Good Life Project - A Simple Model for a Really Good Life | 2023 Kickstart

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

So as we all step into this year together, there's a big question that I think is on everybody's mind. And that question is, "What does it actually take to live a good Life?" Is it about health or wealth, friendship love, passion, purpose? Or are there things that really matter that are fairly simple to cultivate, no matter your circumstance, but that most of us completely miss? And maybe most importantly, what can we do? How much is actually in our control? And does that vary from person to person or even within one person's life from moment to moment, month to month, season to season? No matter who you are, what you do or what life brings your way, the question of what it means to live a good life, it resonates at the core of every single one of us. No matter our circumstances to feel more alive and connected to feel like whatever version of our best life is possible, we have found a way to access it on some level. And we have a sense of agency and co-creation in it.And for over a decade now, I have been granted rare access to a global collective of luminaries in every industry and circumstance imaginable. From renowned scientists and leading voices in everything from spirituality, and philosophy, to art, to innovators, change makers in industries, psychology, health, mental health, relationships, education activism, CEOs and founders, painters, writers, Oscar-winning actors, iconic musicians have populated the quest and the list of teachers for me and people that have turned around and shared with you. And what I have added to that is many decades of my own countless personal experiments and experience ranging from studying and teaching, yoga and meditation to my own meditation and breathwork deep dives to having the incredible blessing of teaching tens of thousands of students and human beings from around the world. Building many intentional businesses and communities and experiences focused around collective elevation. And over time, this deceptively simple, yet powerful model for a life well live emerged and I call it the Good Life Buckets. And this simple Good Life Bucket model remains as valid as robust as powerful as ever. So get ready to dive into the Good Life Buckets with the new 2023 lens on how to tap this model to build your best life possible.You can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.Links Mentioned:5 Life-Changing Relationship HabitsArthur Aron's 36 QuestionsGood Life Project Bucket QuizSparketype™ QuizFind All Of The Episodes In This Series:How to Succeed at Anything Worth Doing | 2023 KickstartCheck out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So as we all step into this year together, there's a big question that I think is on everybody's mind. And that question is, what does it actually take to live a good life? Is it about health or wealth, friendship, love, passion, purpose, all some, none of the above? Or are there things that really matter that are fairly simple to cultivate, no matter your circumstance, but that most of us completely miss? And maybe most importantly, what can we do? How much is actually in our control? And does that vary from person to person or even within one person's life from moment

to moment, month to month, season to season. No matter who you are, what you do, or what life brings your way, the question of what it means to live a good life, it resonates at the core of every single one of us. And it is more important now than ever, because everything has changed. Our lives have been upended, the way we live and work and play and connect, the way we think and feel is shifting seemingly moment to moment. All of the external elements that we relied on as markers of everything from success to happiness to connection to safety, it's all up in the air. These last few years have brought many of us moments of great stress and change, and in some cases, loss and reckoning.

But it's also brought moments of great potential and reimagining and possibility. It's become a bit of an invitation to both get honest and also ask where we really want our lives to go and to be this one life that we've been given and how we might be able to participate in making it happen. So I have been studying this question. What does it mean to live a good life? For my entire adult life, in the past decade, it has become the center of my professional pursuits, really asking what are the components, the key contributors, what's real, what's fake, what are the biggest levers, the ones that have an outsized impact, and what might actually matter, but maybe

more on the level of icing on the good life cake. It doesn't actually move the needle all that much. And what can we do, no matter our circumstance, to feel more alive and connected, to feel like whatever version of our best life is possible, we have found a way to access it on some level. And we have a sense of agency and co-creation in it. And for over a decade now, I have been granted rare access to a global collective of luminaries in every industry and circumstance imaginable, from renowned scientists and leading voices in everything from spirituality, philosophy, to art, to innovators, change makers in industry, psychology, health, mental health, relationships, education, activism, CEOs and founders, painters, writers, Oscar winning

actors, iconic musicians have populated the quest and the list of teachers for me and people that I have turned around and shared with you. And what I have added to that is many decades of my own countless personal experiments and experience ranging from studying and teaching yoga and meditation to my own meditation and breath work deep dives to having the incredible blessing of teaching tens of thousands of students and human beings from around the world, building many intentional businesses and communities and experiences focused around collective elevation. And over time, this deceptively simple yet powerful model for a life well-lived emerged. And I call it the good life buckets.

Now, I introduced this model and wrote about it in detail in my 2016 book, How to Live a Good Life. And in the seven or so years since, we have all been through so much, been wildly challenged, disrupted, grown, and learned so much. And that simple good life bucket model remains as valid, as robust, as powerful as ever, because it's not built on something that is trendy or a moment-to-moment thing. It is built on learned wisdom that has survived and been scientifically validated for generations and generations and generations. But the experiences that we have all navigated, that I've navigated over these last six or seven years,

they have added many new insights and levels of depth and nuance to the way that I think about and describe and activate that model. So as we all head into a new year in a state of emergence after these past few years, I wanted to share this model along with a host of new insights and ideas, interpretations, stories, and examples that have shifted and benefited from this incredibly intense window of change and questioning and re-imagining. Even if you've heard me talk about the good life buckets before, you'll want to listen into this updated and refreshed exploration. So get ready to dive into the good life buckets with the new 2023 lens

on how to tap this model to build your best life possible, not only in the year to come, even if that year presents challenge after challenge, which inevitably it does on some level, but also far beyond the next 12 months or so into future seasons of life. Oh, and a quick reminder too, this is part two in our Kickstart Your Life 2023 series. Last week, I shared a powerful framework for action-taking that I call success scaffolding, which is really helpful in the context of anything big and meaningful that you want to accomplish this year. Often that may have been on your big thing to do list for years past, but you just haven't been able to. And with each of these episodes in January, we will also be including a detailed outline or visual mind map that you can download entirely for free as a PDF.

We have included a link to the show notes. Be sure to follow Good Life Project on your favorite app now also, so you don't miss out on any of this month's Kickstart Your Life series. Okay, I am so excited to share this refresh take on the good life buckets with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Okay, so let's talk about this model we call the good life buckets. So think of it this way. Zoom in the lens out.

