic family. My father worked hard but blue collar worked in a grocery store, struggled with alcohol, and it's an important part of my story because I've clearly had some issues psychologically. His father struggled with alcohol, ended his own life, so I like to joke now that it looks like I lost both the genetic and the environmental lotteries on that one. I know what it feels like to feel that level of despair, contemplating ending my own life.

Speaker 2: 6:34

And then I've just, for whatever reason first generation college student, ucla psychology and business started a career I hated, left that went to law school, hated that even more. Dropped out of that was spinning, had no idea what I wanted to do other than coach a Little League baseball team. I'm 24 years old. Out of that I came up with my first business idea, won a business bank competition at UCLA, hired the CEO of Adidas to replace me, raised $5 million in the first dot-com boom and that was my first pass and then sold that and had enough time to do some things and it just iterated and really tried to understand who am I, what are my gifts, how can I give them to the world, how can I enjoy what I'm doing?

Speaker 2: 7:22

And then I just kind of stumbled upon clarity on I want to figure out how to get paid to help people live good, noble lives, while I strive to do it myself. And then I just experimented with countless ideas, most of which didn't work, in order to find, you know, the things that are now kind of driving my life and driving our business. That's now a very long answer to your short question, but I want to emphasize it was messy. It's easy for me to sit here and look like the guy that's got it all figured out. I continue to go through very dynamic iterative cycles, you know, as I step into the new responsibilities I now have Every you know month.

Speaker 1: 8:00

It's kind of reinventing, and it was certainly messy, you know, between you know whatever, it's kind of reinventing and it was certainly messy, you know, between you know down in the story and the narrative of our lives and understanding our lineage and the stories of our family, because those stories so much shape us. So I very much resonate with what you're saying about understanding and repurposing and saying turning something that was a trauma it can then be repurposed and say, okay, it was a trauma, but now I've dealt with it, it's a tragedy at this point and I can, I can redefine this and I can step into the power of my life. So I just I very much value the strength that you've to you know, the willingness to iterate, because it's a lot. But I always think about a caterpillar and how a caterpillar crawls around. It goes into this cocoon, it turns absolutely gelatinous and then it's reformed into this beautiful butterfly and I feel like in that iterative process we're so often this gelatinous glob of goo that is just being repurposed.

Speaker 1: 9:23

When you think about the cycle of you know re these iterations and you're like, wow, every month it's something new. I understand that I've. I live this, I live my version of this and I also say, if I'm still the same person, that same version is something. I did something wrong, like what did I miss? So how is it that when you look at the time span from, say, when you're in your early 20s to now and you're looking at the lulls, it's easy to see everybody up on the mountaintop? King of the hill, I've got it together, but we all descend down as we before we like make that climb up curious? This is surely a selfish, curious question. I think that when we see people make that descent, it has to be a healthy descent and there's a process to that that very few people have figured out. This is my turn to ask a long-winded question.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Brian. So what is your process in this iterative process? And you've reached like, oh my gosh, I just had this four-star general invite me to come and speak to his team. Yeah, and now I'm coming back home, and now I see I need to. I'm going to grow in these ways, or maybe I don't see it, but how is it that you keep yourself um, stable and steady as you are coming down, going through that Valley, before you're blooming back into the next version of you?

Speaker 2: 11:04

Yeah, I mean there's again, as you said, in reflecting, reflecting on what I said, there's so much there we can unpack. Um, first I want to frame that, that caterpillar, the metamorphosis. You know joseph campbell's on my wall over there, the great heroic mythologist right who you know inspired george lucas and star wars all great heroes journeys follow his arc right, so that the hero with a thousand faces right um. And when we go watch a hero film we like it because we see ourselves projected metaphorically on the screen. So a good hero's journey. You know you leave the comfortable world of the known into the unknown. You know you meet guides and bodies and you face dragons. You win, you learn, you win, you learn, you come back transformed. That's the hero's journey.

