The Tim Ferriss Show - #206: Testing the "Impossible": 17 Questions That Changed My Life

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Starting point is 00:02:44 So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, ladies and and gentlemen ladies and germs this is tim ferris and welcome to another episode of the tim ferris show where it is my job each and every episode to deconstruct world-class performers billionaires chess prodigies military strategists actors entertainers you name it to tease out the habits routines and so on that you can use

Starting point is 00:03:21 whether those are favorite books what they do in the first 60 minutes after they wake up, whatever. So this episode is a little bit different. Many of you have been asking me about an audiobook version of Tools of Titans, my new book, which is a compilation of all these habits and routines and so on. About 200 plus folks in the book. There is no audiobook or audible version coming soon because I'm going to be doing something very, very fun and interesting with all of that audio, but it takes some time. So it's going to take at least a few months, but many, many of you have asked for audio. So I'm going to give you a sample. And in fact, I'm going to give you a chapter that is in the book that you've never seen before,

Starting point is 00:04:05 never heard before. And there's a lot of that. In Tools of Titans, I'd say about, let's say 60% is the distilled wisdom and tactics and so on from 10,000 plus transcripts from the podcast, interviewing all these folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, General Stanley McChrystal, special ops commanders, and so on. And 40% is brand new, new tips from old guests, new guests per se that you haven't met before, like Jack Dorsey, for instance, and a lot of new chapters for me. So this is one of them. This is called Testing the Impossible, impossibles in quotation marks, 17 questions that changed my life. So let's jump into it. We'll have some fun with it.

Starting point is 00:04:47 The chapter begins with a quote, which is actually the quote I use before every presentation that I give just about, and it goes as follows quote, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect and quote, that is from Mark Twain. Reality is largely negotiable. If you stress test the boundaries and experiment with the so-called impossibles, you'll quickly discover that most limitations are just a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules that you can choose to break really at any time. What follows are 17 questions that have dramatically changed my life. Each one is timestamped. In other words, I give you a date, rough or precise, because they entered the picture at very specific moments. And as I already indicated, this is a sample chapter from the new tome, Tools of Titans,

Starting point is 00:05:35 the Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Long, long subtitles. I just love those. Question number one. What if I did the opposite for 48 hours? I'll say each of these twice. What if I did the opposite for 48 hours? And the intention is for you guys to use these questions perhaps in journaling exercises in the morning, not to just think about them for five seconds and then move on. So what if I did the opposite for 48 hours? How did this come up? In 2000, I was selling mass data storage to CEOs and CTOs in my first job out of college. And when I wasn't driving around my mom's POS hand-me-down minivan to and from the office in San Jose, California, I was cold calling and cold emailing. That is sometimes called

Starting point is 00:06:19 smiling and dialing. And it was brutal. For the first few months, I flailed and failed. Certainly didn't help that my desk was wedged in a fire exit. Then one day I realized something. All the sales guys, many of them from EMC and other spots where they'd been superstars, made their sales calls between 9am and 5pm. Well, that seems obvious, right? But that's part one. Part two, I realized that all the gatekeepers who kept me from the decision makers, CEOs and CTOs, also worked from nine to five. So the secretaries were there from nine to five. The other gatekeepers were there from nine to five and all the other sales guys were calling between nine to five. What if I did the opposite of all the other sales guys just for 48 hours? That is what came to my mind. And I decided to take a Thursday and Friday to make sales calls

Starting point is 00:07:05 only from 7 to 8.30 a.m. and then from 6 to 7.30 p.m. And for the rest of those days, I'd just focus on cold emails. It worked like gangbusters. It was a huge, huge step function out for me and changed everything. The big boss, my target, often picked up the phone directly, and I began doing more experiments along these lines. It's because I was booking more sales meetings, I was in technical sales, and closing more deals than almost anybody else just by making this one change. So what if I did the opposite? I started asking this all over the place. What if I only asked questions instead of pitching? What if I studied technical material so I sounded like an engineer instead of a sales guy? What if I ended my emails with, quote, I totally understand if you're too busy to reply, and thank you for reading this far, end quote. Instead of the usual, I look forward to your

