The Tim Ferriss Show - #284: The Answers to My Favorite Questions

Episode Date: December 3, 2017

This is an unusual episode. Instead of the typical interview format where I ask other people questions, I did what thousands of you have requested; I answered the 11 questions that are the foundation of Tribe of Mentors (and add in a few bonus answers). From beliefs that have changed my life to how I cope with feelings of overwhelm, I go into depth on all of my answers. I also recorded some of the answers on video, which you can watch on my YouTube channel.I hope you enjoy this solo episode, and find something helpful that you can apply to your life. As always, thanks for listening!This podcast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. One of the hardest parts about growing any business is finding and hiring the right team. Nothing can drain your resources and cost you time and money like making mistakes in hiring.ZipRecruiter developed its own system and platform for helping solve two of the biggest bottlenecks for employers: posting jobs easily and making it even easier to find the best candidates. More than 80 percent of jobs posted return qualified candidates based on your criteria in just 24 hours. As a listener to this show, you can give it a try for free at ziprecruiter.com/tim!This podcast is also brought to you by Helix Sleep. I recently moved into a new home and needed new beds, and I purchased mattresses from Helix Sleep.They offer mattresses personalized to your preferences and sleeping style — without costing thousands of dollars. Visit Helixsleep.com/TIM and take their simple 2-3 minute sleep quiz to get started, and they’ll build a mattress you’ll love.Their customer service makes all the difference. The mattress arrives within a week, and the shipping is completely free. You can try the mattress for 100 nights, and if you’re not happy, they’ll pick it up and offer a full refund. To personalize your sleep experience, visit Helixsleep.com/TIM and you’ll receive $50 off your custom mattress. Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why

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Friday subscribers. 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. So the last five years, what beliefs, behaviors, or habits have most positively impacted my life? A few come to mind. The first came after my good friend Matt Mullenweg, very impressive guy, considered the lead developer of WordPress, which now powers 30 plus percent of the entire internet, also runs a company that happens to be worth more than a billion dollars. He recommended that I read an article called The Tail End by Tim Urban on a blog called Wait But Why. And it makes the point very clearly also with visuals that, and I'm going to paraphrase this,

by the time you leave for this, by the time you leave for college or by the time you graduate from high school, you've spent more than 80% of the total number of hours you will ever spend with your parents before they die. Right? So think about that. I encourage you to read it, but that led me to make the decision to take my parents and when possible, my he has a real job on a trip every six months so for the last few years i've sat down with my parents or my brother or one of my parents to think up a dream location where could i take them where haven't they been so could i take my mom to paris she's never been to paris i've never spent time in Paris, really. So I took my family to Paris.

And so basically every December or January, around the holidays, and then again around June or July, I try to take my entire family on a trip somewhere. And for those people watching this or hearing this, it doesn't have to be fancy. In my case, though, I'm thinking about any place that could be really fun. It could be just a national park somewhere in the U.S., right? Going to Zion. And that has made our relationships better than they have ever been, right? I'm 40 now. And in the last two years, I just feel our bonding

ability, our care for one another, our love for one another has just gone through the roof. And it's really made me appreciate the finite time that we have left, that we all have left, but especially with my parents. And that's just been a really joyful discovery. So thanks, Matt. The next one that comes to mind is a belief. And this is a very recent one. I always viewed positive self-talk and being nice to myself as self-indulgent and optional. I prefer to just view myself as an instrument for competing, doing well, achieving. And after reading books like Radical Acceptance, for instance, by Tara Brock, which is spectacular, and realizing how much of the things that I want to work on are fixed can be traced back to negative self-talk and critical self-talk.