Speaker 2: 11:50

But Campbell says a good life is one hero's journey after another. And Steven Pressfield takes it one step further. He says a good day is a thousand micro hero journeys. But I like your metaphor of the lag is kind of what I think about it. You have a vision, you see this unbelievable opportunity, then you go into your metaphor of the lag is kind of what I think about it. You know, you have a vision, you see this, this unbelievable opportunity, then you go into the valley of despair and you come up. But I like to look at this more of like an evolutionary cyclic loop. Cyclic loop where you're constantly going through that process but you're spiraling up.

Speaker 2: 12:22

And so I think the first important thing to do is recognize that's a good life. So the good life is one hero's journey after another, and you got to recognize the fact that you're constantly being called to be the next best version of yourself. To the extent you ignore that, that's when you start wanting to numb yourself with however you numb yourself, whether it's alcohol or food or Netflix or whatever. So you want to pay attention to the call to adventure, to be your best self. But that feels uncomfortable. When you exit your comfort zone, by definition, you feel uncomfortable. So you need to understand the truth and the fact that you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. So that's rule number one. You've got to know it's supposed to be hard and when you feel that, oh, you know, that's a sign you're doing it right, not wrong. But then what do you do? When you feel a little bit? You know off center which you will feel, by the way, when you are going through those arcs. You should, you know, and each time you go through it, what do you do? And this is what you know around heroic, I have anti-fragile confidence. That's what you know.

Speaker 2: 13:32

The elite performers I've been blessed to work with, whether it's in the military or sports or corporate environments. That's what they want me to talk about Anti-fragile confidence, where you're able to take life's challenges and literally use them as fuel to get stronger. Then you're not fragile, you're not resilient, you're anti-fragile. You get stronger every time you go through one of those cycles and you build confidence, which means deep trust, deep trust in yourself. You have what it takes to meet anything life throws at you, and we've kind of systematized that. So we get it off of the bumper sticker, which is literally a phrase that the general I mentioned shared. That we don't. I don't just present this as a bumper sticker. I'll teach you how to operationalize it and make it a practical part of your life, such that you know what to do when you feel that and that's that's, frankly, what I'm most proud of in my work is operationalizing how one can forge anti-fragile confidence. Again, very, very long answer your awesome question, but those are some thoughts no, are you kidding me?

Speaker 1: 14:32

I just I appreciate this conversation so much. These are conversations that, um, we don't I don't always get to have with you know people, and so it's very, it's like precious to me, um. So that leads me to another question. I'll leave these questions. We get questions and I'm to leave my commentary aside this time. Say, you know, when we're thinking about being anti-fragile, everything you said completely resonates with me, and when you make that breakthrough, that's when it's like I say there's no, apparently I am doing commentary, there's no blue sky.

Speaker 2: 15:04

There's no glass ceiling. I love your commentary, by the way.

Speaker 1: 15:13

I'm like what blue sky? There's no glass ceiling. What are you talking about? Don't apologize to your commentary, that's what's good. I don't want to be like you know there's? There's no glass ceiling, there's no blue sky, there's no atmosphere.

Speaker 1: 15:18

Once you've you've come through that, then you are in the black galaxy, and to me black used to be like oh you know, it's daunting, I don't want to be roaming the black galaxy. That sounds kind of scary. Now it's like it's all. Once you get to that point where anti-fragile, now let's go explore there. It's like endless possibility, endless potential, endless. Go land on a planet for a little bit, explore it and then venture off onto the next, into the next galaxy, wherever it is Right. So I mean, when you're anti-fragile, it opens up your true potential to be able to unleash that DNA that we're uniquely created with, and so I love this.

Speaker 1: 16:00

But you and I know that so many people are living what I call shadow lives, and I know you have. I'm sure that you have another way of expressing that and I'd love to know that. But it's like, guys, I just want to wake everybody up and say, like come on, you've got it. Like almost like you're waking up a hero like come on, wake up. We need you, the world needs you and your DNA and your uniqueness. How is it? You have a system to help people get become anti-fragile, so can you give us some of the highlight reel? I know we don't have time to go into it, so, conscious investor, you're going to go down to the show notes, you're going to go follow Brian's work, you're going to do what I did. You're going to download the free heroic app and you're going to get started. What are some of the basic steps, though, that they can listen to right now to say I want to become anti-fragile, I want to unleash my maximum potential and who I am?