Starting point is 00:07:53 reply and speaking soon, presumptive bullshit. The experiments paid off. My last quarter in the job, I outsold the entire LA office of our biggest competitor, EMC, their giant, the 800 pound gorilla. Question number two, what do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch? And I'm going to pause here for dramatic sipping of coffee. Number two, I'll say it again. What do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch? This came right after the last. So in late 2000, early 2001, I saw the writing on the wall. The startup that I worked for was going to implode like pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley and tech at the time. Rounds of layoffs started and weren't going to end. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, but I'd been bitten by the startup bug and intoxicated by

Starting point is 00:08:45 just the hubbub and excitement of Silicon Valley. To explore business opportunities, because I didn't know where exactly to point myself, I didn't do in-depth market research. Instead, I started with my credit card statement and asked myself, what do I spend a silly amount of money on? In other words, where did I spend a disproportionate percentage of my income? Where was I price insensitive? And the answer was sports supplements, sports nutrition. At the time I was making less than $40,000 a year pre-tax in Silicon Valley, doesn't go very far and spending $500 or more per month on supplements, which was insane, of course, but dozens of my male friends were doing exactly the same thing, going overboard. I already knew which ads got me to buy, which stores and websites I

Starting point is 00:09:30 used to purchase goods, which bulletin boards I frequented, and all the rest of it. So I started to just brainstorm at night and during lunch hours, could I create a product that would scratch my own itch? And what was I currently cobbling together? In other words, what was I creating makeshift solutions for? I had enough science background to be dangerous in that respect that I couldn't conveniently find at retail. And the result was a cognitive enhancer that I've written about quite a bit in the first book,

Starting point is 00:10:00 The 4-Hour Workweek, Brain Quicken. And it was very much based on a cocktail that I put together for effectively smart drug type purposes while I was an undergraduate at Princeton. And at my startup in the meantime, the one that I worked for before everyone got fired, I begged my coworkers to each prepay for a bottle, which gave me enough money to hire a chemist or regulatory consultant and do a tiny manufacturing run. At that point, I was off to the races. So that is how my first really successful company started by asking this question, what do I spend a silly amount of money on myself and how might I scratch my own itch? Now it's important to note here, you can do the

Starting point is 00:10:40 opposite. Maybe there are people who will go to fancy MBA programs, say Harvard or Stanford GSB, and you'll have two male co-founders who come out and start diapers.com or something like that and make a fortune. Well, I don't like to depend on my skills of empathy and market research. I would prefer to know I have at least a guaranteed market of one, meaning myself. So whenever possible, I attempt to scratch my own itch. Number three, what would I do, have, or be if I had $10 million? What's my real TMI? You can change this number depending on what applies most to you. But in other words, you're really asking if I had all the money in the world, what would I want to do, have, or be? If money were no longer a consideration, that could be if I had a million dollars,

Starting point is 00:11:29 $10 million, $100 million, a billion dollars, what would I do, have, and be? What's my real TMI? That doesn't stand for too much information. It stands for target monthly income, and we'll get to that. So flash forward, 2004. I'm doing better than ever financially at that point, better than ever before. And Brain Quicken was distributed in perhaps a dozen countries. I was making more per month at that point than I'm sipping coffee right now. Still do like that caffeine. But I was running on fumes, really. Working 15-hour days and constantly on the verge of a meltdown. My girlfriend, who I expected to propose to and marry, left me due to that workaholism. And I've told that story in the 4-Hour Workweek, so I won't belabor it here. But over the next six months of treading water and feeling trapped, I realized that I had to either restructure the business to remove myself as a bottleneck or shut it down. It was literally killing me. So those

Starting point is 00:12:30 were the two options on the table for me. This is when I began journaling on a few questions, including what would I want to do, have, and be if I had 10 million in the bank? And what's my real target monthly income, TMI. So for the latter, in other words, how much does my dream life, the stuff I'm deferring for this magical retirement, really cost if I pay on a monthly basis? And if you want to find some calculators and so on that you can use for this, everybody listening, just go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash TMI, and there's some useful calculators and so on that you can use. In my case, after running the numbers, most of my fantasies were far more

Starting point is 00:13:12 affordable than I expected. I mean, whether it's a ski chalet and Aston Martin, whatever, you name it. The fact of the matter was I didn't have to postpone my life to redeem in some type of fantastical retirement 20, 30 years later. It was something that you could start to tackle now very programmatically and actually experiment with in the form of mini retirements, which I've talked about before. So they were far more affordable than I expected. Perhaps I didn't need to keep grinding and building. Perhaps I just need more time and mobility as currencies, not more income. This made me think that maybe, just maybe, I could afford to be happy and not just successful.

