The Tim Ferriss Show - #250: Myers-Briggs, Diet Mistakes, and Immortality

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Starting point is 00:03:08 Show where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, of all different stripes to tease out the habits, routines, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This particular episode is a Q&A episode. I do these every once in a while. They seem to be well received. And specifically, I am going to respond to the most upvoted questions from subscribers to Five Bullet Friday. Five Bullet Friday is a free newsletter that I send out every Friday with, you guessed it, five bullet points of cool things that I've found or that I'm experimenting with that guests from the podcast have introduced to me, articles, books I'm reading, et cetera. It's free. It's always going to be free. And if you want to check that out, you can go to tim.blog forward slash Friday.

Starting point is 00:03:54 That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. It has more than a 60% open rate, which is outrageous compared to industry standards, especially for a list of its size. It's about a million people. And I'm going to just jump right into it. And I think that if you're a longtime listener of this podcast, you'll find at least one or two actionable pieces of information here. But I will answer them in the order they were upvoted. So we're going to start with something maybe seemingly esoteric. So question number one, this is from Nate Cornett. How do you feel about personality metrics such as Myers-Briggs, et cetera? What are your types? I am an INTJ, but I only know that because I've been told that so many times. I've never taken the test. And the value, I think, in something like Myers-Briggs

Starting point is 00:04:46 or other personality tests for personal use. Now, if you're hiring, I think they can make a very useful first or second pass assessment if you have a large funnel of applicants for, say, a division of Unilever in a particular low-level position. But otherwise, I enjoy studying questions from tests like that because they lead to introspection of some type. This is also how I use the Tao Te Ching, which is a book that has been recommended by many guests on this podcast. It is one of the five most recommended, and all of those are listed in Tools of Titans. But in the sense that questions and the prompts from the Tao Te Ching are in and of themselves only interesting to me because they prompt you or cue you to create some train of thought. So if the Tao Te Ching says,

Starting point is 00:05:45 weakness is strength and strength is weakness. Well, what does that mean? Really? It sounds just like a collection of fortune cookies, but it could, and it does prompt me to start asking questions immediately or soon thereafter, where in my life might feigning strength be a weakness or feigning weakness be a strength and so on and so forth. And I tease out that thread and pull on it. And it often leads to very interesting places, particularly if I am journaling in the morning, I collect questions. If I find interesting questions in interviews, I will borrow them, take photographs of them, put them in Evernote, write them down, whatever. And I buy books of questions and I buy, for

Starting point is 00:06:26 instance, there's one called if dot, dot, dot. And I expect 19 out of 20 questions in books like that to be useless for my purposes. There are also boxes of questions that are sometimes turned into games like Gravitas is one. School of Life, the original box of questions, I think has some real winners in it, which was co-created by Alain de Botton, who's been on this podcast, and so on. So there you have it. The value for me is in the prompting and cuing, the providing of some type of train of thought or thread that I can then explore. And I use the Tao Te Ching almost on a daily basis by flipping to a random page or having someone else select a page for me in that way, because we can get stuck in routine.

Starting point is 00:07:10 And I like the scheduled use of randomness, if that makes sense in prompts. Next question. This is by Dr. Sergo, Andre Sergo. Quote, you asked this question to Dr. Money Mustache, not Dr. Mr. Money Mustache, and I loved it. What are the most common misconceptions that your fans have about your work or philosophy? Where do most people get it wrong? All right, I'm not going to say that most people get this wrong, but the most common misconception certainly that fans or readers may have is that the goal is free time or idleness. That has never been my proposed objective. I think that controlling currencies like time and mobility allow you to multiply the lifestyle impact of each marginal dollar that you earn. But the objective was never to sit on a beach for the rest of your life, rubbing coconut butter on your ever expanding waistline. That's

Starting point is 00:08:14 not it. So the most neglected chapter, because these go together, is called filling the void in the four hour workweek. And I would say there are many other mistakes that they make in the four-hour body and so on, but I'll focus on four-hour workweek for a second. Another one is that your choice of business matters. Your choice of product matters. And I strongly, strongly recommend, and this is going to come up again in a later question, that you choose a product and service that you'd be proud to put in front of your entire family, all of your closest friends, or in front of people you idolize or look up to. So if Richard Branson is your idol, would you be proud to gift him on his, I don't know how old he is, 150, his 70th birthday or whatever it is,

Starting point is 00:09:08 this as your one opportunity to give him a gift. If the answer is no, then you might want to think about why that is the case. Now, perhaps you're just, you've created a muse that is an automated cashflow business that provides install-it-yourself mounts for flat screen TVs. That's fine. You wouldn't necessarily be proud to give that to Branson, but you wouldn't be ashamed to explain your business. And I have seen a fair number of people who use very questionable or just flat out unethical affiliate approaches or multi-level marketing approaches to try to create automated passive income of one type or another. It's very, very common and I do not agree with selling garbage or any type of promise of, income generation that you can't back up with a lot of track record.