Life can be sort of divided into three major categories where we invest energy or effort, and our effort gives us back so much of what makes us come alive. And I call these different categories the good life buckets. The first one is what I call the vitality bucket. Now, this is all about your mind and body. This is all about optimizing the state of your mind and body. It's about things like stillness and peace, focus and tension, gratitude, resilience, mental and physical health. It's about building the strongest, healthiest, most vital physical body as well that is available and accessible to us given whatever your unique circumstance is. Your connection bucket is all about what happens between you and other beings, other experiences, other environments.

It's about relationships. It's about cultivating deep, joyful, meaningful relationships, love, belonging, friendship, attachment, community, participation, all of those amazing things. And finally, the third bucket is the contribution bucket. And for most of us, this is all about the thing that we call work. This is about how you contribute to the world and what it wants from you, what you give to it and what it gives back to you when you invest that effort. It's about doing work that fills you with meaning and purpose, excitement and cultivates a feeling of deep satisfaction and significance. So these three buckets, your vitality bucket, your connection bucket, and your contribution bucket, they're

sort of like the three big buckets or three big levers that we can pull to really embolden, to activate, to enliven that lead to a good life. These three buckets, when they're full, when they're all brimming over, when they're topped off, life tends to be pretty extraordinary. When they run dry or when any one bucket runs dry, life starts to become filled with pain. When all three run dry, life effectively ceases. And here is a little bit more that I want you to know about this model. So the model is pretty straightforward. It's deceptively simple, right?

A good life is about filling and keeping filled your vitality, connection, and contribution bucket. But here's a little something that you need to know also. It's called the three laws of the buckets. Law number one, the buckets never lie. They tell the truth. If your vitality bucket is on low, if it's a three out of 10, you can keep telling yourself that your physical and mental state is great and it's awesome. And you can try and sort of like tell the story of that. You can try to delude yourself into believing.

But if it is not true, your bucket will bring you back to the truth. The buckets never lie as much as we sometimes wish they would. Law number two, the buckets all leak. There is no way to repair them for life. And the deeper into life we get, the more quickly they tend to leak. Now, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, you can argue either way, but the truth is it's just reality. So your contribution bucket, right? Or your connection bucket, your vitality bucket, they all start to leak. So you could fill it up. Imagine doing all the stuff that would fill your vitality up. So it's just, you felt

abundant with energy and health and vitality and wellbeing, right? The thing is you can't just know that, okay, it's topped off and then walk away and trust that it will just stay there. That bucket will start to leak and slowly the level will start to go down. Again, it's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It is not repairable. But the cool thing is, if we know this and we accept it up front, that tells us that part

of our work is to continuously revisit the level of each bucket, check in and say, how full or empty is this right now? Get honest about that, right? Because they never lie. And then do whatever it is we need to do to refill whatever bucket feels like it's a little bit too low at any given moment in time. That may be one or two or all three. The idea is to never just top it off and to ignore because over time it will empty.

We're always, we spend our entire lives circling around and doing little things that refill each. Now, the thing is about this, it may sound like, oh, wow, like I can never just set it and forget it. But the cool thing is most of the stuff that we actually do to fill all three buckets is kind of cool and kind of interesting and kind of fun. And it's actually stuff that we look forward to doing. Not only does it fill our buckets, it fills us up along the way. And the simply doing of these things is a big part of what makes us feel great and leads collectively to a better life.

Which brings us to the third and final law, which is that each of the three buckets, they feed back with and mediate and regulate the level of the other buckets. So if your vitality bucket is a five out of 10, it is going to make it really hard for you to fill your connection bucket and your contribution bucket. If your connection bucket is really kind of feeling low, it's gonna make it a lot harder for you to actually fill your vitality bucket and feel like you're fully vibrant and alive

and healthy and well. And if your contribution bucket, the thing that for most of us equates to the work that we do in the world, is running low, it's gonna make it really hard to show up in our relationships and do what we need to make it really hard to show up in our relationships and do what we

need to do to really fill that bucket and to also get the health benefits that we want because it affects everything. So that third law is that all of the buckets speak to and regulate and to a certain extent, limit each other. If any one bucket is running low, it is going to temporarily limit how full all three buckets can get. So you can never just devote yourself to one and feel like, well, I can let that other one go pretty close to dry because I'll top it off later. It will stop you from getting where you want to get or filling as much as you want to fill the one that you're even focusing on. It will artificially cap it way lower than its true capacity.

Those are the three laws of the buckets. They never lie. They all leak and they speak to and limit each other. Now, here's where we get into some really interesting intel around these. And pretty soon, we're going to debrief this. We're going to go bucket by bucket, talk about in a lot more detail what they actually are, what it takes to fill it, and then a huge fan of getting honest. We may not share this internal honesty with others, but at least with ourselves. So before the events of the last couple of years, what we know is that the average person's buckets rarely registered anything remotely close to what we would call a good life. Back in the before times, 2016-ish, we actually built a good life bucket quiz and invited people to take it. The goal was

to try and help you figure out or really understand how full or empty each of your three good life buckets was in a fairly objective way. And in a matter of weeks, nearly 20,000 people from around the world completed this tool. The results were kind of startling, to be honest. Remember, this was nearly seven years ago. This was in before times when a lot of people sort of looked at the world and said, there's a lot of good stuff going on. The average person's vitality bucket score back then was a 56 out of 100. The average person's contribution bucket score was 62 out of 100. The average person's connection bucket score was 66 out of 100. So translation, the typical score, had this been a test in school for any of us,

for all three buckets would have been an F. But in this case, the F stands less for failure and more for just flatlined, right? Or what we might consider failure to thrive. People were fine. Maybe that F actually stood for fine. I'm just, I'm fine, right? Fine is not the answer you want to give when somebody asks how you are. Because fine almost always veils a deeper pervasive discontent. And that is exactly what's been happening. People were fine. Very few are actually doing well, let alone out like flourishing in any of the three key elements of