Speaker 2: 16:57

Yeah. So then, as you said, in the app, we talk about it a lot. In the book there's seven objectives I'm not going to go into right now. I'm going to focus on on forging anti-fragile confidence. That happens to be objective two in the book.

Speaker 2: 17:11

Briefly, the first objective is you got to know the ultimate game. So it's a 2,500-year-old challenge to live a quote shadow life where you think you're playing the ultimate game but you're not. Every single ancient wisdom and faith tradition tried to get their adherents to understand the same thing, which is you've been seduced to play the wrong game, to go after the fame, the wealth, the hotness, when really what you want and what's going to make you experience the joy and happiness and meaning you want is deeper relationships, becoming a better person and making a contribution to your family and community. Now, of course, money is important in that dialogue. You got to figure out how to win the game that everyone else is playing, but you got to know there's a bigger game. Right and I use my son, who's into chess as an example a lot, right, there's the ultimate game.

Speaker 1: 17:56

I noticed that it's awesome.

Speaker 2: 17:59

But when I'm talking to military officers, when I'm talking to elite coaches and executives, I say the same thing. You got to know the ultimate game, which is to be your best self. When you win that game, you'll win all the other games that you thought were the most important, but there's a beautiful integrity there. But then, to forge anti-fragile confidence, you got to know rule number one of that game, which is it's supposed to be hard. So your story that it should be easy and you should get it quick which is what everybody's telling you today, even more powerfully than ever before. They're seducing you to play the wrong game. Then they're telling you it should be quick and easy. That's a losing formula. So step back, see that there's a bigger game, and then you got to learn how to play it. So, to forge anti-fragile confidence, I'll talk about my coach, phil Stutz. So my coach, my, my beloved, like spiritual father, my Yoda, is a guy named Phil Stutz. Phil um is, uh, he's the author of multiple books the tools, um, et cetera. But he's in Jonah Hill's Netflix documentary called Stutz. So he works with Jonah.

Speaker 2: 19:05

I've worked with him for seven years, 400 and something sessions one-on-one. In one of my sessions he talked about emotional stamina and he complimented me and told me I had a lot. And I'm like I have no idea what that means. But cool, emotional stamina, let's go Next session. I asked him what's emotional stamina and I'm sharing this to help us operationalize anti-fragile confidence. He says emotional stamina is your ability to tolerate the inevitable pain, uncertainty and hard work of life and not get knocked off by it, right? So then follow-up question is how do I get more of it? And his answer changed my life and it's essentially my tattoo anti-fragile confidence. He says this is the trick the worse you feel, the more you're getting hammered by life, the more committed you need to be to your protocol. Now, that presupposes you have a protocol. It presupposes you know who you are when you're at your best in what I call your big three your energy, your work and your love. So if we want to forge antifragile confidence and have emotional stamina to deal with life's challenges, the first step is you got to know who you are when you're at your best.

Speaker 2: 20:14

So the exercise that I do with everybody I work with is get out a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, put do on the upper left and don't on the upper right and then think back to a time in your life when you were crushing it, you were on fire. It could be a few times in your life. You were super energized, you were super productive, you were super connected. You were doing certain things at that point in your life. What were they? And you weren't doing other things? All right, what were you not doing?

Speaker 2: 20:42

Then you look at your current life and I have goosebumps right now and you look and see, am I doing the things I did when I was on? Am I currently doing things I didn't do when I was on? And then we drill down and we say, all right, what's the one thing you need to start doing that would most change your life, that you want to do, that you think you can do, that you think will have a big impact, and what's the thing you need to stop doing? Now we're architecting a protocol and then we get more and more clarity on that in the app and everything else that we do, and then when life hits, you boom. You double down on that protocol. You do it every day. So then you start committing to doing those things.

Speaker 2: 21:18

You have a checklist we can talk about, but that's a long but abridged take on how we can start concretizing this. I'm not interested in firing people up. I want to change their lives, and the way you do that is to simplify it. And then you need to be consistent. Most people want to start something and then, when it gets boring, they stop doing it. It's your compound interest. I mean from an investment perspective, the magic occurs when you aggregate and compound tiny little gains. But you got to give it a long enough period of time, and so the same thing holds true in our lives. And again, that's the essence of everything we do and a quick take on some of the ways we try to make it practical.