Starting point is 00:10:09 So there you have it. In terms of, say, for our body, almost every mistake that people make related to the slow carb diet, which still has the highest adherence rate of any diet that I've seen, and I've now met probably close to 100 people who've lost more than 100 pounds and some who've lost more than 200. And you can search just slow carb diet, 100 pounds. If you want to see some amazing photographs and case studies, you can get all that information, including the diet for free. You don't have to buy the four hour body. I would love that, but you can just search 100 pounds slow slow-carb diet and it'll pop right up. The most common mistake people make is they think it needs to be complicated because most diets are complicated

Starting point is 00:10:50 because the model is complicate the profit. Let's make the diet or the exercise program complicated enough so we can sell you extra bands you don't need, sell you extra meal plans you don't need, sell you additional follow-up DVDs that you don't need, whatever it might be, DVDs, I'm getting old. And in the slow carb diet case, it's four or five rules. Don't eat anything white. Don't do this. Don't do this. Go crazy once a week. Have your cheat day, etc. There are five or six rules. And the guiding tenet should be, if you have to ask if it's okay, don't eat it. 99.99999% of the time, you already know. Or if you have to ask, leave it out. That's it. And you will not die if you have to leave out. If you're like, can I eat garbanzo beans or not? Oh, God. Short answer, you can't actually. You shouldn't. But I cover that before our body's second chapter on that. But if you're not sure, don't eat it. If you have poor portion control or something, don't eat it. All right, there we go. I'm going to move on. Next is what just missed the cut for Tools of Titans. And this is Zach. So Zach, I am going to read you an example of something that didn't make it in. And I've, based on this question, I was inspired and I put together a blog post. It's tools of Titans, a few goodies

Starting point is 00:12:16 from the cutting room floor. You can find it at Tim dot blog forward slash extras, Tim dot blog forward slash extras. And, uh, there are a bunch. There are many, many, many. In fact, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cuts that we had to make because the book was long enough at 700 pages. We didn't want it to be 1500, nor did the publisher. So I'll pull one paragraph from Naval Ravikant, who is the person I call most often for startup advice, I would say. Neck and neck with Kevin Rose. They have different areas of expertise, but overlapping. Incredible track record.

Starting point is 00:12:53 Incredibly good as an investor in multiple asset classes. And a very ethical, brilliant, brilliant guy. So the question he was answering is, what are the things that you look for in founders or the red flags that disqualify an investment or a founder? And there are a few. He goes into intelligence and defines what that actually means. He talks about energy and why that is critical. So if people are constantly looking for positive feedback, for instance, they're probably not going to make it to the end goal if they're in the often zero-sum

Starting point is 00:13:27 game of venture-backed startups. The last one is where I want to focus. And finally is integrity. Because if you have someone who has high intelligence and high energy, but they're low integrity, what you've got is a hardworking, smart crook. Especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic. They're very fast moving. People are very independent. So if someone wants to screw you over, they will find a way to do it. Fundamentally, ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. If being ethical, excuse me, let me try that in English again. If being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it. So what you're looking for is a core sense of values that rise above and beyond the pure financial incentives. End quote.

Starting point is 00:14:07 Now, of course, he's not implying that being ethical is always unprofitable at all, but it is often profitable to be unethical. Therefore, his point. All right. That is one example. You can find a bunch of others, a couple pages of extras that are fun at TimDubbBlog.com forward slash extras. Next, this is, oh, you know what? Actually, let me add a few other things because there's a follow-up to that which asked about other books. And there are a few things that I think very carefully about putting out into the world. If you see, if you hear, if you see, then you have

Starting point is 00:14:45 some type of telepathy. If you hear anything in the background, I'm in the Montreal offices of Shopify, one of the companies that I've worked with forever since they had six or seven employees. And I think they now have 2000 plus. So congrats guys, beautiful offices, by the way. All right. So there's certain things I hesitate to put out in the world or think very carefully about. One is any type of instruction or step-by-step process that could be used for very dangerous or illegal activities. I always cringe and get quite upset at journalists or media outlets who will say, put together a feature piece, and it's about how to put together a dirty bomb for less than $200. Here's what terrorists could do. And I find that to be incredibly irresponsible. And therein, they lay out the details. And I think that is really

Starting point is 00:15:40 just irresponsible and pretty despicable for clicks or whatever their metric is to create that type of public risk, I think is incredibly, incredibly irresponsible. So one that fits in that category for For Our Body, I had written up a chapter about how to have genetic testing done anonymously, because I do not like to have my name associated with a lot of my biological testing. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons. I'll give you one that you may not realize, and that is that based on your full genome,

Starting point is 00:16:20 probably only small portions of it, since we at this point can only interpret small portions, you can reconstruct, I shouldn't say you, there's certain companies that are really far ahead, who can reconstruct your face, your actual visual appearance based on your genetic code. So that in and of itself would lead you to think, well, then it's never anonymous, and we're going to get to that point. But for now, I like to keep my name out of it because there are such things as, say, specialized biological weapons. You might think I'm a complete crazy person. I know people who can design these things, and it's actually not that hard, not that expensive. So I could just be blowing a certain type of, say, trace metal into someone's face if they're predisposed to a certain neurodegenerative disease.