Starting point is 00:13:57 So I decided to take a long overseas trip. Number four, what are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here? So these questions also from 2004 are perhaps the most important of all, so they get their own chapter. I don't have time to go into it right now, but that is the fear setting chapter on page 463 in Tools of Titans. So guys, I think it's the best book I've ever written. Please grab a copy, but we don't have the time or space to go into that exact separate chapter. But what are the worst things that could happen?

Starting point is 00:14:22 Could I get back here? These are portion of this exercise called fear setting, which is arguably more important, I think, than goal setting. So number four is what are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here? Because I really didn't immediately take my trip. I sort of danced around it, imagining all the horrible things that could go wrong for about six months in perhaps a good example of the don't happy be worry phase and fear setting allows you to take the emergency break off and actually take so-called risks which are actually not risky at all because there is no likelihood or low likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome number five notice that is how i define risk which is very important

Starting point is 00:15:03 specific all right number five if i could only work two hours per week on my business what would come. Number five, notice that is how I define risk, which is very important, specific. All right, number five, if I could only work two hours per week on my business, what would I do? If I could only work two hours per week on my business, what would I do? This is an example of an absurd question that can produce very powerful brainstorming exercises and results. And this is another commonality across many of the people in Tools of Titans, by the way. This is just my commentary. This isn't from the chapter. Whether it's Peter Thiel asking, so serial billionaire, and certainly in the news a lot these days, asking, why can't you accomplish your 10-year goal in the next, or your 10-year plan in the next six months?

Starting point is 00:15:39 Or Peter Diamandis, or Tony Robbins, or many of these other people, they ask absurd questions, and there's a lot of power in them. So number five, if I could only work two hours per week in my business, yes, I know that's impossible, but if you had a gun against your head, what would I do? Or what would you do? So after removing anxieties about the trip with fear setting, the next practical step was removing myself as the bottleneck in the business. Alas, how can I not be a bottleneck in my own business? Is not a good question. So after reading the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and the 80-20 Principle by Richard Koch, I think it is, K-O-C-H, I decided that extreme questions were the forcing function I needed. The question I found most helpful was, if I could only work two hours per

Starting point is 00:16:21 week on my business, what would I do? Honestly speaking, it was more like, yes, I know it's impossible. And I already mentioned this, but if you had a gun to your head or contracted some horrible disease and you had to limit work to two hours per week, what would you do to keep things afloat? The 80-20 principle, which I've talked about ad nauseum in the four-hour workweek, also known as Pareto's law, is the primary tool in this case. It dictates that 80% or more of your desired outcomes are the result of 20% or less of your activities and inputs. Here are two related questions I personally used. What 20% of customers' products regions are producing 80% or more of the profit? What factors or shared characteristics might account for this?

Starting point is 00:17:02 I was profiling my highest leverage customers, right? Many such questions later, I began making a lot of changes. I fired my highest maintenance customers, putting more than 90% of my retail customers on autopilot with simple terms and standardized order processes to cut back on all the back and forth communication. And I deepened relationships and increased order sizes with my three to five highest profit, lowest headache customers. And that all led to the next question. This is number six. What if I let them, this means my employees or contractors, what if I let them make decisions up to a hundred dollars, $500, a thousand dollars? And it goes on.

Starting point is 00:17:43 This question allowed me to take my customer service workload from let's call it 40 to 60 hours per week to less than two hours per week. In mid-2004, I was the sole decision maker. For instance, if a professional athlete overseas needed our product overnighted, because after about six months into selling BrainQuick and we realized that athletes were the most price insensitive target market that were approaching us because of increased reaction speed or improved reaction speed and so on. Faster times off the blocks, whatever it might be. So if a professional athlete needed our product overnighted with special customs forms, I personally, as the boss,

Starting point is 00:18:21 would get an email or phone call from one of my fulfillment centers asking, how should we handle this? What would you like to charge? And these unusual edge cases might seem like rare exceptions, but they're actually, I would say most of the time, a daily occurrence. Dozens per week hit me on top of everything else I had to do. The fix was really simple. And in retrospect, I'm just astonished. It took me so long to figure this out. I sent an email to all of my direct reports along the lines of, dear so-and-so, from this point forward, please don't contact me with questions about A, B, or C. I trust you. If it involves less than $100 of cost, please make the decision yourself and take a note, the situation, how you handled it, what it cost, in one document so we can review and adjust each week. Just focus on making our customers happy, end quote. So I did this and I expected

