EntreLeadership - #177: Tim Ferriss—Making the Most of Our Lives

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

If the word innovation had a poster boy, it would be this week’s guest, Tim Ferriss. This entrepreneur, self-improvement guru, podcast host and best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek joins us to share his story. Tim discusses how to handle rejection, how to overcome fears, and why, at the end of the day, it’s never just about us. This is a fascinating conversation you don’t want to miss. entreleadership.com/podcast Summit Event EntreLeadership's Recognition Free Tool Infusionsoft's Target Market Worksheet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. We are broadcasting from the Music City, and this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you for joining the conversation. A little bit longer podcast. This episode, there's your warning, but I think it's worth it. If you're not familiar with who Tim Ferriss is, well, you're going to enjoy this.

For those of you who know Tim Ferriss is, he is our feature conversation. His new book is Tools of Titans, the Tactics, Routines, and Habits, Billionaires, icons, and world-class performers. And, you know, Tim really has helped popularize this format that we know as podcasting. Has had unbelievable success and gets a lot of very, very difficult to get guests. And he's done a wonderful job of really, as I say, he's almost like the Tiger Woods for the PGA Tour and bringing so much popularity of this format. We're grateful for that. In the middle of this book tour,

coming to us from a hotel room in New York City, so you're going to enjoy that. I'll tell you a little bit more about Tim and the book in just moments, but I want to make sure that you stay tuned after the interview because we still have some great tools for you. If you've not downloaded them this month, you still have an opportunity to do that. One is 43 ways to recognize your team

from our Entree leadership team, and then from our good friends at InfusionSoft, how to identify your target market. We also have a $300 discount special for you podcast listeners to our Entree Leadership Summit. So I'll tell you about all that after the conversation. So, Tim Ferriss, you know, again, I hate to read bios. So I don't. I never do that to people.

I just don't like it. I can't stand listening to podcasts where the host reads a person's bio. It's just painful. So I don't do that. You can just look up, Tim Ferriss. Just Google him. He's everywhere. His blog is wildly popular.

Podcasts had over 100 million downloads. You may have heard of the four-hour work week, which led to the four-hour body. I think then it was, what, the four-hour chef. So, you know, the guy came on the scene and had some real success and recently discovered podcasting. It was not that long ago that he got into it. And podcasting was already on its way to what I would say in the minds of most people. They'd heard the term. They understood what it meant. But he really has done much for the format, and I'm grateful for that. And I will tell you that, of all the guests I've interviewed since I've been here,

I certainly have the most in common with him as it relates to the role I play in this space, the Entre Leadership podcast. I love to ask questions. I love it as much as anything I do professionally. I love it as much as anything I do personally. I love a great conversation.

It doesn't have to be a famous person, a powerful person. I just love asking questions, and so I get it. And I've always appreciated somebody who shares that. He does. for the sole purpose of learning myself and then sharing that with others. So it's really fascinating to talk to somebody who does this. And I will tell you, the long form is something I love.

If Eric came to me tomorrow and said, hey, we're going to start doing two-hour interviews on the Entry Leadership podcast. I'd say, rock on, let's do it. Now, I'm not sending you a message, Eric. He's behind the glass smiling at me. I'm not sending some sort of passive aggressive stuff. I'm just saying, I love what he's done. And I don't know if you recorded this part of the conversation,

but before we kind of got into our conversations with Tim, I thanked him for popularizing the long-form interview because it was kind of like, uh, keep it shorter. So there's your warning. I already told you at the top of the podcast. It's about an hour and a half. Is that right, Eric, somewhere in that range. Maybe 60, 70 minutes, but I think it's well worth it. I think it's good stuff. We get vulnerable. We get into his story, what makes the guy tick. Why does he do what he do? He's very successful, so it's somebody we can learn from. So without any further ado, the podcast legend himself, Tim Ferriss joins us here. Here it is. Well, Tim, great to have you on. I know you're in New York, and the book launch is active,

and you've got a million things going on, and we're really thrilled to have you with us. So paint a picture for our listeners. What's happening in the next 48 hours? What all is going on this week is the book hits streets everywhere? The next 48 hours are going to be exciting. I think they will be caffeine-infused. I do not believe that the four-hour workweek title will apply, although a lot of the principles in 80-20 now and so on will, but I usually batch my activities in this way. So the next two weeks are just back-to-back everything you can possibly imagine. So I'll be speaking to students, I'll be doing book signings, I'll be doing AMAs, ask me anythings on different platforms.

I will be doing everything and anything that I can to get Tools of Titans into the minds of as many folks as possible, because it's been a real labor of love, which I can't say about all of my books. This is the first book that I enjoyed writing, and it is, I think, the book of my own that I will refer back to the most over the next year, five years, 10 years, because of the cliff notes, nature of it. And it's exciting. I'm very, very thrilled to finally be debuting this gigantic tomb. Yeah, well, you should be. I mean, honestly, this is a book that 200, 300, 400, 500, years from now, the information in here is relevant. And I think that's what you've put together, which is so beautiful. It's just evergreen, beyond evergreen. It really is, and you should be very

proud. And when you say labor of love, I think it's a great phrase. Anybody's ever written a book knows that it is a arduous process at times and has all these different cocktail of emotions wrapped around putting it together and then of course releasing it. Just give us a quick snapshot. How long, if there is a clear cut start and finish on this book, how long did it take? If you look at really the earliest seeds of the podcast and the refining of the approach and so on, as well as the recruitment of all the people who are involved, in the book and featured in the book, you're looking at about three years, I would say, two and a half to three years total. And that is fairly standard for my book process. It's a

three-year process for the type of really detailed, tactic, experiment-rich nonfiction that I try to write. It really takes about that period of time. All right, so we're going to cover the book, folks. I promise we're going to dive into, and again, there's no way to even possibly cover this book in a conversation or a podcast so we won't try. We're going to get to that, but Tim, obviously, seen the meteoric rise of your podcast, and we're all cheering you on. You've done great things for the format. I don't think that this is an exaggeration to say that in some ways you've got a bit of a Tiger Woods effect. What he had on the PGA tour, I think you've done for podcasts. And I think there's a handful of people that have done that, but you're certainly in that. And so we appreciate that. So I like to just talk to people, I think probably as much as you do about what makes them tick and why. So I want to go way back, if you'll allow me. And I know that you were raised in a small town. I was. But I'd like for you to combine that small town environment that you were raised in, your home environment, the school environment. I'd like you to paint a picture. What was growing up like for Tim Ferriss, maybe through those prisms?