Starting point is 00:17:11 I know a lot more about this than perhaps I should. That's because I've spent a lot of time with odd but very competent scientists. But here we go. So the, the anonymous genetic testing was something I didn't put out because it would in effect the way that at that time you would have to do it. And even now that the way you'd have to do it in many ways would be a how to manual for money laundering and, uh, acts of terror through anonymity. Now, if you're a really smart engineer, you can figure out a lot of this, or just a generally smart person who can think hyper-rationally, you can figure it out. But I didn't want to put fuel on the fire. And here's the key piece. The benefit, the max benefit,

Starting point is 00:17:58 the utility to most people is not that high. So the public risk and the illegality that it would engender was not commensurate at all with the benefit. There are other cases where I'm putting out, say, pieces on how I learned to swim, where I assume that one out of every thousand people is batshit crazy. I also assume that a few people out of those thousand are really haphazard, maybe stupid, and will read all of the warnings and potentially not follow them. So I have to write things very carefully for risk mitigation. But even recognizing that some people might do things completely counter to my instructions. I think the benefits of say, teaching thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of

Starting point is 00:18:51 people how to swim outweighs that nominal risk. And therefore, you know, I've put out these pieces, like I think it's how I learned to swim in 10 days. I didn't learn until I was in my thirties, for those people wondering. So you can check that out as an example of what I thought about very carefully and then put out. Counter example would be a chapter in the four hour body with David Blaine, who's amazing. And if you haven't seen my episode on TV with him, you should, I'm not sure if this link is going to be active by the time that you hear this, but att.net forward slash fearless. You can watch a TV program that I did with David, which was awesome. He taught me how to hold my breath. And I went from 45 seconds to three

Starting point is 00:19:31 minutes and 33 seconds with about 15 minutes of training. I did a chapter on this in the four hour body and very quickly decided that the risks outweighed the benefits and it was removed from additional printing. Next question. We got Vesterda. Vesterda? Okay, Vesterda. I have no idea. I'm throwing a wacky accent on that just because I like it. Is what do you see yourself doing in old age? Would you take immortality if it became available? Are you hoping it does? And he or she really wants me to answer the third question in depth. Not sure it'll be in depth, but in old age, I hope to continue doing a lot of what I am already doing. Learning, exploring, finding things to experiment with, and then teaching the cream of the crop that has a really, really fantastic benefit to risk ratio for the

Starting point is 00:20:27 greatest number of people. I plan on continuing to do a lot of intense physical training. And I look to people like Don Wildman, for instance, who is one of Laird Hamilton's heroes, who at 83 is heliskiing, snowboarding, in this case, I think a month, two months, a year. Art Devaney, another who's been on the podcast, Jersey Gregorick, these are all models for me. And when you meet, in my case, because I'm a male, when I meet men, but also Gabby Reese, Laird Hamilton's wife, is a great example of this. People who are, say, well into their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, even 80s, who are doing 15 to 20 pull-ups, who are hella skiing. It removes age as a complete excuse, certainly. And so I will not only train, but spend time with people who show me what can be done

Starting point is 00:21:26 despite common excuses to your other question would i take immortality if it became available i'm assuming we're talking about scientific immortality not mythical immortality in other words i'm assuming you mean that by using fill in the blank combination of metformin, stem cell therapy, rapamycin, all of these various things, vampire-like blood transfusions with 18-year-olds, who knows, that you're able to extend your life hundreds of years or 50 years, whatever, or forever in this case, immortality. That also assumes that if you're like, Matt, you know what? I'm tired of living forever. All of my friends who can't afford this are already dead that you can just off yourself. So in other words, you're not some type of demigod who can never die whatsoever. You have the exit option

Starting point is 00:22:18 of taking the Cato route. Well, Cato was ordered to kill him. Wait, what's Cato ordered to kill himself? I think Cato actually just killed himself. Cato was ordered to kill him. Wait, what's Cato ordered to kill himself? I think Cato actually just killed himself. Seneca was ordered to kill himself. In any case, you're able to take that exit option. So assuming that option were on the table, yeah, I'd take immortality, sure. Then you always have the option to hit escape. Am I hoping it does?

Starting point is 00:22:41 This is a trickier one. I, on some level, do not. I am not pining after immortality. And there are many ways we could dig into this. I am all for extending my functional health span, certainly. But if you look at the average lifespan now, 2017, and you look at the average lifespan, say 1950, average lifespan, 1910, average lifespan, 1850. If you remove, if you isolate your socioeconomic class and you remove infant mortality, because infant mortality is

Starting point is 00:23:28 what skews averages in the same way that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average net worth is a few hundred million dollars. That doesn't mean anything. It's ridiculous, right? In the same way, when you're counting all of these babies that die at day one, day 10, day 14, the average lifespan gets dragged down tremendously. But if you remove infants, newborns, and you remove people outside of your socioeconomic class, if you're listening to this podcast, chances are the average, or if you want to look at median, whatever, lifespan really hasn't improved that much in the last 50 years, certainly. And I would just say that I worry about having all the time in the world or the perception of having all the time in the world. This is my personal concern.

Starting point is 00:24:20 There are other economical and, or I say economic and environmental concerns that I would have, but without getting too far into Methuselah and so on, the concern can be illustrated by a hypothetical question. Do you think you are more likely to write a book if you have a year deadline and a publisher holding you accountable, or if you have 30 years to write that book? I would argue you are much more likely, infinitely more likely, that's of course exaggeration, in the first case, in the former case of having a tight deadline. So I do think that there's the possibility if I were immortal, I would feel no rush, no compulsion to do many, many, many, many, many, many things. And I like the fact that I have a fire under my ass for exploring the world because it could be taken away at any moment. And also, if we're assuming that I have scientific immortality, that is barring any type of catastrophic life-ending event. So even if barring being hit by a bus or having a frozen