Starting point is 00:19:10 the worst, expected all sorts of things to go sideways. And guess what? Everything worked. It was totally fine, minus a few hiccups here and there, which I expected. And I later increased that threshold, right? If it costs less than $100, I later increased that to $500, then $1,000. And then my reviews of their decisions in these Excel spreadsheets or whatever went from weekly to monthly to quarterly too. Once people were polished, effectively never. And this experience underscored two things for me. Number one, to get huge good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small bad things happen. And that's an exceptionally good trade. Number two, people's IQs seem to double as soon as you give them

Starting point is 00:19:49 responsibility and indicate that you trust them. Question number seven, and I think this is a good place for me to take another dramatic sip of coffee. I am aerating that for your pleasure. Number seven, what's the least crowded channel? Number seven, what's the least crowded channel? All right. What's the least crowded channel? What does this mean? Fast forward to December 26, 2006. I remember this day really clearly, exactly where I sat at my parents' kitchen table. I really remember it so clearly. I just finished writing the four-hour work week and I'm sitting down after a lovely Christmas to think about the upcoming April book launch. What to do? I had no idea. And as a result, I tracked down roughly a dozen bestselling authors, just cold, cold, cold reached out to

Starting point is 00:20:36 these folks, cold emailed. I asked each of them questions, the ones who agreed to interact with me. What were the biggest wastes of time and money for your last book launch? What would you never do again? What would you do more of? If you had to choose one place to focus $10,000, where would you focus it? Or where would you focus? What would you put it into? And I heard one word repeatedly for the last question, blogs. What are these things, these blogs? They were apparently both very powerful and underappreciated. So my first question to them was, what the hell is a blog? My next questions were, how are people currently trying to reach bloggers and what's the least crowded channel?

Starting point is 00:21:15 So I had used this when trying to reach CEOs and CTOs when I was smiling and dialing way back in the day at my first job. And the people pitching bloggers were generally using email first and phone second. And even though those were my strengths, I was good at those two media, those two channels. I decided to experiment with in-person meetings at conferences. Why? Because I felt my odds would be better as one out of five people in a lounge rather than one email out of 500 emails in an overflowing inbox. And based on all of this, I started looking at trade shows. I started looking at options. Where would bloggers, these mythical bloggers congregate? I packed up my bags and I headed to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show in January, which had more than

Starting point is 00:22:00 150,000 attendees in 2005. It's kind of like the Super Bowl of technology releases where all the geeks get to play with new toys. I never even walked in the front door. This is a critical detail here. I parked myself at the off-site Seagate-sponsored blog house lounge. I found out where the lounges were. Where would these people be hanging out in between walking on the trade room floor, in between panels and so on? So I found this Seagate-sponsored blog house, H-A-U-S Lounge, where bloggers were invited to relax, recharge their laptops, and drink free booze. So I sat there in the corner, sipped alcohol, asked a lot of dumb questions, and never overtly pitched anyone. I really did not hard pitch anyone. I only mentioned the book if

Starting point is 00:22:45 someone asked me why I was there. And my answer was, well, I just finished my first book. I'm really nervous about the launch. I'm here to learn about blogs and technology, and I really don't know what I'm doing. Famous tech blogger, Robert Scoble later described my intricate marketing plan as get drunk with bloggers. That was my marketing plan. Apparently, it worked surprisingly well. And the way I'm going to elaborate here a little bit, I would approach a handful of people congregated together drinking. And very often I would ask, can I eavesdrop? Would you mind if I eavesdrop? And I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm trying to learn as much as possible. And they'd look at each other kind of oddly and be like, yeah, whatever. So I'd stick around and I would

Starting point is 00:23:24 ask a lot of questions. If they said Ruby on Rails and I didn't know what Ruby on Rails was, I'd say, I'm really sorry to interrupt guys, but I'm pretty deep in the ignorance pool here. What's Ruby on Rails? And eventually someone would generally ask, why are you here? What the hell are you doing here? And then I would give the answer I just mentioned. And only if someone asked many different follow-up questions would I say, you know what? Zero pressure, but I have a bunch of these books, these advanced copies from my publisher. I'd be happy to just use a post-it note to indicate which 20 pages I think you'd like most. Because based on what we're talking about, I think you'd really

