Aubrey Marcus

How to Get The Mental Willpower to Know What is Best and Actually Follow Through On It

Episode #345

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Aubrey Marcus’s step-dad invented an artificial vagina.

His step-dad’s pregnant wife wasn’t having sex with him. This made him very unhappy.

So he refitted a flashlight with some wet, spongy thing and called it a “fleshlight”.

I love this story because it takes something that felt very upsetting to me for some reason and made it seem like a public service.

I started laughing and Aubrey told me, “It was really amazing to see the letters come in. ‘This device has saved my marriage’. The Fleshllight became the best-selling adult male product of all time.”

Well, I’m an idiot for even trying to judge. I’m always an idiot when I judge.

Even when I’m judging myself an idiot, I’m probably an idiot. Which sounds idiotic.

—

Aubrey wrote the book, “Own Your Day, Own Your Life“. How to live an optimal day in terms of health, happiness, productivity, love, relaxation, and much more.

I read it. I loved it. And I asked Aubrey a ton of questions about it.

I either hate a book or LOVE it. “Like”, the basic grammar of social media, feels like a mediocre emotion to me.

One of the benefits of having a podcast is I can read a book and if I have more questions I can call the author, see when they will be in NY, and invite them on my podcast so I can ask whatever I want.

First, I watched Aubrey’s other interviews. He did a good one with Tim Ferriss. So right in the beginning of my podcast with him I told people to watch Tim’s podcast.

The worst podcasts are the ones that just repeat what every other podcast and article says.

I like to take my guests out of their media messages and stories. I want to have real conversations.

I want to make a new friend. You can’t make new friends just repeating the same stuff they said elsewhere.

So I asked about the Fleshlight. Then I asked him how much money he made.

Then I asked about cold showers.

—

We filmed the podcast (this is new for me). This is my first one. So you’re the first to see it.

I’m going to tell you my day today. Some of it comes directly from Aubrey’s book because I’m going to try it.

Some of it comes from doing 50-100 podcasts where the healthiest people in the world say the same thing.

Some of it has been my routine for 18 years. Trial and error (much error) has helped me figure out my ideal day.

But it changes every day.

—

This is my day today.

Because I’m easily suggestible, some of my new habits are from yesterday’s podcast with Aubrey Marcus and his book.

I hope his ideas work, because some of them are painful. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.)

Some of my habits are things that have been working for me since about 2010 or 2002.

And some of my habits (particularly eating habits) are from podcasts scattered across my last 350.

I hope after reading this (or listening to the podcast or watching it, you take the same inventory. What’s “a day in the life” for you? How are you living? What do you like? What don’t you like, etc.)

MORNING:

A) WAKE UP WITH THE SUN

Jordan Peterson suggests waking up the same time each day. Arianna Huffington and Sean Stephenson suggests eight hours a day.

Normally I go to sleep around 10pm so I can wake up around 6am. But since I now do standup comedy many nights, I don’t always wake up around 6am if I’m going to get eight hours.

But today I woke up around 7am. I got about 7 hours of sleep.

B) MOVE:

I did 30 pushups. Aubrey makes the excellent point that “movement is medicine” so why not start the day moving.

C) WATER:

Aubrey makes another excellent point: “If you slept seven hours, that’s at least seven hours without water. You’re probably dehydrated and that’s a problem since the body is 70% water.”

Water reduces anxiety, clears inflammation, fuels the brain, etc. I might be slightly misquoting him but others say this as well (Hal Elrod in his “Miracle Morning” and on my podcast).

I drank a liter of water in the first half hour.

—

This is just the ABC’s. I also wrote DEFGHIJKLMOPQRS… I stopped at S. S is a lot.

I didn’t want to skimp. Because health is hard and it’s scary and everyone’s talking about it. So it can become overwhelming. I hope to make it less scary. And more individual. There’s no one size fits all healthy day.

Aubrey likes what he likes. I like what I like. And we each take on some of the same and some different challenges.

You don’t have to do human optimization or peak performance. Aubrey said, “You gotta live a life that’s worth living. Live a life that’s well-rounded, balanced and includes the things like having a glass of wine or smoking a joint and making love to your lover, playing with your dog and hanging out, but ALSO being extremely productive, ALSO meditating, ALSO eating right, ALSO training like a beast.”

The hardest part (for me at least) is 1) getting the mental willpower to know what’s best for me and 2) actually following through on it.

And thanks to this interview with Aubrey Marcus, I’m on it.

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