life. And then you bring in the last couple of years. You bring in a blanket of massive global challenges to physical and mental health, to our ability to stay well. You bring in global economic shifts and scarcity. You bring in a level of endemic, pandemic stress that we have never experienced in modern times. You bring in fear and concern about the future. You bring in isolation, global isolation, removal from relatedness and connection for not just weeks, but often months and years, right? And then you wonder, well, how does this affect us? If we started with a baseline where the average score was in the 50s or low 60s out of 100 in the three good life buckets, can you even imagine? So we've actually

started into that research project. Over the last year, we have done a complete refresh of the good life bucket quiz. And we kind of quietly relaunched it a few months back. And we're now building our, what we would call our emerging or emergent 2022 to 2023 data set around this. And we have made this tool now publicly available. So step one, if you're inclined to start from a more subjective, personally honest place is to go and complete the good life bucket quiz. You'll find a link in the show notes, by the way, and it's 100% free. Your scores for each bucket may simply reflect something that you have been feeling when you do it. It takes probably about 10 minutes, by the way. It's pretty fast. And it may tell you something that you've

been feeling but maybe didn't really have an easy way to confirm or objectively didn't really understand. Or your scores may reveal something that you hadn't picked up on before. And what they will very likely do, no matter what, is give you a much clearer understanding for the three different buckets and what the level is independently for each of the three, and what level of bump or drain to the way that you've been feeling each one is contributing. And this is super important to know also, no matter what your scores are, they are just a snapshot in time. They're absolutely changeable. Tons of things that you can do to refill each of your good life buckets, little things,

immediate things, easy things, free things, all things that will make a really big difference that will begin filling your good life buckets even today within seconds or minutes. And I'm going to share a whole bunch of those for the rest of this conversation that will help you start to feel better, more hopeful, more focused, more energized, more connected and alive quickly. If for any reason, this experience sort of like reflects back to you and says, you know what, I'm really in a place where I feel like I'm struggling. I've been struggling for a while. And you feel like it is causing a meaningful challenge to your ability to live the life that

you want to live. I would also strongly encourage anyone who feels compelled to reach out and talk to people, talk to friends, talk to family. If you feel like it would be helpful to you, find qualified mental health professionals to help you navigate this moment. And with that, we are going to dive into the three buckets, a deeper understanding, and a couple of things that you might start thinking about exploring and doing in order to fill each of the three buckets. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. So let's start out with your vitality bucket.

And as I mentioned, this is all about your mind and your body. Now, when we were first developing the model, you know, we actually contemplated the idea of making four buckets instead of a vitality bucket. I thought about saying, well, maybe there should be a physical health bucket and a mental health bucket, a body bucket, or a mindset bucket. And I pretty much dismissed that idea within a matter of seconds, because the reality is we are so crystal clear, the research is so crystal clear right now, that even though we often speak about them in the context of physical health and mental health, there is no separation. They are one seamless feedback loop that exists within the body. You cannot separate them. The things that would cause pain and suffering to your mental

health are also almost invariably going to affect your state of physical health. The things that would cause pain or suffering to your physical state of being health. The things that would cause pain or suffering to your physical state of being, your physical health will almost invariably also feedback and affect your state of mental health. And the interventions, the things you might do and try that would help either one of them help both of them. And the absence of doing any of these things

also serves as a detriment to both. So to talk about them independently just doesn't make sense anymore. The science isn't there. So we talk about them all in the context of one word, vitality, overall vitality, which folds in mindset, body, physical, and mental well-being. And the standard for this, by the way, is optimal for your unique circumstance. We sometimes see these calls to action that says, you know, you've got to aspire to ultimate peak physical condition and this and that. And here are the tests to be able to do this many pushups and this many sit-ups in this amount of time. And all these things, which are sort of like these model standards that assume that we all have the

same level of capacity, of ability, of mental and emotional and physical resources to draw upon the same level of constraint, the same level of limitation, the same level of possibility. We don't, especially as you get further into life, right? Life happens to all of us. We happen to life and life also happens to us. And we may find ourselves at any given moment in life with a widely varied range of abilities and resources that we have to access to contribute to both our physical and mental well-being. Holding ourselves to some universal standard that is supposed to be the standard for every person, given your gender or given your age or given whatever demographic you want,

is a little bit ludicrous to me. So what I would invite you to do is really just as you're thinking about these things, what can I do to experience optimal physical and mental health given my unique circumstance? There's no perfect standard. There's no universal thing that you aspire to. Think about your own life, what is and is not available to you, what may or may not be expandable, and then work towards whatever makes sense for you, right? What this does in a really powerful way is it removes shame from the pursuit of mental and

physical well-being because we are not aspiring to anyone's standard which may not be within the realm of possibility for us we are simply aspiring to what is available and accessible to us given who we are given our life circumstance at this moment in time so that is a and accessible to us, given who we are, given our life circumstance at this moment in time. So that is a starting point for us, right? Now, when I reflect back to the way that I have explored my own vitality bucket at different seasons of my life, I've done a great job of it. Different seasons, I've done a really terrible job of it. I think back to many, many years ago, this is 20 plus years ago, when I was a lawyer in a large firm in Manhattan, working something like 90 to 110 hours a week, barely sleeping, sometimes not going home for days, eating horribly in a wildly high stress environment, completely isolating

myself from people that I loved. I wasn't moving my body in whatever way was available to me, taking horrible care. All the things that I might do to take care of my physical and mental health, I had stopped doing and I piled on relentless hours and almost in unbearable stress and pressure to that situation. Not surprisingly, I ended up in the hospital in emergency surgery when an infection that had been brewing in my body effectively mushroomed into this massive thing inside me because my immune system largely cratered and couldn't fight it anymore. That was a wake-up call for me. My answer was eventually to actually leave the entire profession. In hindsight, interestingly,