Starting point is 00:23:59 like this one chapter, but zero pressure whatsoever. And if after that, they still said, for sure, man, send me a book. I'd love to see it. That's when I sent out advanced copies and it worked. Go figure. Number eight, what if I couldn't pitch my product directly? And for you audio engineers out there are going to give me shit. Yes, I know that my peas are popping. So Peter Piper picked a pick of pickles peppers. There you go. All right. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, maybe I should have some more caffeine. What if I couldn't pitch my product directly during the 2007 book launch? And I quickly realized that most media outlets rightly don't give a rat's ass about book launches. They don't care about your product. They don't care

Starting point is 00:24:42 about your book. They don't want a sales pitch. They care about stories, not announcements. So I asked myself, what if I couldn't pitch my product directly? What if I had to sell around the product? Well, what might I do? I could showcase people from the book who've completely redesigned their lives. So human interest stories, this is keep in mind for the four hour work week. I could write about unrelated crazy experiments, but drive traffic to my book focused website. So if you Google geek to freak, you'll see the result of that. It was about gaining an absurd amount of lean mass. I guess it was something like 34 pounds in 28 days. And that was my first ever viral blog post. It hit the front page of Dig, which was a gigantic deal at the time, and it had nothing to do directly with the four-hour workweek except for a focus on efficiency, and it involved me,

Starting point is 00:25:33 and I published it on my website, which drove people to a website that was optimized for the four-hour workweek. All right, what else could I do? I could popularize a new term and aim for pop culture. If you check out the term lifestyle design, which is on page 278 in Tools of Titans, I explain exactly how I went about doing that, creating a new term in the popular vernacular. Well, what else? I could go meta and make the launch itself a news item. How can you make your launch itself, what you do, PR worthy? And I did that with a video book trailer for the 4-Hour Body, as well as a BitTorrent partnership for the 4-Hour Chef, and so on and so forth. People, this includes media, do not like being sold products,

Starting point is 00:26:19 but we all like being told stories. So work on the latter. Number nine, what if I created my own real world MBA? How do you create a real world MBA? This kicked off in 2007 to 2008, and it explains how I got started in angel investing, which later became the most profitable part of my entire life. And to this date, even though I retired effectively two years ago, angel investing and tech investing has created more wealth for also in the book, creator of Dilbert, thinks about systems thinking versus goals. So how do you choose and set up projects so that in the long term you win, even if that project is a failure? The way you do that is you make your plans around developing skills

Starting point is 00:27:22 and relationships that will persist even if this short-term project fails in the eyes of the outside world. So what if I created my own real world MBA? What would that look like? And you can do that for a lot more than business. You can do that for just about anything. Number 10, do I need to bake? Do I need to bake cakes?

Starting point is 00:27:40 Do I need to bake cakes? No. Do I need to make it back the way I lost it? All right. Hold on. Coffee break. Do I need to make it back the way I lost it? This was a very important lesson for me to learn. In 2008, I owned a home in San Jose, California, and its value cratered. Now, side note, if I had held it until now, I'd be totally fine because it was in Glen, what the hell is it in Willow Glen. More accurately, I didn't own the home. In 2008, the bank owned the home and I had an ill-conceived adjustable rate mortgage. On top of that, I was on the cusp of moving to San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:28:15 So to sell would have meant a $150,000 loss. Ultimately, I picked up and moved to San Francisco, regardless, leaving my San Jose home completely empty. And for months after that, friends pressured me to rent it, emphasizing how I was flushing money down the toilet otherwise. I eventually buckled and I suppose feeling that peer pressure and feeling stupid, followed their advice. And even with a property management company, regular headaches and paperwork quickly ensued. Regret followed. And one introspective night, I had some wine and I asked myself, do I really need to make money back the same way I'm losing it? And by analogy, if you lose $1,000 to the blackjack table, should you try and recoup it there? Probably not. If I'm losing money via the mortgage payments

