Andrew: 00:02 – Have we climbed Everest only to find a mountain of cream-filled pastries we can’t resist? And have we evolved to be vacant-eyed sloths with a mobile device in one hand and a TV remote in the other? In this edition of Two-Brain Radio, Chris Cooper explained why he’s made it his life mission to help fitness entrepreneurs find wealth. The short version? Healthy people are happy people, and gym owners know the path to health. We have more gym owners, we’ll have more happy, healthy people. Here’s Coop on why he never wants to see fat people on Mars.
Chris: 00:32 – Over the last week I’ve been talking about playing the Infinite Game, how to avoid the trap of competition and the mindset necessary for success. My mission is to make 1 million fitness entrepreneurs wealthy, because the world needs more fitness coaches. Until the last a hundred years, humanity has concerned itself with playing an infinite game. We won merely by surviving. First we survived long enough to replicate ourselves. Then we survived long enough to overlap generations. We invented grandkids. Now we’re surviving beyond the age of manual utility and enjoying decades as observers. We have ease. We have medical care and hell, we should. Our ancestors worked really, really hard to give us this gift. We can do all these things because as a species, we’re wealthy. Capitalism has created the opportunity to coast through our last years. We no longer work ourselves to death. We work ourselves to pension. The poorest person in Western society today is wealthier than the Kings of Europe were 200 years ago. We have medicine and food and access to water.
Chris: 01:39 – We have sanitation. We avoid most diseases and cure almost all of the others. We have time for leisure and coins in our pocket. We have time to wonder what’s it all for? And we have time to Netflix and chill. But we have not survived 10 million years of evolution to sit on the couch and watch Oprah. We have suffered through famine. We have struggled through wars and we squeaked our way through plagues. Our bodies are adapted to survive through conservation of resources. We now have more than we need, but our surplus is killing us. Our largest health problems come from abundance. The bounty of victory is clogging our arteries, our brains, and our planet. We have so much that we’re choking on it. Our bodies are fattening, our brains are slowing, and our environment is filling with our garbage. We have no universal just cause left, so we’re depressed.
Chris: 02:37 – We’ve survived eons of need just to realize that surplus might destroy us in the end. Now we might someday escape our collective pollution by rocketing it off to Mars, or we might launch our garbage from our beloved planet by splatting it onto the moon. Slowly, inch by inch, we’re conquering outer space, but we’re losing the fight to conquer ourselves. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? The real goal of humanity isn’t survival. That was just a short-term goal. The real goal is happiness. The ultimate goal of the neocortex, that most evolved part of the brain, the part that separates us from every other species, is to make itself happy. Call it enlightenment or call it heaven or call it anything you want. When things are going well, we secrete reward chemicals that please the brain. Dopamine and serotonin are the trophies we get when we do things right.
Chris: 03:31 – Triggering these chemicals is the brain’s ultimate goal. Our bodies follow our brains around. We are constantly led toward the pursuit of happiness. We’re just not sure where that is exactly. We know how to prevent unhappiness. Mostly we know which boxes must be ticked first. Air and water, food, security, habitat, a sense of belonging. We can be happy without those. Abraham Maslow described the path to self-actualization in his hierarchy of needs. His little pyramid looks a lot like the tip of the evolutionary spear. The founders of the USA said their goal was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in that order, so let’s get on with it. A healthy person wants a thousand things, but a sick person only wants one thing: to be well. Last week I said that to solve any problem, you have to split it in half and then you have to split it in half again, and so on until you identify one specific action to take right away.
Chris: 04:28 – A few days later, I said that Greg Glassman’s sickness, wellness, fitness continuum was brilliant but incomplete, that the continuum should include death on its left side today. Today I’ll add that it should include happiness on its right side. Fitness isn’t the ultimate goal. It’s a step in the journey. Now, plenty of people are happy without being fit, but everyone who studies happiness from neuroscientists to Buddhists agree that some measure of fitness is necessary for an enduring state of happiness. Yoga was created to prepare people to meditate longer. Therapists’ first prescription for depression is usually go for a walk, and most medical practitioners understand that in many cases, exercise works as well as antidepressants, but depression is still the leading cause of disability worldwide. The world health organization says so. So who is leading the pursuit of happiness? I say it’s the people leading the pursuit of fitness, because fitness and happiness are interdependent.
Chris: 05:29 – Fitness professionals are best positioned to lead our species forward, so we need more of us. My first training business wasn’t Catalyst. It was a one-on-one strength-and-conditioning practice called Focus. I made two T-shirts and about a dozen homemade cards with Focus Strength and Conditioning on the front and the Continued Evolution of the Species on the back. That was in 1998. But I still believe that; that evolution isn’t over. The human race has evolved toward happiness or self-actualization or Nirvana or enlightenment or heaven. That we have the tools and most of the knowledge to get there, but we’re waiting to be led out of the wasteland. If we produce a million fitness entrepreneurs, I believe one or two of us will figure it out. Some of my friends are already working on it, and I’ll link to their blogs right below this video. Colm O’Reilly. You can listen to his podcast on Two-Brain Radio. Craig Hysell, you can sign up for his daily blog in the link below. Bonnie Skinner, our resident psychotherapist at the Two-Brain workshop, has a lot to say about depression and Mark Divine, an ex-Navy SEAL has simple daily directive exercises that you can do, like box breathing
Andrew: 06:44 – If you’re a passionate fitness entrepreneur who deserves to thrive, we want to help. Book a free call with a certified mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