I think had I known now what I know about work and meaning and purpose and contribution, which we'll talk about a little bit more later today and then an entire episode following this month, I may well have made a different decision. But for me, the decision was to remove the source of overwhelm and stress and burnout and be able to focus back on doing all the things that I had stopped doing to reclaim my physical and mental health. Zooming the lens forward, the last couple of years for a lot of people have replicated elements of that circumstance that I just described. In our lives, we've had huge amounts of fear, of stress, of isolation, constant low-grade uncertainty and fear, sometimes really high-grade uncertainty and fear. That elevated stress,

actually, it takes a toll on our state of mind, our state of calm, happiness, peace of mind. It makes it much harder to access. But what many of us don't realize is that the carryover effect of sustained elevated stress, the constant releasing of our stress hormones, cortisol within our body leads to potentially systemic inflammation, metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction, effects on health, energy, immunity, cravings, well-being, disease risk. And on some level, I literally do not know a person who has not experienced this over the last couple of years because it has become endemic with sort of like opening your eyes in the morning and dealing with everything from the

news cycle to the state of public health and wellbeing. You pile on all sorts of social isolation and it's been really, really hard, right? A lot of times, a lot of us have also been instructed to be in physical circumstances where if movement is available to you, we actually don't have much ability to do it anymore. It compounds everything. So the last couple of years have kind of been a vitality bucket challenge like we have never seen before. And we've all been plunged into it.

Nobody got out of this. So the question is, well, what can we do now? We are in this moment where it feels like we have maybe more agency than we've had in a couple of years, more sense of control than we've had in a couple of years, more ability to make decisions. We feel like we can actually go out. We feel like if movement is available to us, we can move more easily and readily. We can start to say yes to many of the things that would have helped us fill a vitality bucket. So what do we say yes to then? What are

the big levers, the things that would really fill your vitality bucket? Well, there are so many different things, but like I said, what I tend to really want to focus on is not the icing on the bucket filling cake, the maybe hundreds or even thousands of little things that make a tiny incremental difference. Show me what I call the levers, the actions or things to do that make a massive impact, an exponential impact on the way that you feel, on the ability to fill any given good life bucket. Here's the fascinating thing about the levers when it comes to the vitality bucket. There is nothing new here. These are things that we have known literally for generations and generations. In fact, at least one of them, we've known for thousands of years.

We're constantly looking for, show me the app, the technology, the digital thing. And by the way, I'm kind of a biohacker. I wear all sorts of wearable biometric type of devices to give me feedback and data about the state of my mind and body, which is pretty awesome, right? But simply doing this and gathering data doesn't change anything for me. What I have found is that even though I track everything from heart variability to all the different rhythms of sleep to my body temperature to at times glucose levels in my body on a five minute increment, I have run all of these experiments. And when it comes down to it, what I found is that the things that affect them all, which also simultaneously fill my vitality bucket the fastest and the most, are the real simple

things. So I'll share a couple of those with you. One of them is mind-stilling practices. And you probably have heard this shorthanded as meditation. Meditation is one type of mind-stilling practice. It can be incredibly effective. You probably have heard this shorthanded as meditation. Meditation is one type of mind-stilling practice. It can be incredibly effective. And in fact, mindfulness meditation has been a central part of my mind-stilling practices for over a dozen years now.

It's the thing that I do first thing in the morning when I wake up. And it has profoundly changed everything for me. But meditation doesn't have to be the only thing that you do as a mind-stilling practice. A mind-stilling practice can be simply focusing on your breath. It can be prayer. It can be listening to music. It can be repeating mantras. And a mantra, by the way, can be any simple sound or word or phrase. And yes, it can be a line from your favorite song. So these are things that allow us to reduce the mental chatter that comes into our minds, to train our attentional capacity, our focus, and to notice where our mind is at any given time and then let go of the spin part and

then refocus on the things that we know will ground us. So rather than me saying this is the single mind-stealing practice that everyone should do, like I said, mindfulness has become the center for me. Think about trying on different mind-stealing practices. What feels like it would be fun and available and accessible to you? And then try it out. Do it every day for just a couple minutes. And over time, see if you can turn that into a practice.

The second thing for me, and tremendous research around this now, is increasing exposure to nature and plants. Now, this sounds kind of silly. When I lived in New York City, I'm in Boulder, Colorado right now. We have been for over two years. We were part of the exodus from the city into natural environments. When I lived in New York City for 30 years, the thing that allowed me to be okay a lot of the time was the fact that I could vanish into Central Park walking, which I did almost on a daily basis, even in the winter, or go for a walk along the Hudson River. Something intuitively in me knew that regular access to nature was mission critical for me to be physically and mentally okay. We now have a lot of research that shows that

whether you are deeply immersing yourself in natural environments like forests, the experience of that literally changes not just your psychology, but it can downregulate the inflammatory state, the level of cytokines in your body. It changes your mood, your level of aggression, your level of anxiety. But here's the cool thing. It doesn't just have to be you immersing yourself in natural environments. You could be walking down the street with plants or trees around you. You can be inside. You can be in your office or your home office or wherever it may be and just have put a couple of plants in the room where they are in regular view of you. Research tells us that that alone, regular exposure to plants, even in an internal

environment, makes a difference in our state of mind. Even having a window readily available to you where you can see plants through the window makes a difference. So it's accessible to everybody. For me, I have this incredible blessing now of being able to walk out my door and be in some of the most stunning nature on the planet, right? Now that is available to me. It's accessible to me from a physical geography standpoint, and it's accessible in terms of just my own state of physical ability. But think about what is accessible and available to you, even if that means bringing bits of nature inside so that you can experience the benefit from it. Now, it would make a lot of sense for me to talk next about two really giant levers that are huge vitality bucket fillers, and that is movement and nutrition, right? And of course,

these things do make a huge difference. Movement is one of the biggest vitality bucket filling levers that you can pull on the planet. It affects literally every other system on your body, right? It affects our state of mind, our state of being, our state of wellness, our, it regulates mitochondrial function and metabolic function and all the other stuff that flows from that. It helps with inflammation and disease risk. It just makes us feel better. And at the same time, we have varying levels of ability to do it. You may be somebody who is fully able-bodied, strong, flexible, and you can push yourself really hard in all sorts of different ways. You may be somebody who is limited or constricted in that. And that is fine. So if movement on an intense exercise level

is available to you or on a mild mobilization, gentle, even assisted mobilization level is available to you, the invitation is to see what you can do. Say yes to whatever is available to you. And whatever you can do can help and will help. And also to know if your unique circumstance does not allow yourself to really say yes to this, there are all these other levers you can pull as well, right? Nobody is excluded because there's so many different ways to follow and fill your vitality bucket. I also mentioned nutrition. And nutrition is and can be stunningly important.

