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April 25 - September 22, 2020
Physicist Max Planck famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Mindfulness is simply being aware and conscious in the present moment. That’s it.
If that sounds kind of fuzzy, here’s a way to make it more concrete. The next time you’re supposed to be doing something and you catch yourself focusing on something else, that is a moment when you’re not mindful. You probably have more of those moments than you’d like to admit. But that’s why mindfulness as a practice can be so powerful.
It was Jim Rohn who said, “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” In my case that has been literally true.
It was this experience with the plant that eventually led me to place Huperzia serrata at the heart of supplementing high brain function.
Huperzia serrata is a tool in your arsenal, a screwdriver in your set, and while you don’t need to take it every day, on the days you need to be at your best, on days you want to own, you should have it available.
Nootropics have been proven to assist with memory and cognitive performance. Huperzia serrata is a great place to start and is a part of one of the most rigorously tested formulas on the market. If you don’t know about nootropics, now’s the time to find out.
Doin’ Work Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. —PHILIP STANHOPE, 4TH EARL OF CHESTERFIELD
When people come visit the office, you know what they say? It’s not “Man, Aubrey, your employees are working so hard.” It’s “Man, your employees are so happy.” And happiness is a magnet for success. Happy people do better work and draw other happy people to them. I never have to beg people to stay late to finish a project, or volunteer to work a trade show. Because I am constantly supporting their personal journeys of self-optimization, financially, physically, and emotionally.
The worst thing in the world is to feel like you are getting owned by your job or your employer.
I’m a firm believer that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who need to find purpose and meaning in what they do for a living, and those who find purpose and meaning elsewhere and use work as a means to those ends.
didn’t care if I was appreciated at my new-old job, I didn’t need a pat on the back. I just needed to do good work and get paid. In service of my mission, I was able to smile through the suck, and learn from the dysfunctional management so I didn’t make the same mistakes once I got my own thing off the ground. In short, I intentionally went into a toxic work environment day after day in order to emerge with the resources necessary to build my dream. The plan succeeded.
according to the author of a book titled The Healthy Workplace, a large fragrance and flavor company investigated how smells affect the accuracy of typists. Their research found that “54% made fewer errors when they could smell lemon, 33% fewer with jasmine and 20% fewer with lavender.” Lemon-jasmine-lavender tea for the win!
THERE IS NO “I” IN TEAM, BUT THERE IS A “ME” We talk a lot about teamwork in our society. Teamwork makes the dream work! But we don’t talk nearly enough about how to be a good teammate, or how to judge whether you are working well with your team, or how to know who is actually on your team.
In fact, evolutionary biologists credit laughter with exactly that purpose: diffusing what would ordinarily be tense situations. The moment you can laugh about something, the threat is over. If anyone is in an energetically challenging place, instead of indulging it, or telling them to fix it, be a good teammate and shoot for laughter.
The writer Nicolas Chamfort once jokingly advised that if you swallow a live toad first thing in the morning, nothing else will seem too challenging for the rest of the day. I’m not sure that’s true, but he’s definitely right about one thing: if you start the day off with the hardest thing you need to accomplish, you are going to enjoy the whole day a hell of a lot more.
In the words of General George Patton: “Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.”
1. Know your mission.
2. Own your space.
3. Work effectively.
Now Do It You ever hear the cliché, “If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life”? It’s bullshit. I love what I do. And I generally feel good after a full day of work. But it’s fucking work.
What you will find, once you embrace the grind, whatever your grind may be, is that all of a sudden it isn’t so bad. It is never pain that is the problem; it is the suffering caused by the resistance to that pain.
three states of mind anyone should tolerate: acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. To accept is to embrace, to meet without resistance or judgment or preference. To enjoy is to move past acceptance and actually have fun while you are doing it. And enthusiasm sits beyond enjoyment, where you are bringing your intent, and your passion, into what you are doing.
You’re not at work to fuck around. You’re at work to do work. Go, hero, go.
Garlic is one of these mysterious foods that has been used therapeutically for millennia. It contains multiple antioxidant compounds that, among other things, subdue the common cold like a Brazilian jujitsu black belt. A large twelve-week study found that garlic supplementation reduced the number of colds by 63 percent versus placebo. That is awesome by itself, but even better when you consider the average length of cold symptoms for those who were sick was also reduced, from 5 days to just 1.5 days in the group taking garlic. Another study backed up those results and found that a high dose of
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This chemical conversion process is why I told you to keep your bacon bendy. When you burn it or fry it on high heat, the sodium nitrite that naturally occurs in bacon, as well as the nitrates that are often added for preservation, can turn into a nasty carcinogen called nitrosamines. Not only is this bad for your system, but it also ruins one of nature’s tastiest, porkiest gifts.
Rather than counting your calories, focus on the nutrients you are putting into your body. You want to ingest plenty of macronutrients like proteins, fats, and fiber. Remember, you are what you eat ate, so source your macros well.