It was, I think, in some ways, a very typical childhood and other ways of very unusual childhood, So typical in the sense that may be typical from the lens of someone lucky enough to be born in this country, in any first world country for that matter. But my parents were very supportive. My mom was very good. And keep in mind, this is Long Island, but specifically in the Hamptons or near the Hamptons. So I was a townie out on Long Island. So you have this juxtaposition and contrast.

kids with rat tails who are running around with like T.J. Max clothes, townies. And then you have the city folks, city people, as we called them, who would come in. And that included everyone from the no-name Nouveau-Rish to later, I realize, actually some pretty cool folks who go out there just to escape the noise of New York City all the way up to the Jerry Seinfelds and Spielbergs and so on. And that was on one hand, very simple. And my parents were, I would say, middle class, lower middle class, never made more than about 50 grand per year combined. Never felt like we were missing anything, my brother and I. Lived in the woods, basically. I mean, not literally outside in the woods, but we were surrounded by trees.

And school was made interesting in a few ways by my parents. So my mom, for instance, never had the budget to buy us a lot of new bikes or BB guns or whatever it would be. However, my parents both made it really clear. There's always a budget for books. And if we wanted to get a book, we would go to the bookstore and we'd look at the remainder table because those were where the cheapest books were. And you could find some great stuff. So we found this book. I remember very clearly, fishes of the sea, or I found it.

Maybe fishes of the world. And I was fascinated by sharks. And so I got this whatever was 400, 500 page hardcover book, which was a reference book of fish and sharks, piranha and so on.

There's another book I remember getting when I was a little kid called Dangerous to Man. I was fascinated by animals that could kill humans for whatever reason. You could psychoanalyze that. But the sport of reading

was made something attractive because in one sense was the only thing that we had budget for as kids. Number two, we were told very early on, if you do well in school, you can do anything you want for the rest of your life. And that was the basic belief, or one of the basic beliefs that I had grown up. And I was a real runt.

I was extremely small. I was born premature. I was in the ICU for a long period of time. I still have scars from where I had respirators attached. And my whole blood volume transfused four or five times. So I was really small. I had terrible allergies, had asthmatic symptoms.

I really just got the living crap beat out of me up until about sixth grade. And I would isolate myself. And I had friends, but they were all the nerds also who played Dungeons and Dragons. But my mom was very good, my dad as well,

but my mom was particularly good at exposing me to many different environments and many different things that cost us. nothing, which turns out, it forces you to be creative, but you also get, I think, some of the best experiences that way. So she would take me to the beach and we would collect black sand using magnets. We would take our leftover chicken bones. We had a lot of chicken legs, a lot of chicken legs. And we would just tie string around the bones that were left over and go hang them

off a dock and catch crabs. I mean, we weren't catching crabs, but we would pull them up and they'd be covered with crabs. And my mom is very good at exposing both my brother and I to tons of different stuff. And if we then gravitated to something, if we became obsessed with something, both of our parents would try to support that to the greatest extent possible. And that parenting style differed even within my own extended family, because we had aunts and uncles who would say, force their kids to take piano lessons and then force their kids to learn to count to 10 in French.

and they would demonstrate that at dinner parties and things like that, which I think is common. You have folks kind of living vicariously through their kids, and they want their kids to perform and impress other folks and whatnot. I never felt any of that. So now on the flip side, and I'll try to keep this short, and I don't want to get to other stuff, but I shouldn't say on the flip side, when I got to about 14, I started working in restaurants, maybe 13. I started really young.

I think it's probably illegal. But I was cleaning an ice cream shop, then I was busing, tables. And if anyone's seen the affair, which is TV show, a lot of it is based in this restaurant called the lobster roll, although there's a huge sign outside that says lunch. So people from Manhattan sometimes erroneously call it lunch, but nobody calls it that locally. They call it the lobster roll. Then I bust tables at the Maidstone Arms where I got to, for instance, every, I want to say Sunday, I got to bring coffee to Billy Joel. And he was, he is and was a self-made guy. I just remember him always being really cool. And I was super nervous around him,

but he would talk to me, he would answer questions. I asked him, he first met Christy Brinkley, and he talked to him for 10 minutes about it. And he would buy a cup of coffee and he tip 20 bucks. And that just blew my mind because $20 at the time was just four knocks. And, And he contrasted, though, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you had really, really entitled rich people who, in most cases, didn't have to work for it. And I should point out, though, this is not old money. Like really, really old money, if you're talking Rockefeller, et cetera, they're over the fact that they're rich.

They're just beyond that being interesting. So they're totally fine. Like, old money is actually totally, totally fine, but they're really low-key. They don't really even go out to a lot of these restaurants. Then you have the self-made folks like the Billy Joel's. They're generally totally fine. There are some idiots, but they're generally totally fine. They know what it's like, and they're not idiots as a result, generally.

But right in the middle, you have a lot of people who went to the Hamptons to see and be seen. Maybe they could afford it. Maybe they couldn't. And it was all about the image. It was all about the pomp. It was all about the fashion, the exterior. And they were just the worst. the worst people imaginable.

And I still kind of feel like they're the worst people imaginable. But they just mistreated staff so badly. It was atrocious. So I didn't do this, but my friends, because they were in the same situation, they got so aggravated by this that they would collect hood ornaments from city people's cars,

like the Mercedes emblems, the BMW, like whatever they can get a hold of, they would just rip it off cars. And I'm not condoning that, but just pointing out. It's just a lot. It's history. Yeah, there was a lot of tension between the locals and the city folks. And I'm between worlds in an odd way. But I have more empathy and sympathy for the, I would just say, cooler, more laid-backless, idiotic cohort of folks who come from the city out to the east end to escape and to relax. It's been an evolution for me. But that's kind of a snapshot of my experience growing up. Well, I think it shows us, you know, the fabric of how you were raised. And there was so much. that you shared with us, I think is huge. Particularly for parents, I've got three kids in elementary school.

And I asked that question on purpose because we see you now as this guy who's built this, you went from the four-hour books to now this podcast and this book, which I think when it's all said and done, will be as much a signature for you than as the other books. But a guy who sits down and has conversations and you're fascinated by, you know, how the successful tick and why and all these different topics. And I think you revealed it very quickly in sharing what your mom. and dad, they're very strategic to make sure that they kept that natural curiosity that every

human being is born with. Anybody who's got a toddler knows. We don't have to tell a toddler how to ask questions. They just, they want to get to the bottom of everything. And it's exhausting when you're a parent. Yeah, yeah. It's exhausting. But at some point, life beats that out of a lot of people. And it seems to me your parents were intentional to keep that curiosity alive, this habit of inquiry. Would you say that that context, those habits they formed in you have certainly served you so well now and what you're doing and you're helping others really understand the importance of curiosity? I think that it's absolutely the case, and I was positively rewarded for being curious.