The way that you fuel your body can be incredibly important and can be a hugely effective vitality bucket filler. It is also a giant nest of thorny conflict and all sorts of different advice and wisdom and insight. So what I would tell you is that there are certain fairly universal principles. Plants, more plants tend to be much healthier. Higher levels of fiber tend to be healthier. Good fats and proteins tend to be healthier.

But every person is unique in their circumstance. So what I would say here is nutrition matters, but really spend the time to understand what is appropriate and constructive and health filling for you, your unique body, your unique moment in life, and what is available to you. Take the time to really do that. And don't just try and follow some seemingly universal thing that is right for all people. That does not exist. Do what's right for you. And by the way, we will be introducing you to a number of people right here on the podcast over the next two months that are going to explore, really help us explore the link between nutrition and our physiological and psychological state. So I'm so excited for that. Be sure you stay tuned

for those conversations. So it matters. But the thing I really want to focus on, I sort of like the final big lever here is sleep. And here's the thing about sleep and its relationship to movement and nutrition. Sleep is kind of like the universal regulator for all of these different things. Sleep mediates every other system in the body, your endocrine system, your nervous system. So sleep is going to affect dramatically how you're able to move or not move, your level of energy, your level of pain, your level of inflammation, your mood, whether you can actually sort of like get yourself up psychologically and emotionally to do it or not. It is profoundly going to affect your nutritional system.

It is going to affect, even if you go and do the work to really figure out like, well, this is the most health inducing way for me to eat. If you're wildly underslept, it is going to affect your endocrine system and the chemicals that course through your body and your brain in a way, which is going to very likely lead you to be so induced to act by craving and non-intelligence and thoughtfulness and intentionality that it will be nearly impossible to say yes to any nutritional approach that is truly health-inducing to you. We tend not to like to talk about sleep, even though it is so critically, it's sort of the

big lever that controls all the other levers, because we also tend to think we don't have a lot of control over our sleep. That it's that thing that we all know matters so much and affects us so much, but what are we going to do? Well, it turns out we actually do have a lot more control over our sleep than we think. And there's a whole range of things that we call sleep hygiene. Simple things that we can do throughout the day and also in the wind down time before we go to bed that can practice over time and turn into sort of like a habit or an ongoing practice make a really big difference. And I'll share sort of like what I call the big five here in research-backed tips

around sleep hygiene. One is to stop eating probably about three hours or so before bedtime because the process of metabolizing what's inside of you, especially depending on what you're eating or drinking, can pretty strongly affect your ability to both fall asleep and stay asleep and have high quality sleep. Second is no screen time, two hours before bedtime. And in a modern world, people are like, you're kidding me, right? No screen time? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Consider it. Do even just like a seven-day trial and see how different it makes you feel. The third is lower light for the hour before you go to bed. I've actually been experimenting lately with a certain frequency of just green light in the half hour or so before I go to bed because there's some interesting emerging research

that shows that it may help you fall and stay asleep and have deeper quality sleep. Also for me, I'm somebody who has had headaches on and off my whole life, which certainly affects vitality. There's some really interesting research now on especially evening pre-bed exposure to certain frequencies of green light that help you. But what I really try and do is stay away from intense light, bright light, and blue light in the hour or so before I go to bed, because that shows us that it can help us fall asleep and stay asleep and have better quality sleep. In the final half an hour or so, my mind might be a little bit distracted. So what I try and do is either read

or I will listen to something. Great thing to listen to, by the way, podcasts, but not podcasts that are super engaging. We've had some really funny feedback over the years from many of our awesome listeners in our community say, Hey, Jonathan, thanks so much for your podcast. I love what you do. The sound of your voice is so calming and grounding. I listen to you every night. It helps me fall asleep, which is always kind of funny. I'm like grateful. And then I'm kind of like, how should I take that exactly? So I am really good at putting people to sleep. Apparently if the sound of this podcast helps you do that, by all means, tee it up 30 minutes before you go to bed.

If it doesn't, then don't do that. Reading for me can be super effective at allowing my mind to just really come down into a relaxed focused state. And then the final thing, which may be the hardest for a lot of people, but practically it's actually the easiest, is to leave your phone away from your bed. And if you happen to use your phone or rely on it for an alarm to get you up in the easiest, is to leave your phone away from your bed. And if you happen to use your phone or rely on it for an alarm to get you up in the morning, there's this incredible old school hack. It's called an analog alarm clock with a little battery inside of it where you can literally

probably get it for a couple of bucks and put it next to your bed and just set it and leave your phone away. So many people wake up throughout the night and when they do, they keep checking their phone. They expose themselves to input, which triggers their brain to be activated, often agitated, and the blue light from their phone turns their brain back on and will disrupt the sleep for the rest of the night. So check out those five different things. They can be really, really effective in helping you get a better hold on your sleep so that you can then more easily regulate nutrition and movement and all the other things that you want to do that will contribute to you filling your vitality bucket. So we talked about some really simple things here. Mind-stilling practices, regular exposure to nature or plants, movement and nutrition in a way that is appropriate and accessible for you, and sleep. And honestly,