Starting point is 00:25:34 chunk of ice land on your head, you're going to live forever. You still aren't guaranteed a long life. So there you have it. Long answer to a short question. All right. The next question is from Paul Tor Lifeson. And Paul asks the following. Hey, Tim, you've asked a few guests about this, but what is your current view on balancing future focus goals and enjoying the present moment? Too much of one leaves you forever chasing the Joneses, while too much of the other seems to lead to stagnation and maybe even nihilism. Thanks. This is a question that I think about a lot. And I think it can, the focus on present state appreciation or appreciation in general and achievement, let's just call that future focused, can certainly shift over time when you travel up Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Starting point is 00:26:33 and you achieve greater material success, financial security, et cetera. These things can change. My current view for myself is that by routinely exposing myself to simulated poverty, to difficulty, to cheap food, cheap dress, fasting for extended periods of time, which you shouldn't do without medical supervision. Read the Tools of Titans chapter on that, please. I come to realize on a regular basis that I can be happy slash content, and those are tricky words, so I use them sparingly, with very, very little. And that the financial position I am in provides me all of the security that I would need with very rare exceptions. And for that reason, I have tried to temper my drive for achievement if it is primarily financially driven. All right. I also have, I have on my schedule, I would say daily practices for self-awareness and the exercising of gratitude. Five, the five minute journal would be an example of that. I did that this morning. I have it in my

Starting point is 00:27:55 backpack right now. I have weekly practices that allow me to be more present state aware, which I think goes hand in hand with appreciation. If you have one, you have the other. And an example of that would be screen-free Saturdays when I am avoiding, for instance, laptops, social media, and so on. I may still use my phone for Uber and other apps that maps and so on that are necessary for me to function in a city. Then quarterly resets. So two to three excursions, two to three day excursions or retreats could be, say, a silent retreat, could be a hiking trip without electronics, could be any number of different activities or lack thereof that is on the calendar. So these are things that are on the calendar. I also take extended trips with my family, meaning my parents in this case.

Starting point is 00:28:50 And if you're not spending a lot of time with your parents these days, read The Tail End, which is an article by Tim Urban on Wait But Why. It might change your life. Check it out, The Tail End by Tim Urban, and so on and so forth. very smart, very accomplished, very different people who I happen to think are pretty well balanced in both achievement and appreciation, but are in different modes currently. You can listen to my podcast with Mark Andreessen, billionaire entrepreneur and investor, who's fascinating. So Mark Andreessen, if you just search his name and my name, it'll pop right up. And contrasted with that, you could check out my interview with Derek Sivers. I have two with Derek. They're both phenomenal. And Derek, I would say, is more in the monk mode side of things. And when people ask him how to scale their business,

Starting point is 00:29:58 which he has done, he says, why do you want to scale your business? He has a lot of great questions. So I would recommend checking that out. All right. Next question. Everyone says go after your vision slash passion. No speaker the English. Everyone says go after your vision slash passion. Do you have any suggestions on figuring out or creating a vision to go after? Not everyone. Here's my answer, not everyone says go after your vision or passion. I do not say those things because I think they are two words that have been overused to the extent that they carry little or no meaning. Generally, my approach has been treating my life as a series of six-month projects, two-week experiments,

Starting point is 00:30:46 and then assessing opportunities after each has been launched and achieved some type of critical mass. So I do not have a five or 10-year plan, number one, which is related, because some people assume they're going to find their one true life passion that will guide them for decades. No doubt there are people who fit this profile. I am not one of them. I generally, in selecting my projects and experiments, use excitement as a barometer. It's pretty simple, like sympathetic nervous system, what gets you all hyped up. And to determine that, you don't sit down and think your way through it. You have to try a lot and see what bites you, meaning what gives you the itch. And the only way you do that in my experience,

Starting point is 00:31:31 or at least for me, is by throwing a lot against the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to get out, be curious, take classes. I took my first fencing lesson recently, for instance. I am in Montreal learning some Quebecois just a little bit. It is a little rough around the edges. Limited use outside of Canada. But I'm very, very curious. Even if I never use something, again, I feel compelled because I enjoy the learning process and interacting with people who are excited to teach just about anything. Greek, Turkish, doesn't matter. Even if I know there's a 99% likelihood,

Starting point is 00:32:11 I'll never use it again. So get out and try things. You need to schedule, be more social, make yourself uncomfortable. All right. And one way that you can try to find the Venn diagram overlap of what excites you and what could sustain you for a longer period of time, even if that longer period is just six months, is asking yourself, what are you better at than your friends? What do you find easy or easier than your friends? What are your friends impressed by that you can do that other people find more difficult? And you could use that as a hypothetical when you try things. How would my friends fare at this? And if you are like me, very competitive, then when you find the overlap of something that

Starting point is 00:32:58 excites you and something where you seem in some predetermined fashion through genetics or interests or otherwise to be better than average that often at least will give you something to work with for six months. I don't have a prescription for 10 to 20 year plan because I do not have one. Next, actually not next, this is a subtext. this was a follow-up uh meaning a slightly hidden portion of this question that i just covered uh personally i see myself jumping around a bunch this is the uh design small empires quote personally i see myself jumping around a bunch and essentially lowering the chance that I hit mastery in any given one. None of them feel like they fulfill me enough to go 120% into just one, but maybe the diversification is what is causing

Starting point is 00:33:51 the lack of fulfillment. Anyway, we'd love to get your thoughts. Side note, I read the book you put in a quarterly box. That's quarterly.co if you guys want to see it. And the book, if you guys want to check it out, is The Crossroads of Should and Must by L-E-L-L-E, Luna. The Crossroads of Should and Must. A great read that hits on this question. So that book does, I think, hit on this very, very specifically. But I want to just point out something here. There are a number of assumptions built into your questions that I would test.