The belief that if you want to love others fully, you have to love yourself. Period. Full stop. End of story. You can't berate yourself constantly and think that you can fully express love to other people. I just don't think it's possible. So that's the belief that in order to love others fully, you have to love yourself, which believe me as someone who's tried to be the Terminator his whole life, on some level pains me to admit but i think it's true and last i would

say two things number one and do not explore this without professional legal and medical advice but is looking into and supporting research related to psychedelic research and if you want to hear a bit more about that or read a bit more about that, you can listen to my podcast episodes with James Fadiman, F-A-D-I-M-A-N, or Dan Engle, E-N-G-L-E. Closely related to that, although you might not think, is meditating on a daily basis. I went through a huge burnout period right after The four-hour chef and two people who are world-class performers, Chase Jarvis, incredibly successful photographer, also startup CEO, has really killed it in many, many fields. And then Rick Rubin, perhaps the most legendary music producer of all time, both said, in effect, dude, have you ever thought about trying Transcendental

Meditation? And I had a lot of pushback. A lot of pushback. I was like, ah, it seems culty and they charge you to give you a mantra. Are you kidding? I'm not going to do it. And they said, what do you have to lose? Seems like you have no downside here because you're sort of at red line. And I did it and it doesn't have to be

Transcendental Meditation but meditating 20 minutes certainly first thing in the morning and then when possible before dinner at some point, has completely changed my life in terms of being able to capitalize on that gap, that small gap between event or stimulus and my response. And that little gap, that little gap is your life. That little gap is reality. So being able to widen that gap just enough so that I can choose my response instead of being completely reactive has been huge. So those are a few things that have dramatically changed my life in the last five years. So purchases of less than a hundred dollars that have most improved my life in recent memory, because there are many purchases of less than a hundred dollars. There are a few right off the bat. Number one is this hat. This is the Sitka Dakota beanie,

and it's camo just so people don't see your head when you're walking around. You look like the Headless Horseman in your turquoise shirt. But extremely comfortable hat that for whatever reason, and I can't properly explain this, I can wear, say, in warmer temperatures, like 60, just because I don't have much coverage. I can also wear it sub-freezing, and it works in both environments. I first got exposed to this. Sitka is a hunting brand. It's kind of like the Lululemon, the most comfortable clothing in the hunting world, really high-quality gear when I was in Colorado.

And I travel with this everywhere. I also use it as a Merce man purse So I'll stick say a piece of recording equipment into this hat to protect it because it's semi padded So this travels with me constantly. That's number one might as well show you this number two Which is spray zinc. This is Thera zinc spray which is the zinc gluconate and I use this for immune support. So this travels on the side of my backpack.

And I will spray like binoculars. I'll put five or six sprays around the mouth. And I will do this two or three times probably per day when I'm traveling. And I've found it, as it appears at least to me, to make a substantial difference. If there are a lot of people getting sick and continuing to get sick, coughing and so on on a trip or on a plane, this helps me not to succumb. So this is always with me. The next one that is always with me, and all these items travel with me 24-7 effectively. They live in my backpack.

This is the Rubs device. And no, it is not a massage parlor with black windows. It is what looks like a golf ball and it has these little nubs on it. It was gifted to me. This is very, very cheap. It's like $6 gifted to me by Amelia Boone. Thank you, Amelia, who is a four-time world champion in obstacle course racing. And you roll out your feet or your hands or your forearms, in my case, with this device. And it is incredible how much it relieves pain throughout the body if you just roll out your feet properly, which is something I picked up not only from Amelia Boone, but from Ed Cohn, who's the most successful legendary powerlifter in the history of the world. I think he deadlifted 901 pounds at 220 or something insane like that. And a lot

of back pain, leg pain, in my experience, goes away when you just rub out your feet. So if I land at a hotel or when I wake up after much travel, I use this on the feet. Next up, we have this device. This isn't the most interesting angle, though. That is the most interesting angle. This is the Logitech Keys-to-Go Keyboard, and it holds a charge for a very, very long time, and I stick this in the laptop pocket. Why? Because I like to work in, say, restaurants. I like to type. I like to brainstorm in restaurants, but I don't want to have a laptop out. Or if my laptop has a problem and I can't use it, I still want to be able to type and not poke at my iPhone screen. So I will

take my iPhone, lean it against, say, a glass of iced tea or wine or whatever and Then I will pair it to this keyboard and I can type an entire chapter out It's really cool and people don't even notice necessarily that I'm working they just think I'm a crackhead staring at my iced tea for two hours straight, all right the last up and This is Increasingly important as I travel to louder and louder cities, let's say in some cases, is the following. Max Pillow Soft Silicone Putty. And this is what it looks like. These are earplugs and they're not foam. And what this allows you to do is sleep very, very, very well. And that includes laying on your side.