It was encouraged. It wasn't discouraged. And even if my parents were stumped, I remember asked my dad once, I said, when the snow melts, where does the white go? And he was like, uh, that's heavy. That's a good question. And trust me, not all of my questions were like that. I used to watch the Loufriigno Hulk TV series and it would tear around the house, ripping out seat cushions and just making a mess. So there was that too. But it was definitely fostered. And I think that it does, unfortunately, that natural curiosity and also the, when the natural curiosity is beaten out of you for whatever reason, and there are many ways that happens. One of the casualties of that, unfortunately, is that you, the tools of curiosity and the tools of learning.

go into disuse. And what does that mean? That means that your ability to ask good questions, follow-up questions, might just take a back seat to everything else. And those are the pickaxes.

What I mean by that, in life, you can have anything that you want in life if you're good at digging in other people's heads. That is where the gold is. That's right.

Someone out there, many people out there probably know exactly how to do, exactly with whom to do, where to do whatever you want in your life. And you just have to go picking with the right pickaxes in those people's heads, which is a lot easier than you might think. But those pickaxes are questions.

And that is why partially podcasting has been so fun for me, because it has given me a forum within which I can experiment. I can test different questions. Some of them totally bomb. Some of them work well right off the bat. others evolve over time. And in a pretty short order, you get better and better and better at surgically exploring different topics, different types of people. And then you see more possibilities. So for me personally, the original reason for experimenting with the podcast format was to get better

at asking questions and to get better at listening and to get better at not having quite as many verbal tics, as I know I do, and many people do. Because if you get better at asking questions, you also get better at thinking yourself. Because what is thinking at the end of the day? When you wake up, most of us have, and I still have this, of course, you have an internal dialogue where you're asking questions and answering questions, imagining scenarios throughout the day. It's really a form of thinking. So when you improve your questions, you also improve what you can ask of yourself, how you frame, how you perceive different problems or scenarios or opportunities. It's the closest to a magic trick that a real-world, like Harry Potter magic trick that isn't

even a trick that I've found is just focusing on getting better at asking questions. And you can do that by studying podcasts, which I've done. You can do it by studying inside the actor's studio or Larry King or Terry Gross, all of which I've done. You could hire someone who works at those shows. to tear the hell out of your transcript of your show, where they say, hey, you made a mistake here. You could have done this differently.

You were treading water for 10 minutes on this topic that went nowhere, cut this out, do this first, do this last. I was like, wow, okay, there is actually a method to this. So to bring it full circle, one of the intentions of tools of Titans was to very, in a very fun way, dropping sort of a gingerbread trail behind me, to lead people through the habits and routines and lessons

and philosophies of these various titans in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way, going from the healthy section to the wealthy section to the Y section, where they will absorb good questions. They will absorb how these titans ask themselves questions to get 10x results, 100x, 1,000-X results. And by the time they go through the book, even if they only read 100 pages or 150, which is my expectation for most folks, even though there's 704 pages, I think,

they will have a toolkit. They will literally have a toolkit of questions that they can deploy in almost any situation. So if they find themselves on an elevator standing next to Elon Musk, they can make the most of that five minutes without getting themselves immediately dismissed. Or they are sitting on an airplane

and, oh my God, I'm sitting next to Hero Y, X, or whoever it might be, they can actually capitalize that on that. Or who knows? They're cold calling or they're cold emailing And they happened to get a response from somebody they thought was unreachable. Okay. How are you going to make the best out of that?

That's right. And you learn how to navigate that landscape. So I have found, I'm curious, I want to ask you this, because I have found what has made me a better question asker is becoming a better listener. Like that first question may be a little bit rough and maybe not smooth, you know, over time, been doing this now 15 years. But if I listen better, it's going to formulate a better question. Do you find that to be true? I think if we're better listeners, we become naturally better question askers. Oh, 100%.

And that's, I think, easily explained because when you are not actively listening, and listening, if you want to be an expert listener, it is an active process. You're really engaging with what the other person is saying, and you are even perhaps asking hypothetical questions or real questions. Why did they do that? What did they learn from that? I wonder what that felt like. What did that feel like?

you're digesting what they say as they say it. And then one of two things can happen, among others, I'm sure. You can either, once they have apparently finished, you can feel that there's more to the story, and you can just sit there in silence. That's right. Cal Fussman, who's arguably the best interviewer I've ever met, who wrote the what I learned column for Esquire for 20-some-odd years or most of them. So he's interviewed everyone. I mean, Mikhail Gorbachev. De Niro, Muhammad Ali, everybody. He's interviewed everybody.

And he gave me a tip, which is also in the book. He's given me so many. But the one that comes to mind is let the silence do the work. And that was feedback he gave to me after reading a few transcript. He said, let the silence do the work.

If they're really, really stumped, they'll ask for an out. But otherwise, let the silence run another few seconds. It's not going to kill anybody. And very often people will volunteer deep next layer insights or stories that they've never talked about anywhere else just by letting the silence do the work. Now, the second piece to that is that you will then, when you're

actively listening, have good follow-up questions that help you, just like the silence, to go two, three, four levels deeper. And most interviewers do not do that. They just don't. And there are stylistic differences. You can be a good interviewer, a million in different ways. James Lipton, for instance, inside the actor's studio, he knows every question he's going to ask, and he knows the answer to every question he's going to ask. He knows the sequence, and he does not deviate from the architecture that they have created for that show, which is successful. It works. On the other hand, you have someone like Larry King, who very frequently will go into an interview with next to no background research on the guest, because he wants

to interview asking questions that an audience member, a viewer might ask, knowing nothing about the guests themselves. I end up somewhere in between, typically. And the follow-up questions, though, are very often where the magic is. You can start with the most mundane of questions. And from there, if you ask good follow-up questions, you could have an hour-long podcast that is amazing. You could start with, you know, you could ask an Arnold Schwarzenegger question, who is your daddy and what does he do?

You know, whatever. It doesn't. That's right. It just doesn't matter. And by the way, I mean, this is going to maybe sound tacky, but this applies to a lot of things. For instance, I know a lot of young guys who are constantly thinking about what opening line they should use with girls. And they come up with the most hair-brained, what they think are clever, ridiculous approaches. I mean, it's just absurd how far this goes.

And they've got all these one-liners and so on and so forth. And I'm not saying this is a particular skill of mine, but you could walk up and say, the paint in this place is crazy, huh? Like the paint job in this dentist's office is crazy. You could say whatever it is. And as soon as you engage and they start to talk about anything, if you make it that far, if you know how to ask good follow-up questions, you can have a productive, interesting, fruitful conversation. And that applies everywhere, everywhere.

That's right. Let me ask you this. Do you find yourself intentionally or has it become an instinct when you're sitting with somebody live? So unfortunately today, you're in New York. I'm here in Nashville. But when I'm with somebody in person, I'm trying to read their body language as well. So I'm trying to listen to their body, if that sounds weird. But do you understand what I'm saying that?