Starting point is 00:34:24 So the first was, everyone says go after your vision, passion. Do they? Because I don't, and I know a lot of friends who don't. So I would look for exceptions. Whenever you find yourself saying everyone, always, never, look for exceptions. Because you don't want to calcify your thinking that way. And so essentially lowering the chance that I hit mastery in any given one, that presupposes you have to have mastery to find this passion slash vision slash excitement. I don't think

Starting point is 00:34:54 that's necessarily true. I love to try to get, say, in the top 5% of the general population in a given skill very quickly, say within six months. And that can be done for many, many things. I talk about it a lot in The 4-Hour Chef, which is actually about accelerated learning, which I know is confusing. But Josh Waitzkin, on the other hand, really wants to take himself and others from being in the 99th percentile to the 99.999% tile, if that's even the thing. So Josh Waitzkin would be an example of that mastery-focused individual. So that's assumption number one, which you can test and disprove pretty quickly. The next is none of them feel like they fulfill me enough to go 120%

Starting point is 00:35:40 into just one. That implies that you have to go 120% into just one. And I don't think you do. In fact, and you can read, if you just search Jack of trades and my name, you will find a short article that I wrote about some of the advantages for some people like Steve jobs, for instance, in being a generalist. And actually Mark Andreessen and Scott Adams of Dilbert fame have talked about this, this combining of two things that say you're in the top 10%, the top decile, inability for often beats the one person who is attempting to be in the top 1%. So if you're attempting to go to the MBA, very, very hard road ahead of you, unless you're the one in a million who are going to make it. If however, you are say

Starting point is 00:36:32 a really good engineer and you combine that with law degree, well, that is pretty odd. That's an unusual combination. You can take that a long, long way. If you are say an MBA student who suddenly becomes a fantastic speaker. So you focus on communication. That's a force multiplier. All right. So you can read a lot on career advice. If you search career advice, Scott Adams, that'll come right up. All right. Next question is from Nathan. Here we go. Hi, Tim. You put yourself through mental and physical situations that normal folk would run a mile from. What is your self-talk on the lead up to and during those situations? Getting an insight into your doing phase may help many to use the same self-talk

Starting point is 00:37:18 to take their first steps to something bigger. Thanks, Nathan. From the UK. All right. Self-talk is, is I find a cool topic and I ask a lot of my guests about this. Like when you did X, what was the monologue or what was the dialogue? What was the self-talk internally? I'll tell you for me. And when you pose this question, I thought of a few things. I thought of extreme cold exposure. So let's say getting into an ice bath that's four feet deep and ice from top to bottom. There's no getting away from it. So doing something like that for the first time. Or something like yabusame, which is something I would not recommend. Japanese horseback archery.

Starting point is 00:38:02 There's some video of me trying that on the internet. There are a few things that I might say. Number one is, you know, I've prepared or I'm more prepared, meaning than other people who have attempted this. So I've done my homework. I've done the training. I've put in my time. I am prepared for this. Even though I'm afraid of it, I'm prepared for it. That could done the training. I've put in my time. I am prepared for this. Even though I'm afraid of it, I'm prepared for it. That could be one line. The other would be along the lines of, quote, and I'll let you look it up, Cus D'Amato, the first trainer, a real trainer of Mike Tyson in boxing, was just a phenomenal trainer, had an incredible, incredible track record. And he would say, and I'm paraphrasing, but that the hero and the coward feel the same thing. It's how the hero

Starting point is 00:38:50 responds that make him or her different. So I would just remind myself that fear is natural. Being uncomfortable is natural. Feeling anxious is natural. That is what happens before you do something like this. It's not unique to me. Then the last thing that I will sometimes say to myself, and since I'm not politically correct, I won't try to be. This may seem offensive to people. I find it useful. Is whether you're getting on stage to give a speech or I don't need that for speeches necessarily at this point since I've done so many, but for something that I've never done before that I'm very nervous about, I'll ask myself, have any other people say less driven or if it's a physical activity, older or fatter or

Starting point is 00:39:39 less pain tolerant, figured this out and done this before? And the answer is almost always going to be yes. Meaning you're afraid you're starting to make excuses or you're starting to say things to yourself. Like for instance, I remember before a sports competition at one point, I said, you know, in my head, if I got a silver medal, that would still be fantastic. And that is not how you win a gold medal, by the way, I don't think in my experience. So I snuffed to that and I said, has anyone who is less prepared, less well-trained, older, younger, whatever might be viewed as a handicap or disadvantage, have they won a gold medal if the answer is yes I have no excuses I am prepared therefore that is my goal and those are a few of the things that I might say to myself before any of these I think competition brings

Starting point is 00:40:37 out that type of self-talk a lot more than independent self-experiments. All right. Next, this is from Gagorski26. Well, Gagorski26. Oh, another thing. Actually, I forgot one thing that I might say to myself, which is that even if this turns out poorly, it's going to make a good story. Even if I hate this, it's going to make a funny story. And that doesn't mean do things that are dangerous. Speak to your qualified professional and medical doctor and attorney and common sense advisor before doing anything, obviously. But I did see a t-shirt at one point on a rather attractive girl in New York City, which made it very distracting for reasons that will become obvious. The shirt said, bad decisions make good stories. All right. Bad decisions make good stories. I thought that was

Starting point is 00:41:35 very funny. And I think that in some cases, bad experiences can also make good stories. You don't want to be haphazard. You don't want to throw caution to the wind and do something that is extremely high risk. But the point being, if you get into a nice bath with someone else and you can't hold your bladder because it's too cold and you pee and they see it and they're really pissed off, that'll be funny for your friends later. Okay. Next question. This is from Gagorski26. Many of your guests, when asked what advice they would give to their younger selves, say, quote, don't work so hard, end quote, or quote, take time and enjoy it, end quote. But do you think they would have gotten to where they did if they followed their own advice? This is a very good question. I would say that I want to say no. I want to say no. And most of them would also, I think, give that answer.