So what happens if you, say, roll up foam earplugs, stick them in your ear, and then you lay on your side? You feel like you have a Nerf ice pick being jabbed into your eardrum, which is not very comfortable. And I find these two also dampen sound more effectively than foam, typically. Fantastic. So those are a handful of the purchases, less than $100, that have most impacted my life and continue to. They travel with me 24-7.

All right, so what would I put on a billboard? If I could put one message on a billboard to get to millions or billions of people, it would be, you are the average of the five people you associate with most, which also happens to be probably the best advice that I received between the ages of 10 and say 15. I remember that a mentor at the time who I think was borrowing from Jim Rohn, R-O-H-N, who happens to be the mentor of Tony Robbins, long story, but he left a message on my answering machine with tapes. Remember those kids? And he left that bit of advice. He said,

just remember you're the average of the five people you associate with most, right? And that means financially, emotionally, physically, mentally, you are going to be the average of the five people you spend the most time around. All right. So choose those people as well as you can. What do I do when I feel unfocused or overwhelmed? There are a few things. First, I have a short checklist. Am I eating enough? All right. So it's very fashionable with intermittent fasting to skip breakfast, skip that meal, skip another meal. For myself, I've realized unless I am in ketosis, unless I am on a ketogenic diet or fasting or have ketones in my blood, which is an alternate fuel

to glucose, I need to eat. And of course you can supplement with exogenous ketones, but am I eating enough? If I skip breakfast and it's 1 p.m. and I haven't had lunch and I'm feeling unfocused or overwhelmed, I probably don't need to sit there and journal on my existential dilemmas. I need to eat some fucking macadamia nuts and maybe have some beans or salad or something like that. All right, so simple, simple, simple. The second would be, am I consuming too much caffeine? Real simple.

For me, if I'm feeling anxious, overwhelmed, very often, if I want to achieve a more zen-like state, there are at least two things I can do. And one is meditate twice a day, which I like to do, doesn't always happen. Meditate twice a day and do all of these other things related to cultivating peace of mind. The second one is stop consuming so much caffeine. All right. Real, real, real simple. Then last are a few tactical and strategic questions. And being overwhelmed

and unfocused, I think, are quite different things. Typically, sometimes they come along together. There are two questions, or I should say two pairs or groups of questions that I use a lot. The first one is an 80-20 analysis. And there are two questions as part of that. And I put this on paper, always on paper, because I want to trap my thoughts on paper to see if they hold any weight, to see if there's any insight, to see what is ridiculous. Maybe I have worries that once I put them down are really unfounded and kind of ludicrous. First question is, what are the 20% of activities or people that are producing 80% or more of the results and positive emotional states that I want?

The positive emotional states part is really important. All right, so you spend one or two pages on that. The second part is the opposite. What are the 20% of activities, responsibilities, or people that are producing 80% or more of the pain, the headache, and the negative emotional states that I would prefer not to have? Do another page or two. And then the last question, if you're engaged with a specific project or relationship, could be anything really, is very simple. What would this look like if it were easy?

I think very much if we're type A personality, we've competed in school, we've competed in X, we've competed in Y and Z, we are trained by ourselves to believe that if we're not redlining, if we're not overcome with effort, that we're not doing a good job. We're not trying hard enough. I think that often leads us to seek complicated paths with many, many moving pieces. So what would this look like if it were easy? So for instance, if I'm having trouble with a book and I have three months left to write it, I'll ask myself,

what would this look like if it were easy? What if I had to finish this book in a week? If I had a gun to my head or a gun to my dog's head, poor Molly, and I had to save Molly, what would I do? All right, you have a week, that's it, period. How would you write this book? And that gets rid of a lot of fluff. And I start to say, all right, well, how could I use money instead of time to fix this problem? How could I ask other people for help instead of trying to do it all myself in this situation? What would this look like if it were easy? And you can find a lot of gems that way. And just expect 95% of what you write down is going to potentially be ludicrous

and you should come up with the absurd, right? Don't edit when you're putting stuff down. But within that, you might find one or two things and you're like, that's it. Now I can save 80% of my headache, 80% of my angst because I don't have to do it the hard way. And then you can find an elegant solution that produces an even better product, even better outcome. So those are a few of the things that

I regularly do when I'm feeling overwhelmed or unfocused or distracted. So what is my favorite failure, the failure or a failure that set me up for later success? There are many. I mean, I have struck out a lot. And it's important to remember, say Babe Ruth, right? Home Run King, also the Strikeout King. And I'm not saying I'm Babe Ruth in either capacity. But one that comes to mind that is relatively fresh is The 4-Hour Chef. The 4-Hour Chef was my third book.