before you even think about movement and nutrition, if those are in your purview, I would actually start with sleep. Because as I said, sleep is the ultimate mediator for nutrition and movement. Without first figuring out how to at least get some level of better sleep on a regular basis, it will be exponentially harder for you to actually say yes to intelligent nutrition and movement because your brain is just not going to be in a place where it will support that type of constructive decision-making. So that would be sort of an order that I would think about. And again, let go of any shame along the way. These last few years have been so hard on all of us. Wherever you're starting with your vitality

bucket, that is okay. It's a snapshot. It's just today. There are so many things that you can do that will help fill it. So just start today. Do the little things bit by bit and give yourself grace along the way. And that brings us to the connection bucket. That is the second bucket, right? So we have vitality, connection, and contribution. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. The connection bucket. This is all about us and the in between right over really a period of years now and this is even pre-pandemic we were experiencing what has been described as a loneliness epidemic

something like 52 percent of amer reported being lonely, 47% reported relationships not being meaningful, and 58% felt like no one knows them well. Add the last few years to this, add a level of pervasive physical isolation, right? Digital helped a lot. What was kind of really cool was that technology improved at a rate that was so fast that it allowed us to substitute in video calls and regular catch-ups. That really helped a lot. That acceleration, which was driven by crisis and now sustains, is one of the huge benefits that's come out of the last few years. But it's not a replacement. It's not a replacement. What we know is that feeling connected to others on multiple levels is central in our ability to flourish as

human beings, to feel like we're living good lives. So kind of a legendary study, shorthanded often as the Grant Study, which actually combined two different studies and measured nearly every marker for well-being that you could over a nearly 80-year window, showed us that the single biggest variable in life well- lived was not what we thought. It was actually the depth and quality of relationships. And amazingly, amazingly, I'm gonna talk to you a bit more about the connection bucket right now and a couple of very specific things

that we wanna think about to fill them. Fantastically, be sure that you are following this podcast because in the next episode coming up after this, we're also going to bring you this beautiful conversation with a guy named Bob Waldinger, Robert Waldinger, who was, I believe, the longest running curator of that very study that I mentioned. This is one of the most famous studies in the history of human flourishing. And Bob was the person who basically for decades was overseeing so much of the research and gathering and analysis around it. And he's been deeply involved in what the future is and like the future studies. We had an incredible conversation

coming up with him. That's going to take you deeper into a lot of those ideas and that research. But what I want you to know is that the state of your relationships is what your connection bucket is about. And we need to feel that we have strong, deep relationships in order to live good lives. We are wired to know and to be known by others. And that tends to happen on four levels. One is friendship. You feel like you are genuinely known by your friends. And this doesn't have to be a mass number of friends. It can be one or two friends, but it's not just sort of like casual acquaintances. These are people that you have actually revealed yourself to. You've been vulnerable with. They know you. Not the projection of you, but the real you.

That is incredibly powerful. And you know them. You're not sitting there relating to, you know, like the social media facade that they have presented to the world. You have developed a deep knowing and relatedness to the real them. Friendship is one level. Belonging is a second level. This often comes from being a part of a community, a like-minded community. And a lot of the energy around belonging is this sense that you can show up as yourself. You don't have to do anything to quote fit in. You are just accepted as part of a community of people. You feel a sense of belonging. I belong here. I belong with these beings. The third level is loving or intimate relationships. Now, this is the level that is often held up as the ultimate, the movie rom-com thing. This is the thing where when you solve for

loving, intimate, romantic relationships, everything else in life just kind of follows along. And in fact, you can get everything that you would ever need from that one other being, which is largely fiction. The research proves this now. We actually have a really fun, deeper conversation with Waldinger in that upcoming episode about this mythology. But important to know, sure, yes, it is wonderful if you find that intimate person who is with you for a moment, a season, maybe even if you're incredibly fortunate, an entire lifetime, that can contribute to filling your connection bucket in a powerful way. But it also is not the end-all be-all and it doesn't have to be there in order for you to feel like you have fully topped off your connection bucket. And by the way, animals count here too. You can feel deeply, deeply, lovingly connected to an animal,

to a dog, to a cat, to a bird, whatever it may be. These things can really contribute. And then the fourth level of connectedness is spiritual connectedness. A sense that you are a part of, you participate in, you feel connected to something bigger than yourself. That may be a being, it may be a sense of a field of energy, that may be a sense of oneness, that there is a universality between all beings on the planet that I participate in. We define that spiritual connection, we tend to, depending on our traditions and our backgrounds and how we've been brought up, differently. But what we do know is that if we experience it, it matters.

Now again, friendship, belonging, loving, intimate connectedness, spiritual connectedness, these are four levers that are really powerful fillers of your connection bucket. Does that mean all four have to be there? No. But what we know is that the more you can pull these levers, the more you can add to them, the easier it is to fill that bucket, the connection bucket, and keep it topped off. So what are some of the things that we can actually do to improve, to nourish the friendship and the belonging and the loving intimate relationships in the spiritual sense? What can we actually do? So a couple of things here, as I started out,

we're going to give you options here, right? So one thing that I would point you to, not too long ago, actually, just a couple of months back, and we'll put a link in the show notes here. I aired an episode called Five Life-Changing Relationship Habits. That episode got downloaded a lot and probably for a good reason because a lot of people are feeling this sense of like, what do I do that'll make a really big difference in the depth and quality of my relationships?

So go definitely after you listen to today's episode, just go and click on the link in the show notes or just scan back just a couple of episodes here and you will see that episode, five life-changing relationship habits. It's a deep dive into these five habits around relationships that can be incredibly powerful and helpful and have the added effect of helping to fill your connection bucket. What I want you to know on top of this is that, again, no one of those four ways of being connected is determinative of your ability to feel deeply connected. Digital connection, by the way, as a source of friendship or belonging, loving intimate relationships, spiritual connectedness can be a great starting point. It can even get you pretty far down the road, but I would

definitely invite you to see if there are opportunities for you to move beyond digital and be physically present with people. If you can do it in a way that is accessible and available and safe for you. And again, in this day and age, that has become a much bigger factor for a lot of people. I would invite you to explore how to potentially do that. It can be stunningly powerful to bridge the gap between something that is digital and actual in person. Again, in a way that is accessible and safe to you, if possible. Look at the four categories, the general invitations. And what we're looking for here is depth and quality over volume.