Speaker 1: 21:59

My gosh, I have goosebumps and I'm teary-eyed At the time of this recording. I am being stretched to my max and I have a huge growth summit coming up, but I have. My schedule wouldn't make sense to the average person, but I still make time to go grab coffee. I still make time to go do like and it's being stretched. But I said like life isn't going to get easier. This is my protocol, this is how I'm building out my life and this is my what I call my buy box you know of, for for my life.

Speaker 1: 22:33

We are the architects of our lives and most of us just live. It's too easy to live haphazardly and to let life just bounce us around and we end up playing the, you know, like the supporting cast members and somebody else's story. It's like, no, I'm the star of my story and I am going to narrate the story really powerfully and I'm going to co-create this with the sovereign. It's going to be powerful. But to just to your point is this has just been so affirming, because that was a choice I made. I have, I am living that live. The protocol know it works. Stick with your, your workout routine. Maybe you adjust some things along the way, but you know you have to do these things so that you can show up and be present and have the energy to do that, and it's a completely different world.

Speaker 2: 23:22

This is the first time I've experienced the full package and I'm like let's keep this going on, let's go and then you get curious, you get excited, you know, and then your prior best becomes your new baseline. And the good news is, if you've achieved that high level of performance and all of us have in different regards at different times you've proven to yourself you can do it. So it's not an abstraction. We just quit giving up the gains, quit making progress than giving it up. You know, the master is the one who practices day after day after day. The amateur and again the general I still respect. You know, in an event I attended with him, he said that the special forces operators that he leads, they practice relentlessly, over and over and over again. Now, the best in the world? Well, the amateur practices until they get something right. The truly world-class performer practices and practices and practices not until they get something right. The truly world-class performer practices and practices and practices not until they get it right, but until they can't get it wrong.

Speaker 2: 24:22

And that's the difference between mediocrity and excellence. So most people get bored with the basic fundamentals. The great ones don't. So you need to know what your basic fundamentals are and then work them ruthlessly, especially when you don't feel like it. When you do that, even 5%, 10% more than you used to. You change your life completely and then you feel that. Then you feel that excitement of oh my God, if I was able to do what I did without this wisdom and discipline, what can I do with it? And life becomes much more joyful and purposeful and you get the byproduct of all the success that may have been eluding you at the level you wanted before. Well, winning the ultimate game and feeling that and knowing how to play, you know the game of life at a really, really high level.

Speaker 1: 25:11

I love that when we're, when we're walking a congruency with who we're created to be. It's just this natural extension where it's almost like the path just lights up in front of you. It's like, oh, this feels great, I want to continue down this path. And I was thinking about Kobe, I think that's who I'm thinking of. Is that he practiced. Somebody went in to watch him practice. They're like can we watch you practice? And all he did was shoot free throws for an hour or something. And they're like I thought I was going to see you practice. And he's like this is-.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Well, the story yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:46

So the story. You may have seen that somewhere other than my book, but I do talk about that in the book too. So the quick story on that is a guy named Alan Stein who worked with Kobe and others. He's at a camp that Kobe's running and he says, hey, can I watch you play practice? Because his thing is that's when you see greatness, not when they're playing, but when they're practicing right. So Kobe says yeah, I'll meet you at 4.15. And the guy says 4.15, we have camp at 4.15. And Kobe says no, no, am, I'll see you at 4.15. Kobe's already drenched in sweat because he showed up clearly before 4.15. But what Kobe did during the hour hour and a half he was training were drills. He learned in like third grade, the most basic fundamental drills. And Alan goes up to him afterwards and says Kobe, you know you're doing the most basic drills, like you're the best player in the world. What are you doing? And Kobe looks at him and smiles and says why do you think I'm the best player in the world? You know he's doing the most basic fundamentals. Now he did it with surgical precision. But again, the great ones know that it's all about the fundamentals and I can give you countless examples on that, but that's it.