Starting point is 00:42:36 There's a good chance that the answer is no. But it is not automatically 100% a no. There is the possibility that they could have been selectively focused and achieved great things, maybe even greater things. But there is a period of time, and this relates to an earlier answer, about finding excitement when to determine what you're good at, to determine what you're excited by, which by the way leads to energy, which was one of the three criteria that Naval looks for when he's investing in companies. So in the founders, energy is one of them. How do you get energy?

Starting point is 00:43:15 One of the prereqs is that it is a burn, not just an itch. It is something that excites you so much that you can plow through brick walls. Okay. To figure out what triggers you that much and what you're obscenely good at more than the people you'll be competing against, you have to try a lot of stuff in the beginning. In the beginning could mean starting in high school. If you're skipping college, let's say in the beginning could mean right after college, it could be when you're 40 or 50, it doesn't matter. But when you get started, say in entrepreneurship, assuming that's what we're talking about, you have to try a lot, throw a lot on the wall to see what works, what doesn't, what you like, what you dislike, and so on.

Starting point is 00:43:58 So you can do an 80, 20 analysis, at least in my, I suppose, portfolio of tools, you would then use an 80-20 analysis to determine where you get the maximum outputs for the minimum inputs. And to do that type of analysis, you need a data set. So you have to try a bunch of shit. Pardon my French earmuffs, children who may be listening in the car. And that does take a lot of effort. So don't work so hard probably doesn't apply in the very beginning. However, afterwards, take time and enjoy it. I have come to believe that taking a little bit of time to appreciate, which relates to an earlier question, and be grateful for what you have is very important. Because if you can't appreciate what you have, nothing you get will ever make you happy, if that makes sense, because you'll always be on to the next thing.

Starting point is 00:44:52 And there's a terrible, terrible, terrible phenomenon called hedonic adaptation that you guys can look up. It's sometimes called experience stretching, but hedonic adaptation applies to more than experiences. So you guys can look that up. In any case, the point being, I think that you can be very, very, very hard driving, but still have a five minute morning practice of using something like five minute journal or morning pages, or a gratitude exercise, like the jar of awesome, which you may not have heard of. You guys can look that up. I don't think they are mutually exclusive. And you want to be very careful about false dichotomies, as Matt Mullenweg would call it. So there you have it. I do think it's possible that they could have by A, not working so hard,

Starting point is 00:45:38 B, taking time and enjoying it. Taking time and enjoying it, I don't think is mutually exclusive. I think you can also work your ass off on the things that matter. So common misconception about me, I have no problem whatsoever with hard work, really hard work. And believe me, I can do it when it is applied to the right things. And that is a critical condition. Don't work so hard in the beginning. Chances are you're going to have to do a lot of stuff. And to do a lot of stuff in a constrained timeframe, got to put out the effort. All right. Next question is, that's not the question. That's me buying myself time. This is from DE1073. Catchy, catchy name. And here it is. Hi, Tim. What would your advice be for students preparing to take the MCAT? If I'm not forgetting, I believe

Starting point is 00:46:34 that is from med school. One, what would an 80-20 breakdown look like? Where would you spend most of your time to get the best results? Also, do you have any advice? I'm sure I could re-listen to older podcasts and find these on retaining information. Maybe routines that could make the hours spent studying extremely productive to get the best results from them. Well, this could be a long, long, long conversation. So I will give you some very specific recommendations, but I will also advise or suggest that you read the meta-learning section of The 4-Hour Chef, which goes into a lot of this. Particularly if you are dealing with hard-to-recall and retain material, then you may want to use some types of mnemonic devices for turning the abstract, say different numbers and theorems and so on, into the concrete images, which you can peg and remember very easily. So if anyone listening,

Starting point is 00:47:30 for instance, wants to get to the point where you can memorize a shuffled deck of cards and give it to someone and tell them the exact order or memorize, say, a hundred digits of random numbers, a hundred digit string of random numbers forwards and backwards, you can do that with about two weeks of training. Okay. But the points that I will make are number one, practice tests over and over and over and over again under stressful conditions. A mistake that many people make is they take a test and they take it in perfect conditions. They are sitting at their laptop or with a book open in their completely quiet room and the setting is ideal. Maybe they just had a foot rub, ate a nice sandwich. They

Starting point is 00:48:18 have a dog there to keep them calm. Fantastic. But just because you perform well there doesn't mean you're going to perform well in say a crowded test taking hall or in front of a computer in some type of lab when there's some person next to you sneezing and farting the whole time. So you want to expose yourself to different types of stresses. Once you have an acceptable degree of performance in practice tests in a controlled environment, you want to start adding stressors. What does that mean? I'll give you some real world examples from my life, from my last TED talk. And if you guys want to see that, I'm very proud of it.