You don't have to have a ton of people, a ton of communities in your life. Think about a small number and how can you actually get real, be open, vulnerable, and go deeper with them? What are some fun mechanisms to do this? So here's kind of like something that nobody does anymore. But I have a couple of friends who started doing this, and now I've started doing this because of how it affected me, writing an actual handwritten physical letter. I have a friend who every once

in a while, probably a couple of times a year, I'll get a handwritten letter from her. There's no agenda. It's not transactional. She's not looking for anything from me. She's just like, hey, I just wanted to write something to you to share something, share an update about me, tell me what's up in your role, tell you how much I appreciate you. Knowing that somebody has taken the time to do this, seeing the physical writing in an

actual letter that I get in the mail and get to open, it lands so differently than an email. It's incredibly powerful. And it will require you to remember how to actually write longhand. Who knew? We learned to do that all one day, many, many moons ago. So think about actually, who could you write a letter to? And run a little bit of experiment. Could you do this maybe once every week or twice a month for a couple of months? Start the practice of physical letter writing and just see what happens. A really short and easy, here's a much shorter, easier kind of fun

thing that you can do. I call it friend text roulette. What I will often do is I will take my digital device and instead of it being a source of distraction and disconnection and something that can inject stress and agitation into relationships, I will subvert it and use it for a source of relationship good. And it's a really fun, easy way to do it. Take your device, open up whatever your preferred messaging app is, take a finger or whatever it is or whatever is accessible to you and give it a flick. If it's a digital flick on a keyboard, whatever is available to you and give it a flick. If it's a digital flick on a keyboard, whatever

is available to you and let it spin like a roulette wheel through all the people and the messages and just see where it lands. What is the name that has landed on? And if it's someone that you're comfortable sending a message to, again, if it's sort of a moral enemy from times past and you really want nothing to do with that person, maybe that's not the person. But it's pretty rare that that happens for the most part. It'll land on a name that maybe you haven't talked to in a long time. Maybe you just talked to them a little while ago. Use it as an opportunity to say, hey, this is me. I was just like, literally you popped into my head, which you did. I was just thinking about you. Maybe share like a quick funny thing or something that

just happened. And you know, it's been a minute. Like, how are you? Just checking in, just saying hi. And do that on a regular basis. I literally do that a couple of times a week. I never know exactly where it's going to land. And there have been

moments where I've given it a really strong flick. It's gone back pretty far. And maybe it's landed on a name where the last conversation I had with him, maybe it wasn't the most comfortable and it's been a while, but maybe it's also, it had been enough time so that whatever the source of emotion was that kind of led to the friction and led us to not being in super close connection, I didn't even remember what it was anymore. I said, you know what? It's been a while. I literally would text them. It's been a while. I know for both of us, it didn't have the greatest last conversation, but I value you in my life. And if you're cool just being back in conversation, just love to you in my life. And if you're cool, just being back in conversation,

just love to know how you are. Little things like that can make a really big difference. Create a bit of a rotation if you want, you know, just do this on like a Sunday morning and a Wednesday night and a Friday at lunchtime or something like that. Little, little thing that can make a really big difference. And I want to share one other thing with you that has been an incredibly powerful mechanism for connection bucket filling. It's something that we've modified and used in, I've done it in my personal life. We've used it in our programming to create safe containers and circumstances and experiences where we bring together large numbers of complete strangers, sometimes in a foreign country and like a

retreat environment. We've done this in variations where we bring together over 400 grownups from all over the world in an adult summer camp who didn't know each other before. And we want to create safety and intimacy and friendship and belonging really quickly. And we've relied on a modification of something called the 36 questions. Arthur Aaron, who'd been researching human connectedness and friendship and relatedness and intimacy for years, developed these questions, which are three sets of nine questions that move from sort of superficial questions that aren't all that personal, don't require a lot of vulnerability. And with each question, you get a little bit more personal,

a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more open, there's a little bit more risk. And he would invite students into a lab and for 45 minutes or so, have them sit across from each other and ask and answer the questions to each other. And by the end, very often,

those complete strangers, like students on a campus who had never known each other before, reported feeling closer to the other person than they had to friends they had known for years. And the secret to these questions was mutual progressive revelation. Both people were asking and answering the same questions, the same prompts. They were willing to slowly get a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more honest, a little bit more open. And the questions were structured in a way that allowed that to happen in a way that felt comfortable. We've done this.

We've modified these questions. We've taken subsets of them and experimented in all sorts of different ways. And they're really powerful. Now, whether you use those 36 questions or not, simply tapping into the idea of creating moments or experiences where you can be with another person in person, virtually, whatever is available to you. And then just sort of like as a fun way to say, hey, let's answer these three questions together or these six questions.

Or maybe you're going to actually go look at all the questions. And by the way, those 36 questions can be found very easily pretty much anywhere online. We'll include a link in our notes doc to this particular episode so you can find them very easily. And just say, hey, listen, wouldn't it be super fun? Let's set aside 15 minutes and we'll each answer these things. It can be incredibly connecting. Whatever it is, create moments and times and experiences where you get to sit down with

somebody, either somebody that you like kind of know mildly, but would love to have fun and know a little bit better or somebody you think you actually know pretty well. And then you want to go deeper with them and agree to sort of like have this really fun experience where you answer a set of prompts and those prompts are sort of like each one requires you to be a little bit more real, a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more open. It can be stunningly powerful. We've had so much fun doing this and it has helped us build safety and trust and intimacy

and connectedness in groups of strangers in ways that we never imagined possible. So play with these ideas. And again, we'll include links in the notes to this particular episode so you can see what those original 36 questions were and explore a little bit yourself how they might work in your life. Which brings me to the final bucket, contribution bucket. Now, I mentioned earlier the contribution bucket. A lot of people look at this bucket and they say, well, this is all about work. This is my quote, J-O-B, the job that I do. And that is if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a solopreneur, if you're in private practice, whether you work in an organization, a company, this is also whether your primary role of devotion is non-paid in a conventional way. If you're a parent or a caregiver, and that is taking up most of your time, and it's a huge

amount of energy and effort, right? This is your work. So when I use the word work, I'm talking about basically anything that invites you to invest effort in a sustained way over time. That could be a blend of primary roles and devotions. It could be a main, like your nine to five, although I don't know if nine to fives even exist anymore. It could be a blend of that and something you do on a weekend. It could be volunteerism, all these things, they all add up. And the idea here is that the blend of these things for most people consumes the vast majority of your waking hours for the entirety of your adult life. Let me say that again. Your work, the blend of whatever effort that you bring to it, will consume for most grownups the vast majority of your waking hours for the entirety of your adult life.