Starting point is 00:29:03 on an empty house, in this case, do I really need to cover it by renting the house itself? I decided the answer was no. I could much more easily create income elsewhere. For instance, speaking gigs, consulting, et cetera, to put me back in the black. Humans are very vulnerable to a cognitive bias called anchoring, whether in real estate stocks or otherwise. And of course, I'm no exception. I made a study of this. A lot of good investors like a book called Think Twice by Michael Maboussin. I believe that is how you pronounce his name. M-A-U-B-O-U-S-S-I-N. And you can also look on Wikipedia, Cognitive Biases, and there's a nice little list. So shortly thereafter, sold my San Jose house at a large loss. But here is the important part. Once my attention and mind space was freed up, I quickly made all of that back elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:29:50 So do you need to make it back the way you lost it or the way you might lose it? And most of the time, the answer is no. Watch out for those cognitive biases. Number 11, what if I could only subtract to solve problems? All right, what if I could only subtract to solve problems? All right. What if I could only subtract to solve problems? Humans are generally incentivized to add. This is a common issue in software development. But back to my story. From 2008 to 2009, I began to ask myself, what if I could only subtract to solve problems? I was advising startups? I would ask this, but it applies to many, many, many, many other places in life, both professional and personal.

Starting point is 00:30:31 So instead of answering, what should we do, which I would get asked a lot by startups I was advising, I decided first to hone in on answering, what should we simplify? For instance, I always wanted to tighten the conversion fishing net, meaning the percentage of visitors who sign up or buy, let's say to a website or an app or whatever, before driving a ton of traffic to one of my portfolio companies. Because otherwise the fish would just slip through the net. These little visitors, if you don't convert, there's very little reason to drive a lot of traffic. And plus, this is something a lot of startups mess up. You don't necessarily get 10 pitches to the New York Times in the first year or two. If they've just featured you for

Starting point is 00:31:10 something that you weren't able to convert, they're not going to necessarily feature you a week or a month or a quarter later. Okay. Here's an example. One of the first dozen startups I worked with was named Jiminy. How do you think you spell that? Exactly. You would never get it right. G-Y-M-I-N-E-E. So we did some work. It was rebranded Daily Burn. And at the time, they didn't have enough manpower to do a complete redesign of the site. Adding new elements would have been time consuming, but removing them was not. So as a test, we eliminated roughly 70% of the quote above the fold, meaning the first screen you see before you have to scroll down, clickable elements on their homepage, focusing on the single most valuable click. Conversions immediately approved 21.1%. I still have the screenshots from this. It's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:32:05 And that quick and dirty test informed later decisions for much more expensive development. The founders, Andy Smith and Stephen Blankenship, made a lot of great decisions, and the company was acquired by IAC in 2010. I've since applied this what-if-I-could-only-subtract... question mark type question to my life in many areas, and I sometimes rephrase it as, what should I put on my not to do list? All right. Number 12, what might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for four to eight weeks with no phone or email? So what might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for four to eight weeks with no phone or email? Though a little bit wordy, I've asked variations of this question many times since 2004, and it used to end with, not off the grid, but rather, allow me to go on vacation for four to eight weeks. But that's no longer enough, and I'll tell you why.

Starting point is 00:32:53 Given the spread of broadband, it's extremely easy to take a so-called vacation to Brazil or Japan and still work non-stop on your business via laptop, as long as you have the Wi-Fi. This kind of subtle self-deception is a time bomb. So for the last five years, I've asked myself, in effect, what can I put in place so that I can go completely off the grid for 48 weeks? And in my particular instance, that means how can I completely remove the necessity to check phone or email for that period of time. To entrepreneurs who are feeling burned out, this is the question I pose most often.

Starting point is 00:33:29 Two weeks is not enough because you can let fires erupt and then attempt to repair damage when you return. Four to eight weeks or more doesn't allow you to be a firefighter. It forces you to put systems and policies in place. And much like the, can I allow someone to make decisions up to $100, $500, $1,000, right? And you need to ditch ad hoc email triage, empower other people's rules and tools, separate the critical few from the trivial many, and otherwise create a machine that does not require you to be behind the driver's wheel 24-7. And that is why the four to eight weeks or more

Starting point is 00:34:04 is so important. It forces you to put systems in place and the systems far outlive the vacation. And when you come home, you'll realize that you've taken your business and life to the next level. This is only possible if you work on your business instead of in your business, as Michael Gerber might say. Number 13, this is, this is a fun one. It's a very visual very visual one number 13 am i hunting antelope or field mice what what does that mean am i hunting antelope or field mice i uh i could say borrowed lifted stole this question around 2012 from former speaker of the u.s house of representatives newt gingrich and i read about it in buck up,