Starting point is 00:48:57 It just came out a couple of weeks ago. Tim.blog forward slash TED. You can check it out. But to practice for that, I did many, many different things. But one of them, which was very important, is I didn't just rehearse in front of one or two friends or by myself. I would go to the offices of startups that I work with. And you could certainly do this with Toastmasters or elsewhere. Or you can get up in front of a completely random group of strangers at a food court or something.

Starting point is 00:49:29 And in my case, I did in offices and I would ask my friend within the company, could you please gather a group of people during lunch hour? Just tell them that someone's rehearsing their TED talk. They'd love feedback. It's a rough draft. And then I would have a room full of 15 or 20 people who expect to be entertained who are strangers. Very important. I don't want my first rehearsal in front of a large group of strangers or a decent group of strangers to be when I stand up in front of 3,000 people or however many at TED with the spotlights on me. That is just asking for a catastrophe. All right. So that's one way that I did it. Another way that I did it was assuming my heart rate would be pounding through my chest when I got on stage at Ted is I would consume at different points. You know, once I graduated from in front of a group, then I would calm down in front of 10 people, 20 people right now I'm calm. Then I would pound, say two double espressos. All right. And don't be an idiot. Use your common All right, now I'm calm. Then I would pound, say, two double espressos. All right. And don't be an idiot. Use your common sense here. But I would add caffeine so that I

Starting point is 00:50:31 would have to deal with a highly stimulated, sympathetic, active nervous system. While I'm doing this, I'm adding a stressor. You could also deliberately, because if you're not going to sleep well the night before a test, you better make sure that you can perform on very little sleep. And you want to have that confidence because in the back of your head when you sit down to take the test, you don't want to be saying to yourself, man, if I had just gotten more sleep, I'm probably going to bomb this test because I always get eight hours and I only got four hours last night. Prepare for that. You want to train as you're going to compete. So at some point, you should, and I was just going to say that you should also never test, say, new supplements in athletic competition, which a lot of people do. And it's just asking for a huge left hook to the head metaphorically. So you, not necessarily pull an all-nighter, but sleep for four hours, get up,

Starting point is 00:51:24 wait until the appointed time when you know you're going to take your test. So in my case, I knew because I asked that I'd be giving my TED talk around 5.30, 6 o'clock. So I waited until that time on four hours of sleep, and then I gave my talk over and over and over again. In the case of, say, archery, I was working on archery for a while, and I wanted to get accustomed to doing that under stressful conditions. And I would do kettlebell swings and burpees and so on to get my heart rate to 180 or so, 190, and then hop up and immediately try to take shots. So it's not enough to have the skills. You have to have the comfort with discomfort that can be achieved by adding stressors.

Starting point is 00:52:09 So hopefully that is helpful. One more thing for factual recall. I would recommend that you check out a book that helped me a lot in high school and college. And I think it ages well. I haven't read it in forever, but it is called to the best of my memory, get it? Your Memory and How to Improve It. Last name of the author, Higbee, H-I-G-B-E-E, I believe. Your Memory and How to Improve It by Higbee. If you want to hear a world-class memory competitor on the podcast, Ed Cook is one of those. He is a fascinating, fascinating and hilarious guy. So Ed Cook, C-O-O-K-E, if you want to hear him, he's been on the podcast. And so you can check that out. He was the coach in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein, which is the type of odd imagery that is easy to remember, by the way. And that's

Starting point is 00:53:00 why it's the title. So Moonwalking with Einstein. And it is about how Ed took an American journalist who'd never competed and turned him into a national memory champion in a year, I believe it was. All right. So the next question is probably the last question for now. I'll keep this episode a little on the shorter side. And this is GTO Reddits, GTO underscore Reddits. All right. Here is the question. Quote, the least confident person in the world, me, craves confidence. What are some effective ways to create it in our daily lives? Some backstory. I'm going to be old this year, 50. I have little to show for my time on this planet. My lack of confidence is a major contributor to this situation. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks. This relates very closely to my answer to the previous question and adding stressors. The premise that to become comfortable with discomfort, you have to schedule it. You have to impose it on yourself. So I would, along those lines,

Starting point is 00:54:16 start with delineating two types of confidence. You have uninformed confidence, which is, I think I can do X. I believe I can that genre. And therefore it has generally at best mediocre results from what I've seen. Informed confidence. So we talked about uninformed confidence. Informed confidence is something different. It's not, I think I can do X. I believe I can do X. It's, I know I can do X because I've done it. And that requires that you go from action to confidence. You don't, you don't start with confidence and then take action. I don't know anyone really who has done that. I mean, there is self-talk, like I mentioned, when you're getting into, say, an ice bath for the first time that you can use, even though you haven't developed the confidence there, you don't competence, confidence and competencies in other areas that give you the belief, which is well-founded,

Starting point is 00:55:30 that you can handle what you're about to do. It's an informed confidence. So the way I recommend exploring this is looking at what I call comfort challenges. And comfort challenges were part of the end of almost every chapter, I want to say, in the four-hour work week. And they're a really, really, really important part of the book. I never really upplayed it or emphasized it, but it's a critical piece of the book. And you can get an example of one, which is the lie-down challenge by looking up someone named Till H. Gross, T-I-L-L, middle initial H, Gross, G-R-O-S-S. And he credits comfort exercises to completely changing his life. And his story is really amazing. I mean, he's met many of the people he viewed as untouchable icons. He married the girl of his