Speaker 2: 26:50

Admiral McRaven, who used to run SOCOM, which is the Special Forces Command. All the Navy, seals, army Rangers, etc. Reported to McRaven. His first book is called Make your Bed. You know the commencement address he gave, make your Bed, and that may sound trite but it's not. If you can't make your bed in the morning and you know you quote should good luck, good luck doing anything of true substance. Like you violated your own trust first thing. You want to get out of bed. Make your bed, get a win first thing, and then find an opportunity to create wins all day, every day. Then you build true confidence, true trust in yourself, not this peacocking kind of pretentious social media Photoshop confidence, but deep, deep, deep, robust, humble confidence, and there's nothing more powerful in my mind than that. Then you take what you're talking and you're walking in integrity with your deepest values, the sovereign, as you said.

Speaker 2: 27:46

And then, by the way, people feel that. So when you do that, there's a moral. Charisma is a phrase that some teachers use, or soul force is what Gandhi called it. You have a magnetism to you that neuroscientists can measure. People want to be around people like that. They can feel their integrity and we evolved to trust people that you can tell are living in integrity and you're also slightly repulsed, to put it bluntly, by people that aren't. You can feel there's a lack of integrity in certain aspects of their lives. So we feel joyful. Those around us are inspired by our presence, they want to follow us, they want to create with us and again life takes on a real positive spiraling up.

Speaker 1: 28:30

All of it, love it, and it's just, it's like the expression simple, not easy. Love it, and it's just, it's like the expression simple, not easy. Right, I mean, there isn't anything that is complicated about this, isn't rocket science. It's not for an elite few to experience, to discover and experience, but it's for everyone. And it's so simple. But it's that boredom, it's like it's not easy. Simple is not always easy. Yeah, yeah, I like to say it's harder. Boredom, it's like it's not easy. Simple is not always easy.

Speaker 2: 28:58

Yeah, yeah, I like to say it's harder than you want it to be, but not as hard as you think it will be. And that's exciting because then again, once you start doing this and you start, you start learning, cause it is important that you learn some of these behavioral design techniques, which is another big part of everything that I do. There's an art and science to changing your life that you want to become a student of and a master of, but, again, it's harder than you want it to be. Right, you will need to turn off Netflix, you know, and you'll need to put away the sugary drinks and do some basic, simple things that get your energy dialed in so you can start approaching life more powerfully. But it's not as hard as you think it will be and, ultimately, to your point, it's simple. These aren't complex ideas. We just need to move from theory to practice and then you get to mastery by more practice. So it's theory, practice, practice, practice. Practice equals mastery, equals all the joy that we're talking about.

Speaker 1: 29:50

And that really takes it full circle with the concept of and I really like your modification to peaks and know peaks and valleys. I live in the mountains and I like I'm a mountain girl, I love mountains and so I do think in, like you know, making a summit, getting those panoramic views, and then the descent, and then maybe reaching another summit that same day, and such. But I really this takes it full circle. With that. We are always spiraling upward and so there's that momentum, that full circle with that. We are always spiraling upward, and so there's that momentum that is gaining. With that. It's simple, it's not easy, but if we stick with it we are going to continue. In that. I think it's an explosive journey. I just love it.

Speaker 1: 30:30

It's so exciting.

Speaker 2: 30:32

Yep, If we live in integrity with these ideas. So spiraling upwards obviously is not necessarily the outcome. It certainly isn't the default in our current culture. The current culture's default is no, you're going to continue to numb yourself and it's vice versus virtue. Are you going to show up as your best self and live in integrity or are you going to succumb to fear and laziness and and spiral down?

Speaker 2: 30:54

You know, and unfortunately in our current world well, again, this is a 2500 year old challenge that's just made worse today. But we got to start making those choices where we are stepping forward into growth and then it becomes exhilarating and then you also get to appreciate because even the descent after somebody can be a beautiful experience. You know, like that doesn't need to be any less sublime than reaching the summit. And we realize wait, life is that, life is this beautiful blend and you need both the summit you're going toward and you need to enjoy the journey. It's not that the journey is more important, it's that we got to integrate both. But again, with the wisdom and the discipline and the humility, there's a lot more joy I love that I've been working on the concept of the gracious descent.