And I'm very proud of it. I think it's a, I was going to say fantastic book, that sounds a little self-indulgent, but I put a lot of effort into it. I think it is a solid book, but it was the first major book acquired by Amazon Publishing. So Amazon announced that it was going to compete head-to-head in a way with publishers by forming its own imprint, basically. And the book was boycotted by everybody imaginable. So Barnes & Noble, I want to say Costco, Walmart, all of these big box stores would not distribute the book. Indies also, most indies would not carry the book.

So despite the fact that I felt like we had a great product, it sold a small fraction of what I hoped would. Certainly, I think most people on the team hoped it would. And that was really, really painful. It was also my first four-color book, and I thought it would be a good idea to take 30, 40% of the photographs myself to learn how to do photography. Turns out, you probably want to tackle those one at a time and not at the same time. And it was brutal. I mean, I had, I would say a nervous breakdown during that period. My relationship suffered. I wasn't getting enough sleep. I was using stimulants to keep awake. It was bad time, uh, for a lot of reasons. And I was burned out. So

after that I was completely depleted. And I decided in the process of promoting The 4-Hour Chef, because I had done a handful of podcasts, like Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Maron, which is WTF, Nerdist, Chris Hardwick, and so on. And I really enjoyed them. I could be myself. What if I just took a break? No more books. I'm going to stop books and I will do six episodes of a podcast where I'm asking the questions because it would allow me to develop skills and relationships that would transcend that. So I'd get better at asking questions. I'd get better at fixing verbal tics and that could be applied to later projects, later books, but never really thought much of it. So I proceeded to do the podcast pretty quick and dirty. First episode, get sloppily drunk with Kevin Rose, my close friend.

It's an embarrassing first episode. And ended up falling in love with it. And now the podcast generates 10 times, I would say, the annual revenue of all of my books combined. I still love doing it. I've done more than 300 episodes. That's more than 200 million downloads. And the vast majority of people who know me, that is as say fans or consumers of anything I do,

mention the podcast. If they see me in the streets, see me in a coffee shop, they mention a specific episode of the podcast. They don't even mention the books. And that's totally fine with me. So I would say that set me up for a lot of what I'm doing now. Couldn't be happier. So thanks for that failure universe. So books I've gifted the most to other people, there are many. The first that comes to mind is any collection of the letters from a Stoic or more commonly known in academic circles as the Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca. So I actually gave away these for free because they're in the public domain with illustrations and so on as the Tao of Seneca

because I've given away hundreds and thousands of copies. It really teaches you what I consider perhaps the ultimate operating system for thriving in high stress environments, at least one of them. Then I would say also, because I read nothing but nonfiction for more than a decade, I really like to gift people I know, type A driven people, fiction, because I think many of the principles and truths contained in stories are better absorbed through fiction. Zorba the Greek specifically stands out, which chronicles the adventures of this very brainy, very analytical person, which I see as more myself, who makes all manner of mistakes in life because of that. And then this freewheeling, crazy person, Zorba the Greek.

So I highly, highly recommend that book. And then also there's a book called Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, which is incredible. And if you've ever wondered where the word grok, oh, I grok that, I don't grok that, where that came from, it's commonly used in text circles, I grok that. I don't grok that. Where that came from, it's commonly used in text circles, came from that book. And it's about a Martian developing as a human being on earth. It's a spectacular, spectacular book. And I would say last, but certainly not least, would be surely,