Do you do that? Do you find yourself listening to their face? what I will do very often is before I record an audio-only interview, I will do a few minutes, and I don't always do this, but I will do a few minutes of video over Skype or FaceTime or whatnot to assess, you get a feel for where they are that day. Maybe they're hungry, maybe they're thirsty. That's a tip from Bill Clinton, whenever he would... go into a meeting or a negotiation where people seemed to be on edge, he wouldn't assume they

had some negative agenda or that they didn't like him or fill in the blank assumption. He would just offer them something to drink and something to eat. And sometimes the explanation is that simple. They're hungry. They need water. But the point I was going to make is I want to try to get a basic read of where they are emotionally and psychologically. It doesn't always work. And I want to put them at ease as well so they can see me. And whether I do that or not, I will generally take five to ten minutes to do whatever I can to make them feel as comfortable as possible. One of the offers of which, and I say this for every guest, is you have final cut. Be as raw, have as much fun as you can. We can always cut stuff out, but we can't put interesting stuff in later.

Therefore, just be yourself, have fun, we'll go all over the place, you have final cut. If you you want to cut anything out, just let us know and we'll cut it out. This is a friendly, we're not looking for any gotchas. That's not what the show is about. And by the way, that is borrowed from inside the actor's studio. They do the same thing. So I think that there are many ways to put yourself at ease, but in some senses, more importantly, put your guest at ease. That's right. And by guest, and by guest, that means anyone you're talking to. That's exactly right. That's exactly. Or interacting with it. All right, there's so much from the childhood stuff. I'm going to dive back into that.

And I feel since I got Tim Ferriss. Erickson's, I got Tim Ferriss on the line, and he's known for a recommendation from other people. You said something that many people may have missed. I did not because I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, coastal area. And crabbing is legendary fun, if you've never done it before. I don't want to miss that. I just want you to say, would you recommend Tim Ferriss? People may fish, or they think, oh, fishing might be great. I think crabbing is much more exciting. If you get there at the right time, you've got the right bait, it's a whole much more intense situation, I think. Would you agree or disagree? I'm going to plead ignorance on this because we never actually caught.

Oh, you didn't. We never actually caught the crabs. We literally just took. Okay. Now, I have seen crabbing in Maryland, but where I grew up, there's mostly you'd have clamming and fishing. Okay. But I would love to go crabbing sometime.

However, the way that we did it was purely catch and release. we would stand on a dock, and I was a tiny little kid, and we would wrap twine around chicken leg from the previous night's dinner, drop it into the water, dragging around, and then pull it up to look at the crabs, and then just throw them back in the water. Okay, so you did half of it. You did half of it. So the rest of it is you have a partner with you, or sometimes you can do it with a net. And so when one of you's pulling up the crab, you got to dive a net into the water and get it. But anyway, I stumped you. I didn't mean to stump you. I thought we might have something fun that no one's ever asked you. Tim Ferriss's view on crabbing, but we missed, but that's okay. That's okay. Yeah, it's great. I want to talk about something that I've heard in a few interviews you've done, and you mentioned it earlier.

You said you felt a bit isolated or you were isolated. Your words were, crap was beat out of you, so I mean, bullying is like a big issue in 2016. And I don't want to spend an enormous amount of time here, but it shaped you. It had to shape you. And I can't do an interview, Tim, without some type of. question for parents because I'm a parent and I'm just curious for those that are listening maybe their kids are going through some of this and they know it as somebody who you came out of that we'll talk more later about some of the real stuff that you share some of the dark stuff in

the book where you're at and where you have been but as a kid and coming out of that what would you say to parents who may know that they've got a kid that is isolated is getting picked on bullied, beaten up. I'm just curious what you'd share. Well, I don't know if I'm qualified to give an opinion, but I will. With the preface that I do not have kids my own, but I have studied a lot of behavioral psychology and have looked at training and teaching and learning to a degree that I would not want to inflict on any other human. So based on all of that and based on my personal experience, I would say that if I were a parent and I were in that situation, I would absolutely 100% put my kid into sports of some type.

And this is perhaps the one exception where I would make something mandatory. And this is a benefit of some schools where playing sports is a mandatory requirement. I think competitive athletics in, it doesn't have to be a group sport or team sport, I was put into wrestling. My mom put me into wrestling when I was about 10 because A, I was hyperactive, B, I was tiny. And wrestling, keep in mind, is a weight class-based sport. So the puny kids could battle the other puny kids and feel like King of the Hill,

even though they only weighed 60 pounds or whatever it was. And that was a huge confidence builder. It also got me out of my head and into my body, which is very undervalued by modern society, at least in the United States. People talk about mind over matter, mind over body. I think body over mind, or at least how much of an impact biochemically

and otherwise the body has on mental and emotional states is really underappreciated. Including for learning, by the way, there are a number of studies that have looked at exercise and its impact on grades and learning, and they are positively correlated. So that would be my first immediate go-to. second, however, if we're talking about the bullying and so on,

this is where I think it is very largely a matter of degree. I mean, there is, if I think there could be a cataclysmic, terrible event of some type, if my kid is exhibiting symptoms of suicide or anything like that, then I think I would step in for sure. And keep in mind, almost all of what I'm talking about is predicated on you and your kid actually talk. talking. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So Seth Godin, I think, has fantastic parenting advice, which I go into in

Tools of Titans, and Josh Waitskin also study these people. They have fantastic relationships with their kids. And yes, teenagers are a pain in the ass, but if you build the foundation earlier where, let's just say, you make it a point to put aside everything else, no matter what, and have dinner at a table together where you talk without electronics for an hour or as Seth does, you know, actually cook a meal with or buy your kid

where there's a semi-distracted state that doesn't make it intimidating. So maybe you're not even looking at your kid, but you're cooking at the stove or doing something else. And it gives them the comfort to divulge what happened that day. But it's very important to, I think, lay that foundation early. You can't expect to pull the rip cord

or get a winning lottery ticket out of nowhere at age 16. I think that's a much more challenging issue. But I do not think if my kid were experiencing difficulties, or let's just assume it's a son because girls generally don't fight physically as much, if my son were getting picked on and it was normal run-of-the-mill hazing, like most of the stuff I dealt with. I mean, I had like some kids chase me around with, like, fence posts with the nail. in them and stuff. That's dangerous. But if we're just talking about bloody nose, fist fight on the

playground, I think that kids need to learn to deal with that. And I think that kids right now are really being trained to be, and conditioned to be emotionally, psychologically, and physically weak and hypersensitive. And whether that is universities disinviting brilliant thinkers from campus, because a small group on campus students protest for fear of uncomfortable concepts or positions and opinions that may make them uncomfortable and trigger X, Y, or Z, or display microaggressions. Are you kidding me? I mean, if you can't handle this simulated cozy environment that we call academics or the school ground, how on earth are you going to excel in the real world?