Speaker 1: 31:43

Uh, because, as, as someone who is out in the mountains, often it is beautiful. That descent is beautiful, that decompression is a gift, and the sights and the scenery and everything. It's just a different perspective. The vantage point is the only thing that's shifted. And then, excuse me, I'm thinking of, you know, a descent off of a 14er in Colorado with one of my best friends and I mean we made the summit in the middle of the day. We were both experienced in the wilderness. We're like it's fine, we know thunderheads and all that. We get what. We had people heckling us like why are you doing this? You guys shouldn't be up here, shouldn't be going up, and we're like we understand, we understand so.

Speaker 1: 32:26

But that descent was just sweet. There was a sweetness to that and I think that oftentimes our culture has said you got to go and you got to be the best and you got to get to the summit or whatever that pinnacle is, and you have to, you have to fight and you have to push people down so that you can stay on top and then to sit to, to realize I don't need to have that resistance. I love how Pressfield talks about resistance. Right, I don't have to. I don't have to have that exchange. I can. I can release that, release that resistance, and I can have a sweet descent because this isn't my last stop. There's more. There's more in the galaxy to go explore.

Speaker 2: 33:06

Yeah, and then again to bring it back to the ultimate frame that we've been talking about. Like even John Wooden I just did one of my notes on his book Wooden on Leadership so he's the best coach in history. You know. He won 10 championships in 12 years, 88 game winning streak. But he never talked about winning, he never talked about the summit. What he wanted was he wanted his players to show up as their best every single day, every single moment of every single day, and that was the win.

Speaker 2: 33:32

And so the beauty here is that you can summit every moment of your life, every single moment, while you're doing the dishes, while you're hanging out with your kids, while you're having a conversation like this how is this not a summit? Turn off my electronics to go to bed. At the time I said I was going to go to bed. That's a moment in which I'm experiencing me at my best, and this is, you know, the essence of my work. On the other arm is arete. So that's the one word answer the ancient Stoics would give you on how to live a good life. So if you ask them, hey, how do I live a good life? They'd say live with orate. It means excellence or virtue, or something closer to being your best self. Essentially, to use the metaphor of the summit, summit and express your best self moment to moment to moment. If you get stuck in the middle of a rugged mountain, they had a word for that. It was called mediocrity, medias ocris. So the individual who doesn't summit their potential in life again moment to moment to moment is mediocre. They settle for average, for middling, for ho-hum, but that has nothing to do with anyone outside of you, ever. It has to do with you. So take your eyes off of other people. Stay in your own lane, as my wife says. Who is a track, you know hurdler, and just run your race. Are you being your best self? John Wooden never studied other teams almost never. He just wanted his team to play their roles as well as they could. If they did that, they'll let the other team worry about him. So worry about your own journey.

Speaker 2: 35:01

You know you mentioned Brian Holiday in our, in your little exchange, in our kind of prelude. He talks about the same thing that the ancient Greeks and Romans call that euthymia. It means tranquility, but it means something closer to knowing who you are, what your path is and living it, and ignoring what other people are doing and get rid of the toxic comparison and just live, you know, moment to moment to moment, and you can win that game. Everybody can win that game. You know what I mean. Like we don't need to worry about how many zeros are in your bank account or how many initials are after your name and how many square footage you know is in your house or whatever. Be your best self, and nothing wrong with those other things, and they tend to come more when you focus on this. But that's kind of how I'm framing it up and why I'm passionate about RTA and that moment-to-moment expression of our best selves.

Speaker 1: 35:59

I love that and I love that. This is the other thing about simple, not easy, and it is for all people, regardless of your income. Bracket your level of education to all the points that you just made. It's like this is available to everyone. When we choose to live our arete every single moment and I love, yes, while I'm folding laundry and while I'm vacuuming or whatever, like it is available or those moments where we show grace and patience and kindness and all the great virtues when our, when our teenagers might be you know expressing you know, it's like, hey, guess what?

Speaker 1: 36:34

I gave a hug this morning, I won. It's like finding that in that moment. I absolutely love that. Brian. You poured so much wisdom into this, into the conscious investor today and if you're watching on YouTube, you can see I'm holding up Brian's book. It is thick and I'm going to just make a little correlation. When I received this book, brian and I like when I opened it up, I'm like, oh, these are like Bible thin pages. I'm like, whoa, these are, these are thin. There's a lot here. This is a weighty book and there's so much wisdom that is packed into this.