I think it is surely, you're joking, Mr. Feynman. Along those lines, you'll find it. And it is a book written by Richard Feynman, incredible physicist involved with the Manhattan Project, but also a polymath and had taught himself how to play the bongos, how to crack safes, how to paint, which he learned doing in strip clubs. A fascinating, hilarious guy, expert at problem solving, and also a very, very, very famous teacher. He could take complex physics concepts and break them down to the point where all he needed was, say, an apple and a pen, and he could explain something that would normally take years of prereqs. So those are a few of the books that I have gifted the most to other people. So questions. Let's talk about questions. Why are questions important? Questions are critically important because first and foremost, thinking what goes

on here is largely asking yourself questions and answering them. Secondly, if you want to get anything in life, chances are it's inside someone else's head, the knowledge, the skills, the blueprint. And the pickaxe for getting that gold is in the form of questions. All right. So there are a few things that you can do to improve questions. Number one is study questions. Watch inside the actor's studio. Listen to Terry Gross. Listen to podcasts, whether mine or Joe Rogan's or others, so that you can borrow questions and test them on other people. And there are a few things to consider when you're formulating questions. Number one is, can it be answered relatively quickly?

So for instance, if you found someone you idolize, you're in an elevator, oh my God, it's Jimmy Fallon. If you ask Jimmy a question, could he come up with a really concrete answer in five seconds or less? If the answer is no, find a different question for you or for other people. So what is your favorite book, for instance? Not a good question because people have read hundreds or thousands of books in many cases. But what book or books have you gifted the most to other people? It's going to be a short list. The search query is really refined. It's fast. Click. All right.

Much like asking yourself, what makes me happy? It's not really a great question. It's too broad. It takes too long to search. But let's just say, what makes me feel most relieved after work when I get home? Or what activities which people... all right, now we're more refined. You can answer it much more quickly and it's more actionable. Think also of the sequence of questions. So if you want to ask someone, as I do very often, a question that could be kind of

heavy or really involved, like what would you put on a billboard? If you had a gigantic billboard, metaphorically speaking, to reach millions or billions of people, what would you put on it? All right, that's a fair amount of pressure, and people, in my case, know they might get quoted. So to get them warmed up and ready for that, I don't lead with that. I'll ask them other questions that are much, much easier and less intimidating. So what purchase of $100 or less

has most positively impacted your life in the last, say, year or recent memory? Or the books question. And that gets them flowing. It gets them engaged. And then I can ask a question like that. Another trick you can use when you ask what might be a difficult question

is you can give an example. So it could be a personal example or it could be something else. So if I ask someone, what is something absurd that you love doing? Because I want that little shred of personality. I don't want to just have the actionable business stuff. I want to get to know them as a human. And I will then say, well, for instance, the number 555 is good luck to me for many reasons. So when it appears on my phone, I take a screenshot and dot, dot, dot, I elaborate a little bit. Or Cheryl Strayed, who wrote Wild, likes to disassemble sandwiches and rearrange all the ingredients so each bite is uniform. That gives them 30 seconds to think about their answer and gives them some examples. All right. A few things you should not do if you meet someone who is, say, just above your weight class in terms of professional development and you want

to connect with them. Don't ask them questions that you could answer on Google. Number one. All right. Number two, don't ask them really broad questions. They couldn't conceivably answer quickly. What should I do? What advice would you give me for succeeding? These are not good terms. If you can't define success in, say, ten words or less, get rid of it. Lose it from the question. All right. of it lose it from the question all right and i would encourage you to strive to be interested

in the form of good questions if you seek to be perceived as interesting stop talking start thinking about questions and then stop and listen one of the commonalities one of the patterns that you spot really quickly if you interview hundreds of world-class performers and i just interviewed 130 or so for my new book tribal mentors is the fact that they have consistent morning routines they have some type of recipe a boot-up sequence that they use to win the day in some fashion. And it ranges from, for instance, mindfulness, and that could be mindfulness meditation, where you find, say, Evan Williams, who is well-known for Blogger, Twitter,

also Medium, who spends time every morning, as I do, with some type of meditative practice. It could be insight. It could be transcendental meditation. You could use an app like Headspace, which I think is a great place to start. And it trains you. It allows you to practice becoming more aware and less reactive so that you're not thrown off by the unexpected challenges and problems of the day. And that helps you to be much more productive and much more centered. You can achieve that in other ways. Gratitude is a common element. So Tim

