Optimize For Courage

Nowadays we are “optimizing” for everything:

We optimize our marketing for higher sales.

We optimize our bodies for greater health.

We optimize our routines for greater efficiency.

But nobody optimizes their life for the most valuable thing of all:

GREATER COURAGE.

Courage is our most vital possession, the key to all human flourishing and evolution.

We know this.

But we do not follow with action. We do not devote ourselves to the cultivation and amplification of human courage.

And so the most vital thing of all goes unoptimized.

Even worse, we typically DEGRADE our courage precisely when we need it most.

We feel the dread of tomorrow’s pivot point and numb the fear with drugs, porn, food, or TV ’til three in the morning.

Then we reap the whirlwind and end up mushbraining our way through the pivot instead of of rising up, claiming the fulcrum moment, and crushing it.

That moment of greatest fear is also your moment of HIGHEST LEVERAGE.

When you face these moments unoptimized, or–even worse–HANDICAPPED, you are throwing your life to the wind, spitting in the face of the gods.

Elite sprinters spend YEARS training for 60 seconds of glory on the track.

The least you can do is spend a fraction of that time training your mind and heart up to a higher level of courage.

If you have a key meeting, opportunity, or conversation coming up, take the day off work and go to a cabin or mountain to meditate and get your shit together.

Get ten hours of sleep.

Eat the cleanest food you can find.

Right before your meeting, call, or confrontation, flood your brain and body with the biochemical magic available to you in the form of a green smoothie or bulletproof coffee.

Jump to the floor and bang out 20 pushups or burpees to get your blood flowing and your brain roaring.

Do everything in your power to beef up your Ground so you can evolve past “surviving” your moments of high fear and actually CAPITALIZE on them.

Moments of intense fear are not something to be endured. They are worm holes to the life you want.

Live lived one safe, linear step after the other leads to slow, incremental progress.

Courageous action, borne of thick ground gives you the quantum leap forward.

So next time you see someone checking their FitBit or running sales numbers in Excel, remember:

Anyone can optimize that easy, linear shit.

Be the one with the balls and the vision to play the deeper game.

Optimize for courage.