Speaker 1: 37:09

And what I really enjoyed about your books I am a voracious reader is I love that I can dip into it daily. It's so simple. So some of some of you conscious investors are out there and you're still just stepping into the reading zone and you're you still haven't fully identified. Um, you identified as a reader just says that was part of my journey as well that this is such a friendly way to just simply step into reading and you can read for five minutes, probably even three minutes, and get powerful wisdom. Just a front and back of one page is going to give you just one thought. That is going to be like a supercharged vitamin supplement that's just going to pour into you.

Speaker 1: 37:52

It's like you want to make sure that you go and pick up a copy of Arete so that you can just you can have this and remember that we don't have to read a book. This is something I've learned recently is that we don't have to read a book cover to cover, in a moment or in a week or in a timeline. This is a book that you can leave out on the coffee table, on the bed. You know on your bed stand, you know you can just leave it around and pick it up. You need some inspiration. Maybe, instead of scrolling, you go and pick this up and you read and you actually pour into yourself and and fuel yourself so that you can live that full life that you're blessed. You know that you're intended to have. It was a free gift the moment you were born.

Speaker 2: 38:35

I appreciate you, julie. Yeah, that was exactly the idea with the book to have some gravitas to it and some weight but also real hyper readability. So there's 451 micro chapters. You know one, two, three, maybe four pages long and hopefully give you some inspiration to again three maybe four pages long and hopefully give you some inspiration to again move from theory to practice Today. Ancient wisdom, modern science let's go.

Speaker 1: 38:57

It's everything all in one and you're going to enjoy. I love all the stories that you have, you know, about your son playing chess, and just there's so many personal touches in the book that also allow you know the reader, to connect with you and say, oh, this is this, isn't just somebody writing, you know, and drawing upon. All of this great wisdom and science is. This is how you synthesized it, and I've realized as I've been working on my own book that there is a lot to it when we're synthesizing information from so many different sources, but it's coming from us and our perspective. So I just deeply value your work. Not just I mean in your work extends so far beyond the book, but it's nice when we have something tangible. I have to say I think it's nice. It's like, oh look, this is my work. It's not just in my head. When we're thinkers and philosophers, it's so much in our head, so yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 39:54

I appreciate you. Yeah, practicing it end of the day, you know, actually doing the things we know we could do.

Speaker 1: 40:00

Absolutely, brian, where it would the best place for people? You know conscious investor is listening and resonating with what you're saying and they want to connect up, they want to get the book, they want to download the app. Is there a one-stop shop that you would like to send everyone?

Speaker 2: 40:17

Yeah, I mean, the book is everywhere. You buy books, arate, a-r-e-t-e. If you want a sample, you can go to heroicus, slash Arate and then the app. You can find in your iOS and Android app stores. Just search Heroic we're the training platform, and then the app you can find in your iOS and Android app stores. Just search Heroic we're the training platform, and then heroicus is the URL if you want to learn more about everything we do in the app. But tons of content in the app. So the book is the byproduct of me distilling hundreds and hundreds of the best books on ancient wisdom. I love stoicism and modern science. We have something called Philosopher's Notes more wisdom in less time. I help you get through all those books you may not have had time to read. In 20 minutes you can listen to the MP3 distillation of the best ideas from the best books. We've got a ton of other stuff in the app, but, yeah, heroic in the app stores, wherever you have. You know you pick up your apps and then heroicus is the best way.

Speaker 1: 41:14

Love it. I appreciate you so much, brian. I appreciate your time and your willingness to reschedule along the way. Thank you for coming on and pouring into the Conscious Investor community. And Conscious Investor remember, adventure belongs on the trail, not in your investing and not in your personal life. So if you need support to take that very first step or maybe it's the like int step make sure you reach out, connect, remember. This podcast isn't just like oh, I'm I, you can't contact me. No, go down to the show notes, let's find a time, let's connect up, let's talk. And now, apparently, I'm over on Instagram. That's a fun thing, it's kind of new to me. So if you want to go and connect up on Instagram, that's fun. Follow at the conscious investor podcast. Until next time. Cheers to your health, your mindset and your wealth. Thank you.