📍 Coordinates: Buenos Aires, Argentina. 🇦🇷
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
🧉 Vibecheck: (1) Just dropped a new podcast with my mate this morning. Always an incredible sparring session with Jon. We cover the 100 Days, processing emotional material, the value of re-reading books, working with your partner, and a whole lot more. (2) We are firing on all cylinders – preparing, packaging, and crafting the HERO100. It is going to blow expectations out of the water. It is going to change lives. Your time is now, let’s get to it. 🦁
I just started Essentialism by Greg McKeown…
It’s a remarkable, albeit painful, salve for my tendency to over-commit and ‘play the martyr’. My good friend
and I agree that it should be required reading for all humans.I’ve been a ‘practicing minimalist’ for over a decade now.
My journey into minimalism was the singular catalyst of the growth mindset in me. Once I felt the visceral improvement in my life, from newfound mental spaciousness to deeper comfort in my body, and a greater appreciation of beauty and meaning in my possessions, there was no turning back.
I felt ‘ready’ for Essentialism…
I felt like I knew what it was going to say. That I was in some ways ‘beyond it’.
But it’s been poking at an important nuance that I haven’t fully taken to heart. Thus far, minimalism for me has been a tool to remove the excess, so that I could continue saying yes to all the commitments and opportunities that cross my path.
These opportunities have been incredible: facilitating psychedelic retreats, living abroad in beautiful countries, getting my salary paid in Bitcoin over 6 years ago, and meeting remarkable people. But chronic overcommitment has also left me bitter, resentful, angry at myself and others, and stressed.
The Way of the Essentialist rests on the foundation of saying no to the trivial many so that you can truly commit to the excellent few.
While great strides have been taken in this direction, it was a painful truth to see the ways that I am still chronically over-committed, consistently managing the trivial many, and overextending myself to do a lot of things in a mediocre manner, instead of a few things in a great manner.
And now, at this time of year, it’s got me thinking about resolutions…
⛩️ Enter: The Misogi
I’ve become deeply interested in the work and life philosophy of Jesse Itzler…
To get his vibe, this is my favourite 8-minute introduction:
Previously a successful founder with major exits, selling a private jet company to Warren Buffet, and later a coconut water company to Coca-Cola. This is the guy who put David Goggins on the map after his best-selling book ‘Living With a SEAL’ was released.
He’s like a distant mentor to me. While we have no personal relationship, I appreciate the power, ferocity, and genuine life force he brings. And yet, nowadays, well into his 50’s, you know what lights him up?
Running ultramarathons.
Completing 100-mile races, or climbing the vertical elevation of Everest in a weekend through his company 29029. It’s incredible. The man is hungry, yet fulfilled in his hunger.
Through Itzler, I was introduced to a practice called the MISOGI:
Traditionally, the Misogi is a Japanese Shinto purification ritual, where participants embark on a pilgrimage, ending up at a waterfall to stand under the torrent of water and cleanse themselves.
In Itzler’s reinterpretation of the Misogi, he says it’s “doing something so big, so hard, once a year, that it sets the tone for that entire year.”
For him, these are 100-mile races.
For others, it’s learning a language, building a business, launching that creative project, running a 5k, you name it. A nuance he adds is that you’ll know it’s big and hard enough if you feel like you only have a 50% chance of completing it.
If done properly, you should be able to look back on your year, and say “2023 was the year I did THIS.” The one, singular, year-defining endeavour.
It solves the problem of overcommitment and lack of progress that I run into a lot. Too often do I—and many others I know—get to the end of the year thinking “I know I did a lot… but what did I actually do?”
Last year around this time I released “Reclaiming Healthy Ambition,” which was an important shift in my life. To consciously reclaim hunger, drive, ambition, and goal-oriented pursuits.
However—in my usual fashion—I committed to something like 6 things simultaneously. As a result, many of them remain incomplete here at the end of the year.
Painful, bitter medicine.
While there are many things I did that I am deeply proud of this year, like building 2 world-class 100-day initiations, the HERO100 and the WARRIOR100, I don’t want to continue this pattern.
This year, I am making no resolutions.
I am, however, planning a Misogi.
If you only did one thing this year, what would you want it to be?
Imagine if you did a Misogi every year for the next 4 decades. 40 major milestone accomplishments. Running a marathon, writing a book, learning a new skill, starting that podcast, having a child.
40 of those, even 30, 20, or 10, sounds like a life well-lived.
BUT, and it’s a GIGANTIC but, you’ll never get there if you’re trying to do everything else at the same time.
There are trade-offs to the time, energy, and intention you bring to this undertaking. If it’s big enough, if it’s important enough to you, it means other things are going to have to lay by the wayside.
My Misogi:
400 hours of yoga study and practice, including completing my 300-hour yoga teacher training.
I have had a yoga teacher training course, sitting at 37% completion, in my awareness for the last 3 years.
It has never been completed. Never been prioritized. This feels like a challenge. I know that there’s a likelihood I fail at this because I’ve failed to complete it for several years now.
But it was never the priority. It was never a misogi. It was never the alpha and the omega of a year.
It was always just a nice-to-have. Something cool to do in the background. Something more exciting to talk about than to do.
While I will continue to have work obligations and other commitments, this is the focus.
One of the reasons I have confidence in my ability to complete this misogi this year is because I know, already, that I have the sacred structure to help with this: the HERO100.
The HERO100 is designed to be a misogi! A grand undertaking that you can look back on at the end of the year and say “holy shit, I did that!”
It’s also the perfect container to help you complete your misogi. The daily personal ritual challenge becomes the training for your misogi. You know my ritual is going to be yoga-focused, and help me quickly rack up 100+ hours toward my goal.
Combine this with the structure the rest of the experience provides:
a community to offer ongoing support and motivation
an abstinence challenge to get rid of unaligned behaviour
meditation, journaling, and item elimination to keep my eye on the prize
accountability to push forward into this each day
This is where I’m at. No resolutions, no new habits, no new commitments: just a misogi, and the HERO100 to take me there.
If you feel like you want an epic undertaking, or if you need the support to complete a misogi of your own, I invite you to join us. We begin on January 14th.
Let this be the year YOU DID IT.
The year a bucket list goal became a living, breathing reality.
It’s possible. It’s waiting for you, on the other side of saying no to the trivial many, so that you can dive into the excellent few that remain.
This is the HERO100, the journey of a lifetime, in 100 days.
Let’s do this together. 🤟 EB.