That's right on. Because that's when you are going to experience macroaggression. That is where you're going to experience real deceit, fraud, incompetence. And if you expect to be able to turn on toughness in the big things, when you haven't practiced in the small things, you are sorely, sorely mistaken. And that is something you develop, which is part of the reason why I talk so much about Stoic philosophy in Seneca and using it as an operating system for being less emotionally reactive. So, for instance, on the internet, a lot of sensitive people out there. And when someone freaks out over something relatively innocuous that I put up, I'll very often reply with a quote. I won't even address what they said, but I'll reply with a quote, which is those who are offended easily should be offended more often.

And that's May West. I feel very strongly about that. So if my kid is facing discomfort, maybe the occasional tussle, it's like, okay, well, maybe a, you need to learn to deal with it. And I'm not going to ignore it. Maybe I'll coach him through it. Show them how to throw a straight right. Okay.

Yes. And second, I mean, this is a side effect and benefit of wrestling. But if you're a little kid who knows how to wrestle or knows a little bit of judo, and that's for both genders or some jiu-jitsu, and you have an older student coming after you, you'll probably be okay. That's right. That is, I suppose, a side note. But those are my thoughts.

I mean, it's very much a difference of degree, right? It's like treating, what would you do with someone who has a 99 degree temperature instead of 98.6 versus someone who's a 103 degree temperature? Yeah. Totally different situations. Well, there's so much to cover and so little time, so I want to fast forward, but I think this is, it makes me think of one of the topics I wanted to ask you about. And so that's great advice for parenting and for kids, but eventually these kids become adults and you really touched on that at the end of that answer. And so I want to talk about rejection because a lot, of what you just shared is great truth to help us deal as adults with rejection, which is going

to happen, meaning every idea doesn't get accepted. I think if anybody's done any research on you at all, you know, we know from your story that the four-hour work week, which has become a phenomenon, and obviously created a whole line of books and helped so many people, you were rejected many times, you know, on that process, and you didn't quit. And I just want you to talk to people out there who may have just recently got a know. And I think, sometimes it is so very personal and sometimes you develop that tough skin, but handling rejection. What have you learned about it, whether from your story or from others, so that people can really handle it well and channel it?

Sure. Let me take a stab at that. The four-hour work week was rejected 27 times by publishers in New York City, the big houses. And then it was bought for a very, very low price, which was fine. that was the foot in the door. In terms of handling rejection and handling no, there are different types of nos and there are different versions of noes.

So first, I think that you need to study negotiation and deal making because it's not always that a no is a no. That's right. And I still handle no multiple times a day, maybe dozens of times a day. I was just negotiating for a space, to use for a recording and this, that, and the other thing. And the answer three times was no.

And I had to try to creatively find something that would work for both sides. And you can teach yourself this skill. It is a coachable or is learnable. It is practicable. That's the most important piece, skill. So there's a good book that actually fits this very well called Getting Past No.

There's a book called Getting to Yes, which was part of the Harvard Negotiation Project. One of those authors split off and did what I think is a more realistic book, which is Getting Past No. That, I think, is a good starting point for folks. There's also a audio, well, I recommend the audio version of a book called Secrets of Power Negotiating by, I believe it's Roger Dawson and try to get the audio if you can. But let's just say that it's a no, it's a no, no, no. It's not going anywhere. Then I want to distinguish between well-founded confidence and, well, let's call it informed confidence. and uninformed confidence. Why did I persist through 27 rejections? It's not because I possessed this miracle quality

that we tend to think of as confidence. I had undefeatable confidence out of thin air that pushed me through it. No, not at all. That's not it. I had evidence that the material in the book worked. I had evidence personally, and I'd also been giving lectures on some of this

material on and off, usually twice a year, for at that point, I want to say about six years. And the students I spoke to, the younger people in particular that I shared this message with responded incredibly well, over the top in terms of enthusiasm, and they asked a lot of questions. So I truly believed, based on the data I had, the evidence I'd gathered, that this stuff worked and that these publishers were wrong. They were rushed. They were overworked. They were all trying to handle too many books. They read my one pager or two pager, said, who the hell does this kid think he is? And that was the end of their exploration. So for those people, it was a no. But they

didn't have the experience. They didn't have the evidence that I did. So that's informed confidence. Uninformed confidence would potentially lead to you beating your head against a wall trying to sell something that no one wants for 10, 20 years until you run out of money. You don't want that. So to avoid that and develop real informed confidence, you need to subject your ideas to the world and get comfortable with discomfort. So what does that mean? In sharp contrast to the coddling of America's youth, which is just avoiding short-term pain to guarantee 10 times more, a longer term pain. Can I just tell you something?

That right there, you should write that down and say that everywhere you go. That's probably the best way I've ever heard the negative effects to everybody gets a trophy. That was brilliant. Thank you. I appreciate it. Maybe I will write that down and say it more. And if you can't say it again. I do this sometimes on the podcast.

I want people to tweet this. Tim Ferriss just laid out gold. What is the product of everybody gets a trophy? Can you say that again to the best of your ability? The product of everyone takes a trophy. and no one gets offended is you are avoiding short-term pain for the guarantee of 10 times the longer-term pain. And by subjecting your ideas, your businesses, your products to, say, a handful of strangers, 10 people trying to get them to buy in the case of, say, generating a product or doing a business,

it's not enough to say, would you buy this? you need to have a prototype and you need to then try to get pre-orders, get people to pay you. It means nothing until the wallet physically or metaphorically is open. It means nothing. Your parents may try to be nice. Your friends may try to be nice. When it comes time for them to part with their money, that's when reality will come into stark relief. So really testing, testing, testing, testing your ideas, testing your questions, testing your products,

testing your plans, subjecting it to the messy reality of everyday life is where you will ultimately find the gold. And handling no, handling rejection is just part of the deal. If you're born as a human being, you're going to interact with other human beings, for that matter, interact with nature, interact with anything. You want it to be sunny? No, it's going to rain today. Too bad. What are you going to do about it. And that is a no right there. How do you deal with it? And really what it comes down to is how do you contend with factors outside of your control? And we can talk about the serenity prayer, for instance, which I think is very, very interesting. But at the risk of beating a dead horse coming back to stoicism and Seneca and so on, which comes up a lot with these various

Titans and icons and billioners and so on in Tools of Titans is it is a systematic way with easy reading in the case of Seneca say the letters of Seneca to help train yourself to become less emotionally overreactive and to go through many many different nose you have to get good at that if you throw a tizzy and a hissy fit and start blaming the world for all of your problems and challenges every time you get a no, you are not going to succeed at anything. If you take everything personally and never even consider the fact that it might be the fact that they're hungry or thirsty or you called them at the wrong time, maybe their wife just yelled at them.