Starting point is 00:34:46 suck up, dot, dot, dot, and come back when you foul up. See what they did there? 12 winning secrets from the war room, which was written by James Carville and Paul Begala. I hope I'm pronouncing your names correctly. The political strategists behind Bill Clinton's presidential campaign war room. And here's the excerpt that struck with me. Here's the excerpt that stuck with me. God damn it, Ferris. Hold on. That deserves some more coffee. All right, here we go. Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Keep in mind, this is in the voice of James and Paul. Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we've got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability, his relentless focus on

Starting point is 00:35:34 capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history. Now that he's in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide, the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse, but it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can't live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is

Starting point is 00:36:20 important. Are you spending all of your time and exhausting all of your energy catching field mice? In the short term, it might give you a nice rewarding feeling, but in the long run, you're going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope? And that's the end of the excerpt. Another way I've approached this is to look at my to-do list and ask which one of these, that's the antelope, right? Look at my to-do list and ask which one of these, that's the antelope, right? Look at my to-do list and ask which one of these, if done, would render all of the rest either easier to complete or completely irrelevant. Question number 14. Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is? This is a tough one for type A personalities. Since you asked, that was sparkling water. Since starting deep work with,

Starting point is 00:37:09 we'll call it plant medicines in 2013. So see the James Fadiman chapter on page 100 in Tools of Titans and two after that. In fact, the two of the three longest chapters in this book about are about psychedelics and psychedelic research, as well as my potentially personal schedule. So since starting deep work with plant medicines in 2013, I have doubled and tripled down on cultivating more daily appreciation and present state awareness. The above question, could it be that everything is fine and complete as is, is one of the questions I ask myself very regularly. It's accompanied by tools and rituals like the five-minute journal, which I talk about a lot

Starting point is 00:37:51 in the book, but it's effectively an AM check-in and then a PM post-game analysis. Each of those takes five minutes. The jar of awesome, which I have not talked about before, I don't think, but is talked about on page 570, and thinking of daily wins before bed along the lines of Peter Diamandis on page 373. But what Peter does, I'll just tell you, he's the chairman of the XPRIZE, and before bed, he will think of his three daily wins. All right? Somewhat similar to what I do with the five-minute journal. Now, to reiterate what I say in multiple places and tools to Titans, type A personalities have goal pursuit as default hardwiring. This is excellent

Starting point is 00:38:32 for producing achievement, but also anxiety is you're constantly future focused. I've personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It's a C plus that gets you limping along to the next grade in the right direction. But for anything more, and certainly for anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have, which takes perspective and wanting what you have. Because if you don't want and like what you have, nothing you get will ever make you happy. So number 14 is, could it be that everything is fine and complete as is? Question number 15, what would this look like if it were easy? Or what would this look like if this were easy? And I used this when I was writing Tools of Titans. I've used this for all of my major

Starting point is 00:39:19 projects up to this point. This question and the next both came about in 2015. These days, more than any other question I'm asking, what would this look like if it were easy? If I feel stressed, stretched thin, or overwhelmed, it's usually because I'm over-complicating something or failing to take the simple, easy path because I feel I should be trying harder, quote-unquote, right? Old habits die hard. So what would this look like if it were easy? This is something that I very frequently journal on in the mornings. And the it, what would this or this, what would this or it look like? It really relates to the project in question, right? And it could be a relationship, could be something personal. What would this look like if it were easy? Number 16, how can I throw

Starting point is 00:40:06 money at this problem? How can I waste money in quotation marks to improve my quality of life? This one is pretty self-explanatory, but I will add some context. Dan Sullivan is the founder and president of a company called Strategic Coach that has saved the sanity of many serial entrepreneurs that I know. And one of Dan's sayings is, if you've got enough money to solve the problem, you don't have a problem. Now, in the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn money. This is completely understandable. Totally what I did. It's what everybody has to do. You don't have this resource called money, generally speaking. so you use your time to earn money. But once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money to earn time as the latter is

Starting point is 00:40:52 non-renewable. It can be hard to make and maintain this gear shift. Certainly, again, old habits die hard. So the above question is in my regular journaling rotation. If I am feeling stressed, overwhelmed, I ask the question that I mentioned before, which was, what would this look like if it were easy? And a sub component of that is how can I throw money at this problem? How can I waste money to improve the quality of life? And they work together really, really nicely. For instance, I'll give you a personal example. I realized not too long ago that I was flying around the country to meet with these scientists or doctors to do various things. And I would fly there, pay for a hotel, and it would take up days and days of my time. And this is so stupid that it took me this long to figure out, wait a second, I'm flying there and