So knowing this, wouldn't it make sense that to the extent that it is available to us, that we believe it's possible, we would try to use that time, that effort, that investment in a way that actually fills us up, is deeply nourishing to us. Nanchers, of course we would. Now, does that mean that you can take every job and 100% reimagine it so it becomes a profound source of purpose and joy and meaning and access to flow and energy and excitement? Well, the answer is probably not. But you can get, most people can get so much closer to that than they ever imagined possible

once they actually understand what is possible. And this is even given whatever your unique circumstances, whatever your level of constraints and abilities and resources and access are, right? We can do things, whether it's the mainstream job, the thing you get paid for, the things that we do on this side, the things that we say yes to for no other reason than the way it makes us feel that compliment that thing, we can find a blend that allows us to feel so much more enlivened, activated, energized by the work that we do. And in doing so, fill our contribution buckets. Now, for years, I've been exploring a lot of the different levers that we might be able to pull in order to fill this bucket. Like what are the big things that go into filling the contribution bucket? And I focused on purpose in life, something that gives you a sense of purpose.

And I focused on meaningfulness, like this thing matters to me, it really deeply meanings. And I focused on all this incredible research on flow states, that incredible state where you lose yourself, where time seems to fugue, you become hyper absorbed. You can never differentiate between yourself and the thing that you're doing. You just lose yourself in time in the best of ways. Things that literally you could spend 16 hours a day doing, but somehow for some reason, it gives you energy and excitement. Things that make you feel like you're not stifling yourself, that you're performing at your fullest level, that all

of your potential, your humanity, your identity is being brought to the task. And I've been doing a lot of research. What are all the different things, the ways that we could feel these different things? And then as many of you now know, that began to coalesce into a much bigger research project that led to a years long exploration to see if actually there were a set of universal impulses for effort that drove all of us that when we said yes to those impulses, it gave us all of those feelings, all of which are primary fillers of our contribution buckets. And in fact, that research led to the development of or identification of these 10 impulses for effort that do in fact give us all of these feelings. And wrapped around

those, I also started identifying a set of behaviors, tendencies, and preferences that formed archetypes. People who have these impulses also very often have really similar identifiable set of behaviors, and they tend to make decisions and act in different ways and have certain orientations. Not always, but very often. to identify the elements of your unique sparkotype profile. And there are three different elements in there. Since releasing that in 2018, nearly 800,000 people have now completed that assessment, generating somewhere around 40 million data points with some follow-on research. We've got more planned in 2023. And the level of depth and insight that we have built around each one of these sparkotypes

and how they move into the world, how they're sparked, how they're stifled, how they get snuffed, how they get really activated or deactivated has been incredibly rich. The learning has been kind of astonishing. And some of that has been distilled into a book that I released called Sparked in 2021. What I want to do is actually take you deeper into that model, deeper into those 10 types and deeper into some of the big and most current and recent insights that we have seen in the world of the sparketites, because this will help you as you step into 2023, as you step into this new year. And so many of us are stepping into it saying, I really want to focus back on my work and

on the way that work makes me feel, what I give to it, what I want from it. And where's the sweet spot between doing that? Saying yes to work that is sustainable allows me to feel like I can support myself in the world. I feel secure, safe. And at the same time, truly makes me come alive. And after the last few years, we have all been grappling with that thing called work

and work has been upended in so many different ways. We're in a moment where re-imagining is sort of like the thing that we can't not do. So what I'm going to do is save that conversation for our next Kickstart Your Life 2023 episode, which will be focused entirely on the sweet spot between work and meaning and purpose and joy and energy and excitement and recognized potential and the way that we bring all of that to the world

in a way that also just happens to dramatically fill our contribution buckets at the same time. So again, be sure that you tune in next week for that episode, because that is not only going to wrap up the fuller conversation around the good life buckets, we're going to go deep into the world of contribution and work and joy and meaning and all of these things that are so top of mind for all of us. And we're going to show how some of these ideas and tools and models, especially around the sparkotypes and some other things can make a huge

difference in the way that you think about the work that you do in the world now and the work that you might explore doing as we move further into this year, this season, and your entire life. So I hope you have found this conversation valuable, helpful, the whole notion of the good life buckets. And I would really just invite you to think about where you are with your good life buckets, how full or empty all of them are or they feel. If you feel inclined, as I mentioned, we do have a link in the show notes and we'll include it in the PDF that accompanies this conversation that will let you check out our newly refreshed and revised 2023 version of the Good Life Bucket Quiz to help you get a better beat on where you are with each one of your three buckets. And then take some time, go through some

of the ideas that we've talked about here. Start to think about what bucket needs the most love right now, and what are the little things that I can do that will start filling that bucket and maybe another bucket? Start tiny. Rather than saying yes to big, giant things that feel complex and very likely won't last very long because it's hard to sustain them, start with the really simple things, the tiny things, the little actions that you can do maybe a little bit further into this year and see how your buckets are doing. See what you've tried, what's worked and what hasn't, what new things might you be able to share with our community here that can really help. We can start some sort of collection of all the different things that folks have tried and explored and how they've worked out in the quest to fill your good life buckets and live your best life. As always, it's my pleasure being with you. If you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your

favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we

all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.