Who knows? If you always assume it's something personally, you always assume you made a grave mistake, you're not going to get very far. And I'll give you a quote, which is actually at the head of one of the chapters, which is from Archaeolocus. All right. Not a modern name. You don't hear that one much.

Arka Lucas Ferris, not running around right now. So not a common name, but the quote is, we do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. This is a very important quote and concept to understand. When it counts, you will fall to the level of your training. That means you have to practice. You want to get good at negotiating? You want to negotiate, who knows, refinancing your mortgage.

You want it with a very difficult banker, potentially difficult banker. really important to you, don't make it your first negotiation. Go to a state fair, a flea market, anything, and try to negotiate and view it as your tuition. Spend 50 bucks on buying a bunch of chotchkes, but you try to buy them at minimum half what the offering price was from the seller. That is your MBA in negotiation. You have to get good at doing that. Or practice by trying to get rid of your, say, credit card fees or some of your credit card fees and so on and so forth, via phone before you do it in person. And Ramit SETI, who's spelled SETHA, very successful entrepreneur in the book, has scripts

for this. He's incredibly good at it. And he was on the podcast and talked about his last appearance on the podcast, talks at length about how to do this type of thing. You have to practice. You will fall to the level of your training when it matters most. That's so true. John Wood and the legendary UCLA basketball coach revered by most coaches in any of the

the sports, as maybe one of the greatest ones said, when opportunity comes, it's too late to prepare. And really, training and preparation is everything. That's such a great word. Tim's answer there, folks, might have been the sole reason for coming to the podcast. I mean, that was really incredible stuff. Re-listen to that a few times and take some notes. All right, one of the things I think you do a great job of on your podcast and in this book, in fact, it's in the introductory section, is you call it out, you tell us, look, here's the deal. As you're reading this, don't think of all these people as superheroes. Don't think of me. Tim Ferriss as a superhero. You know, we're just like you and in many, many ways, and obviously there's some great success. And I, I find that to be so

valuable for people to understand and not feel like it's so unattainable. But the wisdom of this is so good, but it leads me to, we just have, you know, a little bit of time left. And I want to focus on this idea of making the most of our lives. It seems to me that's a burning passion for you, and you want to help other people live lives of significance. And I want to just point out real quick to our listeners on page 197 and 616. Tim shares very transparently. We can't cover it all in this particular conversation, but I want to point out that I think it may be two of the best sections just to hear from him and hear from his head and heart. With those being the sections that I'm kind of coloring this part of the conversation with Tim, one of my favorite quotes is from Henry

David Thoreau. He wrote, most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. As you process that, I'm sure you've read that or seen that before, why do you think that is? That seems to me, you know, to be so sad and yet it's so very true. It is sad. It's tragic. And I know people who are certainly in that category. And it's, I think for a long time I was in that category, quite frankly. And there are a few reasons for it. there are a few reasons for it, but they all boil down to fear. And fear can take many forms, as Tony Robbins would say, stressed is the achiever word for fear.

I'm just stressed. That means you're afraid of something. And you should dig into it. Now, fear is the emergency break in life. And it's very easy to romanticize and promote goal setting, for instance, setting a vision, and all that stuff is important, but it doesn't matter if you have your emergency break on. You can't move forward if you have fears that are going to prevent you from pursuing all of those things or realizing all those things. Here's how I think about it and how I've overcome a lot

of my own fears. Number one, a lot of folks will ask me how I became so much of a risk taker. And like, oh my God, Tim Ferriss has such a high risk tolerance. He does all these crazy things. He invests in these super speculative startups. He does this, that, and the other thing. That guy's nuts. Well, I don't think of myself as risk-taking at all. I actually think of myself as very much a specialist in risk mitigation and risk-minimization. I am very, very conservative in a lot of ways in terms of what most people would think of as risk-taking.

And I'm able to pursue these different experiments, these projects, and I view them all as experiments in the beginning, which I would encourage everyone to do, because it takes a lot of the pressure off, the performance pressure, is I will, A, define risk. To me, it's a very specific thing. And when terms are nebulous or unclear, that's when you make really bad decisions. Risk to me is the probability of an irreversible negative outcome. And irreversible is the key component there. So I will use an exercise called fear setting, which is somewhere in the healthy, might be in the Y section. But the gist of it is, I'll take out a piece of paper, eight and a half by 11. I'll put two vertical lines down the page so that I have three columns of equal with. At the top, I will write down what I'm considering

doing that I feel anxious about, or I feel it might be risky, or that I'm putting off. That's usually a key. The big decision, the big conversation, whatever it is that I'm putting on, joining a company, leaving a company, breaking up with someone, proposing to someone, who knows what it, it could be anything. Leaving your job starting your own company. All right, you put that at the top. One thing you're considering that you've been pushing off. And on the left-hand column, you write down all of the things that could go wrong. So a bullet for each one.

All of the things that could go wrong. The worst things you can imagine, but make them specific. In the second column, for each of the bullets, you write down what you could do to minimize the likelihood of each of those happen. And then in the last column for each bullet, write down what you could do to get back to where you are if, worst case scenario, each of those happened. And when you run through this process, this fear setting exercise, and I still do this probably once a month, minimum once a quarter, because trust me, you don't reach some magical level of success and suddenly all of your problems go away. You just trade up in problems, by the way. It's like, oh, you used to have the corolla of problems. Then you got the Mercedes of problems. Now you have the Lamborghini of problems. Like they just get larger in magnitude. And it's a quality problem. Don't get me wrong. But they don't go away. So I do this now still consistently myself. And when you do that, when you really put your problem or your fear or your risk under a magnifying glass, you tend to

realize that the worst case outcome is very manageable. It's probably reversing. It's probably reversing and worst case, if I had to get back to where I am now, maybe it would take an extra five or six months or a year. So there's a, let's say, zero to ten. Let's just call it maybe a 10 to 20% risk of a temporary negative three to five. And there is a, who knows, let's call it 50% plus likelihood of a life-changing eight to ten good, right? That's an easy bet to take. That's not a risk bet. It's not risky at all. I mean, if I said to you, all, we're going to flip a coin, we're going to roll a six-sided die. And if it gets one to five, I'll give you a dollar every time. If it's six, you give me a dollar. Would you take that bet? I would.