Or if history isn’t your thing, look at science. Naps have been shown to consistently outperform high doses of caffeine for cognitive tasks and even motor performance.
It’s a virtuous cycle, recommended to both military pilots and astronauts based on a study that showed napping doubled levels of alertness.
That’s where brain-wave entrainment comes in. Entrainment can help round the corners so you can reach your intent faster and more effectively. In plain English, targeting theta and delta waves can help you take your naps to the next level. (It will also score you a point on the 30–35 sleep cycles you are trying to accomplish per week; more on that in chapter 15.)
You can find binaural beats tracks for sale online or on YouTube, but to get you started I have hosted two of mine for free at aubreymarcus.com/beats.
The more we learn about brain waves, the more we understand how important they are in generating desired states of consciousness. Binaural beats are a very basic technology, not too dissimilar from a rhythmic beat of a drum, but the tech is sure to improve. With the increasingly chaotic environment in which we live, assistive technology like these beats can be a game changer for a lot of people. By its very nature—with headphones and a twenty- to thirty-minute session—brain-wave entrainment is perfect for a post-lunch nap.
Your body is your slave; it works for you. —JACK LALANNE
Your mind is the ultimate unconventional tool in pursuit of unconventional results. Listen to it, harness it, and go own your workout.
Owning is not about working more. It’s about living a full and fulfilled life—one that speaks to what our bodies need most, which, yes, includes meaningful bursts of productivity, but also includes the rich and joyful connection that other people give us. If you don’t connect with others, then you can’t own the day. Plain and simple.
There was a time in America when we wouldn’t have had to be as emphatic about this point. In an earlier era, we used to do things socially—people were in bowling leagues, played music with each other, sat on their porches and talked. Ironically, in a world of social media, we’ve gotten considerably less social. The result has been an epidemic of existential angst and loneliness. The easiest way to solve that in your life is to actively seek out in-person connection and community after work. Go to the dog park. Play in a sports league. Create true family time.
If you believe you are too old to play, you will become too old to play. If you stay young in heart, spirit, and belief, you will stay young in body and mind as well.
Connect with Your Tribe Jesus, the great Christian mystic, said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is the golden rule. Let’s take it one step further, to the deeper meaning: Do unto others because they are you. You, just living a different life. From that perspective, no one is too distant or too strange to connect with, but what still keeps us apart is that we judge people as harshly as we judge ourselves. We find people lacking like we find ourselves lacking. However, if we can learn to truly see others, we can also learn to truly see ourselves.
And this is true for everything. I can’t tell you how many people in the wellness industry become wildly intolerant of wheat after reading a book like Wheat Belly. Some of these people are Italian and grew up on bread and pasta without a care in the world! But after that book, one ziti will send them running to the toilet. Their bodies didn’t change at all when they received the information that ninjas were lurking in the wheat germ, ready to slit their throat. Their
minds changed. And when their minds changed, their bodies changed. This is not woo-woo, this is science: the famous nocebo effect, the evil twin of the placebo effect. Like when people were told that taking a pill with nothing in it would make them run slower, and it did. And it’s the most overlooked aspect of nutrition—one that to own the day, you have to master.
READING This one isn’t too complicated: reading books is one of the fastest ways to give yourself over to another world, another time, and level up your mind. It literally allows you to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before you.
Just know that there are no wrong books if you like them. The only rule you should follow is that if you start a book, and you don’t like it, do not continue to read it just because you bought it. Life isn’t the summer reading program at your local library. You don’t get free passes to the water park just for finishing books, even if you hate them.
surest way to avoid having your reading time wasted is to lean on the recommendations from smart podcast guests and your own bookworm friends and mentors. Most of the best books I have read came to me through those channels; books I didn’t just read cover to cover but inhaled and then sifted like I was searching for gold on the Bering Sea.
If everything that happens to me is something I am grateful for, why am I so anxious about the future? I’ve always dealt with the problems that I’ve needed to deal with, I’ve always come out better, yet I lack the foresight to have the same perspective as my hindsight. It’s just not having faith. It’s thinking that this next disaster will be different. Guess what, it’s probably not going to be different. Whatever comes, you can deal with it. You will deal with it. Fight that battle if it comes.
Until then, do not play war games in your mind and in your heart every night.
You aren’t ever going to be able to fully control what’s on tomorrow’s menu, but everything life has served you so far has made you the person you are today. Own that thought, and tell your stress that it can go fuck itself.
The famous nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death. The higher the interest rate and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”
No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he is not the same person. —HERACLITUS
You need to be your own good coach. You have to teach yourself to learn from failure, not be defined by it. You threw an interception? Fine, learn from your mistake, get back in there, and keep throwing.
They say that the ends don’t justify the means. Well, they don’t invalidate them either. Do your best, remove the self-punishment for trying and failing, and let the rest sort itself out.