Starting point is 00:41:45 paying for a hotel. Why don't I just fly the doctor to me and pay for his or her hotel? It's the same cost and I don't have to pack. I don't have to unpack. I don't have to go to the airport. I eliminate all of that headache. So in that case, it was just break even. But in both cases, what would this look like if it were easy? How can I throw money at this problem? How can I waste money, so to speak, to improve the quality of my own life? And as someone who came from a very lower middle-class upbringing where my parents didn't make more than 50K per year combined, it took me a long time to make that gear shift because it seems like wasting money, but you're not wasting money if you are saving your non-renewable resource, which is time that then allows you to make even more money, 10X, 100X, whatever that

Starting point is 00:42:28 might be. Number 17, this is the last one. Aren't you guys excited? I'm so excited. Number 17, no hurry, no pause. What? That isn't a question. That's true. It's not a question. So no hurry, no pause. This is more of a mantra, I suppose. It's a fundamental reset. No hurry, comma, no pause. No hurry, no pause. Was introduced to me by Jenny Sauer Klein. You can find her at Jenny Sauer Klein, Jenny S-A-U-E-R Klein.com, who, along with Jason Niemer, who's on page 46 in the book, co-created AcroYoga, one of my current obsessions. The expression, no hurry, no pause, is one of the nine principles of harmony, which you can find on the internet. Nine principles of harmony from Brema, B-R-E-E-M-A,

Starting point is 00:43:19 a form of body work that Jenny studied for many years. I now routinely write no hurry, no pause at the top of my notebooks as a daily reminder. So the five minute journal, the morning pages, I'll write it at the very top. I also, by the way, use the state story strategy with arrows pointing in that direction from Tony Robbins quite a lot, but we don't have time to get into that. So no hurry, no pause at the top of my notebooks is daily reminder. In effect, it's shorthand for Derek Siver's story of the 45 minute bike ride versus the 43 minute bike ride. And you don't need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red faced. If you're only gaining say 5% extra in many, many cases, you can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other. So no hurry, no pause. One former Navy SEAL friend texted me, I was discussing

Starting point is 00:44:11 this with him, and he texted me a principle used in their training. And here it is. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Perhaps I'm just getting old. Aren't we all though? The sands of time flow but one way, my friends. Perhaps I'm just getting old. Aren't we all though? The sands of time flow but one way, my friends. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but my definition of luxury has changed over time. Now, these days, it's not about owning a lot of stuff. Luxury to me is feeling unrushed. So remember, no hurry, no pause. And those are the 17 questions slash one-liners, two-liners. May you find and create many of your own. And in all of these cases, be sure to look for simple solutions.

Starting point is 00:44:54 If the answer isn't simple, it's probably not the right answer. But it all starts with the right questions. If you get the right answers to the wrong questions, you're not going to get very far. But if you get even mediocre answers to the right questions, then those are the force multipliers. All right, guys, I appreciate you listening. As always, I'm so excited about this book. I can't even begin to tell you this has been a labor of love. And it's the first book I've actually enjoyed writing. So check it out. Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & No Noble, Amazon Books

Starting point is 00:45:25 Million, iBooks, IndieBound, Indiegogo, and many more. You can find sample chapters like this one, including the forward from Arnold Schwarzenegger at toolsoftitans.com. Please buy billions of copies for all your friends and family. And Kamal Ravikant, good friend of mine, brother of Naval Ravikant, who's also in Tools of Titans, actually they both show up, told me when he was helping proofread some of these chapters at the very end of my deadline. He said, you know, I've bought the four-hour work week for some of my friends who have wanted to start businesses. I've bought the four-hour body for a handful of my friends who want to lose weight. I'm going to buy Tools of Titans for everybody. There's something in here,

Starting point is 00:46:03 in all these sections, healthy, wealthy, and wise for everybody. So he's buying it for his mom. Look at that. Thanks, Kamal. All right, guys. Tim Ferriss here, signing off. I'm going to have some more sparkling water, some more coffee, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of wine. Much love to you and yours. Happy holidays, guys. And I'm sure that we will be in touch soon. Thanks for listening. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. that we will be in touch soon. Thanks for listening. of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

Starting point is 00:47:06 And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #206: Testing the "Impossible": 17 Questions That Changed My Life

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #206: Testing the "Impossible": 17 Questions That Changed My Life

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.