Yeah, absolutely. Sure. And when you look at it on paper that way, you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe I've been putting this up for three months. This is ridiculous. And then you do it, and everything's fine. Yeah. It inoculates you from that paralysis, which is really a great practical answer to a philosophical statement by Thoreau. All right, so I want you to speak to this, and then if we have some time, we have some quick questions, I think will be fun. I think the most inspiring part of this book is not the wisdom from all of Tim's guests. It's on page 627, and in this particular chapter, he shares a heartbreaking story from a guy

by the name of Silas. Tim, I got to tell you, I got a little choked up reading that story. And it sets up that whole chapter that really wants you to obviously dive into. It's so encouraging for those who sometimes you just feel alone. But you say this to us on page 627. I want to read it and just allow you to comment and challenge us all. You're talking about your perfect storm was nothing permanent. And then you say, but of course, it's far from the last storm I'll face.

There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires, the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms, you build, help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the luscious green of life, and you do, the gray is part of the natural cycle. You are not flawed. You are human. You have gifts to share with the world. At the end of the day, it's not about us, yes? Correct. And so when you wrote that and you're pouring that out, because you actually say this was a difficult chapter for you to write. What do you want people to take away from that?

Well, as context for folks, the entire chapter, I think this is the most important thing I've ever written. The headline is some practical thoughts on suicide. In college, let me put this in perspective. So some of my best friends from high school ended up killing themselves. Some of my best friends in college ended up killing themselves. Friends since college have killed themselves. and I almost killed myself during college at one point. I had a very tough time in college. And over the years since then, and I describe how it almost happened,

why it didn't happen, and the chain of events that culminated in that really terrible decision on my part, I'd already decided that led me to still be on this planet. But since then, having met the family, members, loved ones and friends of people who have taken their own lives, I've thought about this subject a lot, which encompasses depression and anxiety as well. But I think perhaps the most important

paragraph, and I should say, look, there's a lot in this chapter, so we're not going to cover it all. But first off, if you're in a dangerous place, I didn't have this at the time. Call this number. It's the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It's 800.2.2.000. 273, 8255. So, 1-800-273-8255. And you can also just go to Suicide Prevention Lifeline.org, where you can find both numbers and chat in different languages. So I had a few realizations, which I talk about at the end. And I won't go into a lot of the details. But number one, I realize that it would destroy other people's lives. Killing yourself can spiritually kill other people. So if you want to imagine killing yourself as limited to you, which I did for a long time, and I was shocked out of it actually by a chance conversation with my mother. Imagine just taking 10 times the pain that you feel and inflicting it on the people who you care about most. That is what suicide does. Next, realize there's no guarantee that killing yourself improves anything for you.

We just don't know what happens after you close your eyes for the last time. So there's no guarantee that you're going from bad to better. all. So there's that. And then there are different ways that you can help to prevent these dark periods from turning tragic. And some of my friends, for instance, including some high achievers you would never expect, have a non-suicide vow that they make with, say, a brother or someone with whom it's more important, even if they don't care about their own life, it's so important that they keep their word to this person that they will not kill themselves. And there's a lot more to it.

But I would say that perhaps the most important paragraph or two actually come right after what you read. And that is, and when the darkness comes, when you're fighting the demons, just remember, I am right there fighting with you. You are not alone. There's a large tribe around you. And thousands, well, in this case, and thousands of them are reading this book. The gems I found were forged in the struggle, never, ever give up. because depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, these are not a unique problem.

It's very easy to fall into the trap, especially in these dark periods of thinking that, that you are somehow flawed forever, nothing's ever going to change. Why would you ever want to go on living if this is your hardwiring you're destined to have these depressive periods? Well, I mean, on so many levels,

what in waste it would have been had I killed myself my senior year of college? I mean, and this is not the past, myself on the back, but it's just like, it would have destroyed my family. It would have destroyed my friends. It would have, my parents would still to this day be blaming themselves. And nothing that anyone knows before ever would have happened. That's right. That's right. And think of all the trajectory change that you've been a part of. And none of that happens. Because it's not about you. It's about your gift to others. Yeah. And for instance, I mean,

my hope in writing this chapter, which was very hard for me to write and took more. months to do, uh, because I didn't kill myself, this chapter, I think will probably save hundreds or thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of lives. Hopefully so.

So, so is that a good trade? Yeah. I think that's a good trade. Yeah. So that's, that's all I'll say about that. Yeah.

And of course, we couldn't cover it in, in depth. And that's why I told folks to read that and it's powerful stuff. Um, thank you for sharing that. I know that's probably not even easy to talk about. Of course.

And I should just point out that there are a number of chapters that are not that dark, but talk about the struggle, my bad days, what they look like. That's right. It's very important for me that people realize the superstars they have in their mind as heroes or icons, whatever it might be, are generally speaking hugely imperfect creatures, just like all of us with lots of foibles, weaknesses, and insecurities who figure out how to capitalize on one or two strengths. That's it. That is it.

And sometimes, would you suggest that sometimes they just pulled themselves off off the mat? That's why I love Loxy. They just got up. They've all pulled themselves off the mat. Every single person in this book has pulled themselves off the mat repeatedly. Everyone in this book has been told, you are a failure, you are never going to succeed repeatedly. Everyone in this book has had days when they would just pull the covers over their heads and didn't want to get out of bed. Every single one, without exception.

Well, my friend, I've got to tell you, I'm glad that you have. have pulled yourself out of bed many times. You're doing good work. Before I let you go, I want to honor your time. I know you've got a lot going on and we're grateful for this. Many years ago, I think it was maybe six or seven years ago, Tim. I was at a retreat for a bunch of guys and it was with a writer and it was all about kind of making the most of your life and a lot of those themes and kind of discovering your story and all this kind of stuff. It was really great stuff. One of the exercises he had us do at one point in this retreat was to think of your favorite movie and then your favorite character in your favorite movie and kind of just spend time alone

writing out why it is that's your favorite character or what character you would want to play so it's not just the favorite character it's if you were going to put yourself in your favorite movie what character would you play and why is that what does that say to your heart all this kind of thing and i think it's a fascinating question and if you'd allow me to put you on the spot for that i'd love to hear what your answer is to that your favorite movie and what character would you play that movie and why do you think you would want to play that character? Well, this is a great question. I like this actually, but I'll keep it short because this one is a little weird. My favorite movie is an animated movie from Japan called Spirited Away, which for whatever

reason is very difficult to find online. But Spirited Away, which is made by Studio Ghibli, which is like the Disney of Japan of sorts is just incredible. And it tells the story of this young girl named Chihiro, who's later renamed Sen. It's kind of a long story. There's a lot of magic and gods and craziness that goes on, which is really fun to watch. Beautifully animated.

It's just a fantastical voyage. She would be my favorite character. I mean, she goes from very weak, very whiny, very undirected to very confident and very capable, but there are tons of stumbles and tons of mistakes along the way. And to talk about that actual perfect segue, it's all forged in the struggle. I'm not going to give away the whole story, but her parents get turned into pigs and abducted. Oh, that's never good.