O'Reilly, who's just an incredible entrepreneur, thinker, writer, and thought leader in Silicon Valley, goes for a run and will take a photograph of a single flower on his run every morning, right? And this teaches you to pause, to pause and to assess how you're say responding to things so that is a really beautiful practice that can be done with gratitude lists i use something called the five minute journal but whitney cummings incredible stand-up comedian writer and much more also has gratitude lists and this is say naming three things that you're grateful for each morning. Tony Robbins does this. Brian Grazer, incredibly well-known, iconic TV and film producer, also does this. I think he's had 180 Emmy nominations or something like that. And that achieves very much the same

thing of present state awareness and looking for the positive as opposed to fixating on the negative. And last but not least, you have, say, Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL commander, who will lay out his clothing, his workout clothing, the night before so that there's no conscious decision required where willpower or lack thereof could intercede. His clothing is ready. He's already set his to-do list for the next day. He wakes up at 4.30. That's not quite when I wake up. And grabs the clothes, boom, directly to the gym. And he has a home gym where he does his workouts. This is also very common where people recognize these very busy, very driven people that if it's inconvenient to work out, they probably won't do it. So Jocko has a home gym where barbell, plates, squat rack, three sets of rings at different heights, a kettlebell, and you're good to go.

That's all you need. So those are a few of the things that I've seen repeatedly in different forums with hundreds of top performers that they use to win the morning so they can win the day. So in recent memory, what have I become better, say, the last year or two at saying no to? And are there any approaches that have worked well for me? There are quite a few. So if you were to look at my inbox right now, I do not believe in inbox zero as a goal. I have more than 340,000 unread email,

and I don't give out my email freely. 90% of those, I would say, are pitches of some type, people asking for time or favors, introductions, whatever it might be. A few things have helped me a lot. So for instance, with something like speaking engagements, I was chatting with my friend Josh Waitzkin, who's considered a chess prodigy. He's the basis of searching for Bobby Fisher and so on. Amazing guy and good at a lot of things, especially thinking. And his rule was instead of getting stuck in the middle and negotiating for different fees and travel and this, that, and the other thing,

he only does, and actually right now he does zero, which is the best policy perhaps for a lot of things. He does either free for causes, groups he believes in, and then full retail. That's it. Non-negotiable, this is my price list. There is no discount in any case. That's that. Also for speaking, I remember chatting with someone I won't name, but very well known. And they said the further away from my house it is, the more it costs. That's it. And so they have prices. They live on the East Coast. They said if it's down the street in New York City, it's X. If it is in the same state, but requires more than an hour, it's Y. If it's in the US domestically outside of that,

and so on and so forth. International, they almost never do, but then there's a set price. No negotiating. And speaking engagement could be almost anything, right? One that I've learned recently, which has been fantastic, which is actually in my newest book, Tribe of Mentors, is from Kyle Maynard. And you can look him up separately, but amazing, amazing, amazing guy. And he learned from a CEO who used this framework for hiring because the CEO, as part of the process, would ask his employees to interview the potential new hire. And then he would have them rank the prospect from one to 10, but he had a twist and the twist is important. It's the most important. You can't use seven. And what Kyle realized is when he accepted certain invitations

or offers or business deals, and he ranked it as a seven, he was doing it out of obligation or out of fear of missing out or some other motivation that really isn't or shouldn't be a driver for your decisions. Once you have to rank something a six or an eight, six is like a C grade. It's barely passing. That's a no. If it's an eight, you're really stoked. It's not like euphoric, I'm on cloud nine, 10 stoked, but you're pretty stoked. You's a no. If it's an eight, you're really stoked. It's not like euphoric, I'm on cloud nine, 10 stoked, but you're pretty stoked. You're really stoked. Rank opportunities, invitations from one to 10, and you can't use a seven. That's one that's really helped me a lot, and I picked that up very recently. Another comes from a friend, Derek Sivers, who is an incredible entrepreneur and musician and writer and fill in the blank.

His heuristic is if it's not a hell yes, it's a no, which actually goes hand in hand with Kyle's guideline. But if it's not a hell yes, like, fuck yeah, I want to do that, it's a no. Nothing in between. So you'll notice commonality with these is nothing in between, right? So there's some aspect of nothing in between. So I try to, in many cases, make binary decisions. So if I'm going to prepare for book launch, yes, I will do media of certain types with these following guidelines. But otherwise, say if I'm on book deadline and I'm writing, zero media, even if there are good opportunities.