Starting point is 00:56:20 dreams. It goes on and on. And it began with him developing confidence through action by making himself selectively uncomfortable in different ways. The lie down challenge is pretty simple. And here's what it looks like. And you should not, you should not hugely disrupt the public peace. You should not get yourself arrested, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, disclaimer, disclaimer. But the way it works generally, let's say, is you go into a coffee shop at a crowded time. And I consider it cheating to do this with someone else. You should do it by yourself. Otherwise, it's too comfortable. The whole point is to make yourself uncomfortable. And you're in line for your coffee. Let's just say you think it's going to be five to 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:57:09 It doesn't need five minutes. It doesn't matter. Then you just, you just slowly get on the floor, lay on your back. You fold your hands over your stomach if you want, and just lay there for 10 seconds. It could be 30 if you're really aggressive and you don't say anything. You don't say I'm doing experiment. You don't say I'm doing a comfort challenge. You don't give any explanation whatsoever. Someone asks you if you're okay. You say, yeah, I'm fine. Just take an arrest. And then you get up and you just continue on with your day. That is one type of comfort challenge. Another, which is appropriate for this location that I'm talking about, coffee shop is the 10% coffee challenge or the coffee challenge.

Starting point is 00:57:52 Noah Kagan is an entrepreneur has been on the podcast, talks about this K A G A N. And it's real simple. So you get to the front and then you, it doesn't matter where you are. You could be at a Starbucks. You could be at the most corporate place imaginable. You ask for 10% off of your coffee, your tea, your water, whatever you're buying. And again, you cannot say you're doing an exercise. You just say, I mean, you could say, hey, it's a nice guy discount. Can I have 10% off? And you have to ask at least twice.

Starting point is 00:58:19 All right. And that's it. Nothing bad is going to happen. Shouldn't go to jail. It will make you uncomfortable. It will make other people a little uncomfortable, but really nothing disruptive. And that's it. So those are two examples. And very hilarious. I was chatting with a friend of mine who's a very accomplished entrepreneur. And I asked him if he had done the coffee challenge. And he's like, oh man, that's ridiculous. Why would I need that? And I said, because you've been putting off A, B, and C, which you want to do, but you're afraid of rejection or whatever. And this is a way to inoculate yourself in a sense, or at least develop a higher tolerance to that. And he said, oh, that's nonsense, man. I can do that a hundred times a day. Why would I do that? And I said,

Starting point is 00:59:04 thou doth protest too much, sir. Why don't you do it? And then we can oh, that's nonsense, man. I could do that a hundred times a day. Why would I do that? And I said, thou doth protest too much, sir. Why don't you do it? And then we can talk after that. He's a younger guy. And so he sent me a text a day later. He walked around the block eight or nine times with sweaty palms before he was able to go in and ask for a discount, which he got. And he was able to get his coffee with a 10% discount. And it had this host of effects. It had this ripple effect

Starting point is 00:59:32 that was very unexpected, entirely intended by design on Noah's part and on my part. But that is the power of comfort challenges. And by subjecting yourself to controlled discomfort and controlled challenges, that is how you develop confidence. You do not think your way into confidence. You act your way into confidence, which comes along with competence. And you need both. All right, guys. So that is what I'm going to answer for today to do a slightly shorter episode.

Starting point is 01:00:06 I will be doing more of these. If you want to give me your questions and have me answer them, make sure you subscribe to Five Bullet Friday. It is free. It's always going to be free. And it's really fun. People enjoy it. You'll be joining many, many names you would recognize that I'm not going to mention, but people have been on the podcast, household names who subscribe to this. So check it out. I think you'd like it. If it sucks, you can tell me on Twitter, but go to Tim.blog forward slash Friday and you can check it out. It's if you don't like it, unsubscribe, but that is it. It's a more manageable way for me to take questions from everybody. And that is it for now. So as always, thank you for listening. And you can find the show notes, links, and so on from this episode, along with every other episode at tim.blog forward slash podcast that has all the podcast episodes and everything. And I'll put show notes, links,

Starting point is 01:01:03 et cetera, for the books and everything else that I mentioned in this little ditty. So I hope you enjoyed and thank you for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented after a acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. This specific one includes chaga and lion's mane, and it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement, and for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with

Starting point is 01:01:55 me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their products sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you would get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong, but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find Chaga

Starting point is 01:02:40 specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option. And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner of my kitchen. You can try something. You can try a sample pack, which is great also. Right now, by going to foursigmatic.com forward slash Tim, that's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash Tim, and use the code Tim, T-I-M Tim to get 20% off of your first order.

Starting point is 01:03:08 And they're not that expensive anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audio books and they are one of my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time, and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's amazing, and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself. One of the most soothing voices of all

Starting point is 01:03:51 time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become The 4-Hour Workweek. So go to audible.com forward slash Tim, and you can choose one of these two books or any of many, many other options. That could be books, magazines, and much more. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can also access a free 30-day trial. Just go to audible.com forward slash Tim. You can't make more time, but you can make the most of it. So turn your travel or your commute into something more with a free trial at Audible. Go to audible.com forward slash Tim to start now and get your free 30 day trial.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #250: Myers-Briggs, Diet Mistakes, and Immortality

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #250: Myers-Briggs, Diet Mistakes, and Immortality

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