Never good. She has to figure out how to get them back. So she would be the character, but it would be a little weird for a guy who looks like American History X to play a tiny Japanese girl. So I would probably play in that case. I am blanking on his name. I think it's haku. There's this slightly older boy who is like a go-between between the human world and this ethereal, not really ethereal,

mythical god-like realm named haku, who is her consigliary slash guide of sorts, who helps her from making really fatal mistakes in a number of cases and sacrifices himself in a lot of ways. So I suppose I would play haku. And that seems to make sense. I think that would be consistent with who you are. And thus the question.

All right, final question, and this is just for pure fun. You've talked with so many great men and women, people of note that have done great things, and I know you love the art of sitting down and having a conversation. If you could only pick one person from history who is no longer with us on this planet, to have tea or lunch with. Who is that person and why?

Benjamin Franklin, because he was an amateur in many different arenas and was able to innovate in many different arenas, science, diplomacy, printing, in fact, in some respects as well. At the same time, Franklin was a hilarious salesman and Mary Prankster. He was a joker. He loved to drink wine, hit on the French ladies when he's supposed to be on his diplomatic mission. I mean, just sounds like a hilarious, but brilliant guy to hang out with. And I think I would probably, if we're having tea, I'd say, I'd wink at him and pull out a nice big bottle of red wine and say, don't tell anybody. And that would be,

that would be the lunch. That would be so good. Well, folks, unfortunately, our time is up. We've got to honor Tim's time, I could go for hours and hours, and you would love that, but he's got stuff to do. He's got a book to promote, and you know it as tools of Titans, the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers. Tim, I've got to tell you, it's fun to listen in. I listen to your podcast regularly as we're doing what we're doing here, and we're grateful that you came over and hung out on our podcast. We appreciate you very much, and I'm just really excited about this launch, and we're rooting

for you over here in Nashville. We'd love to see if you ever get in Nashville. come on over. We'd love to take care of you and show you some hospitality. But we appreciate you spending time with us. We're better for it. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. And I'll take you up on Nashville when I get there.

It's a great town. Imagine a country clean version of Las Vegas down on Broadway. We'll take you some honky tonk places and maybe just get you to love country music. I don't know. We'll see. Hey, stranger things have happened for me. I'm up for it. We appreciate you, Tim. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks so much. Hey, the new book is Tools of Titans, as I told you, and Tools of Titans.com is the website. A lot of free stuff up there that you can check out. And, of course, his other books, The Four Hour Workweek, The Four Hour Body, the Four Hour Chef. I think I might get that four-hour chef. As I'm getting older, Eric, I like cooking. You like to cook? He's learning.

He just got married, by the way. And how many nights a week are you helping actually cook? You can't. Okay, his answer is he loves to do dishes. I like that. That's good. That's a good start for somebody who's been married a couple months. So good for you. Hey, I want to tell you about our Entree Leadership Summit. This is not a new event to us. And if you've been listening for any amount of time, it's not a new event to you.

But the dates are May 21 through 24. In Orlando, Florida, the lineup is fantastic. Simon Seneca, John C. Maxwell, Patrick Lincione, Lou Holtz, Dave Ramsey. And we've got the old Shark Tank guy, Robert Hersheveck, is going to join us. So that's kind of interesting, kind of an interesting play there. And then, of course, Chris Hogan and Chrissy Wright, I'll be there hosting the event as well. It's going to be fun. And we've got a special offer for you podcast listeners. 300 bucks off of this ticket.

If you register by December 30th. So December 30th is the deadline to save 300 bucks. Entreeleadership.com slash summit. Entreeleadership.com slash summit. Or you can go to this episode's show notes. We've got a link there for you and you can get the deal. So if you get on the phone and you talk to our sales team, tell them, hey, I'm a podcast listener.

I stink and love it. And oh, by the way, I'd like the $300 discount. I threw the, I stink and love it in there, Eric. That was not in the notes. I added that because I think people should say something like that. So there you go. And I'm told that this event's already halfway sold out. I mean, this is, and the energy in this event is something.

There's just nothing like it. Phenomenal four days, so we'd love to see you there. Hey, a couple other things I want to let you know about. We've been bringing you these amazing resources each month. I've been telling me about this. The Entree Leadership Resource this month, 43 ways to recognize your team. I love that it's an odd number because the bottom line is if our team wanted to,

they could have given you 243 ways to recognize your team. The point is we're giving you real practical, tested, tried stuff. We don't give you theory, okay? We give you practicality. And so this is a wonderful resource. It's a spreadsheet. It's a template for you to do whatever you want to. You can customize it.

But folks, recognition matters. and we're giving you over 40 ways to do it. So print it off. All you've got to do to get this resource is text the word. Recognize. Recognize is the word. Text it to 33444-4-4-4-4, or you can go to the link in the show notes. And then, InfusionSoft, these folks are amazing.

They help us do our business here at Entree Leadership and do it well. And so we talked to them, I think Eric and I were in Phoenix a year and a half ago. We said, hey, we want to get some of your resources straight from the old vault, if you will, and give it to our listeners, and they have done it month after month. This one is how to identify your target market. Everybody needs to do this. They give you a worksheet that will allow you to pinpoint your ideal customer pains. That means your ideal customer. What are they hurting from?

What's that need that they really are looking to take care of? Establish why your customers buy from you? So why are they buying? You need to know this. Don't walk through your business blind. and then helps you build a target customer. So this is all about efficiency in closing, closing, closing. Go to infusionsoft.com slash target dash worksheet.

Infusionsoft.com slash target dash worksheet. All right, I want to thank Tim Ferriss. He's got a lot going on and we're routinely up there in the rankings with him. And for him to say, hey, I'll come on your podcast and encourage your listeners. I really appreciate that. I know you do as well. And Eric is telling me we got some fun plans here. This is a little bit of a tease.

So we're going to take some of our favorite content. We did this last year, and it was received well. Eric and I get together, and honestly, it's, I can't believe we get paid to do this, but we listen to past episodes. And we think, what's the content that we enjoyed the most? Our favorite stuff. And we share it with you in a fun end of the year episode. And also, we're recording a conversation very soon.

I'm excited to bring to you. Super practical. A guy by the name of Steve Graves, who I've known for a long time, who I admire, and he gets paid well to coach other high achievers. And he's got an end-of-the-year process that I think everybody should do. I've been doing it for years. So I'm giving it away to you. Steve's going to help us do that.

It's fantastic stuff. So all that's coming up as we wrap up the year and finish strong. So I want to thank, as always, our unbelievable producer. Eric, the producer, we love him. He's great, makes this thing happen. I want to thank our entire Entree leadership team. And then I want to thank you. awesome listeners. We love you very much. We'll talk with you again very soon.