Because the great ideas and the great opportunities die. They get crowded out because you say yes to too many good things. Reasonably competent people don't lose, so to speak, in various aspects of their lives because they pursue a lot of bad ideas. It's because they say yes to too many kind of cool, good things, and then they don't have space for the once every six months or once every year opportunities to come along. They're like, oh my God, that is exactly what I want to do. But it's too late because their calendar's full. All right, so whenever possible,

try to say no across the board to certain categories of things. So for me, that would be interviews, say, speaking engagements, or coffee meetings, any type of in-person meeting. And I learned from a very famous billionaire investor indirectly because I was turned down for a meeting. I know him quite well. And I said, hey, you want to get together, have lunch? I had a couple of questions about X, Y, and Z. And he said, I'd love to. Unfortunately, I am on a no meeting diet and I'm doing everything via email and only when absolutely necessary phone, but I'm doing no meetings whatsoever for the next six months because I realized it was just too disruptive

and I wasn't able to focus on my projects. So I'll very routinely go on no meeting diets, no conference call diets, no fill in the blank diets. And people are incredibly understanding for the most part. And if someone isn't understanding, that also tells you something very valuable, that they are highly sensitive, reactive, perhaps you shouldn't associate with them at all. They can't understand that, which is very non-personal. So those are a few of the things that have helped me to get better at saying no, which historically I'm actually not very good at. I like to please people. I like to please

people. I like to be liked, but I've become much, much better. And it's by having rules. It's by having policies and realizing that if you follow that policy and you're afraid of missing all these opportunities, you can test it for a month and then look back at what you missed a month. You can do almost anything for a month. And then you can assess. And 99 times out of 100, you're going to realize nothing catastrophic happened. In fact, nothing bad happened.

And look at all these good things. Look at all these fun things. Look at all these really high impact things that I was able to do. Hope that helps. Learn to say no. So what is one of the most worthwhile investments I've ever made of energy, time, whatever it might be? I would have to say creating my own real world MBA. And for that, some context. Way back in the day, I was pining after going to Stanford, Stanford GSB, Graduate

School of Business, because I really wanted to go there undergraduate. I ended up not going. And then I thought, wait, but I can get back to the pine trees and the beautiful terracotta buildings for business school. And it also would be a nice two-year vacation that looks good on a resume. I went through the process of applying twice. I went through the process of applying twice. I went through everything and it always ended at the tour of classes because I would find one or two classes I loved. There was one, I think it was called Inside Venture Capital with Peter Wendell, which was fantastic. But then there

were all of these theoretically heavy, abstract, conceptual classes that were really uninspiring to me. And I just felt demoralized, didn't know what to do. So what I decided at the time, because I was also having lunches with someone named Mike Maples, Mike Maples Jr., who's a spectacular investor. And he would ask me for PR or launch marketing advice related to his startups. And I would ask him then about deal structure, why he chose one startup instead of another. And ultimately I decided, wait a minute, why don't I take what I would have spent on business school, which is $120,000 at the time, like $60,000 a year. So 120K over two years and just create the Tim Ferriss Fund, in quotation marks, which would be my real-world MBA. And I would ask Mike if I could invest alongside him, just small amounts of money.

The assumption, this is the most important part, being that I would lose the $120,000. It's a sunk cost, right? In the same way that tuition, it's gone. Once you pay, it's gone. And you hope that at business school or in my real- world MBA, the skills I would develop, all the things I would learn, the people I would meet, the network that I would build would be worth more than that 120K over time. And right out of the gate, I made a stupid decision and lost the first 50K. What a dummy on the first investment. Oh, so I was just like, oh, okay, now what? And I remember

Mike saying, that seems a little aggressive. And I was like, oh, okay, now what? And I remember Mike saying, that seems a little aggressive. And I was like, no, man, this is going to be the next Google. Boom, like shoot my head. And yeah, complete, like walking dead immediately. And I continued then to refine things. And ultimately, that led to early stage investments in Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Alibaba. You go down the list, the 50 plus companies over the next 10 years following that because I ended up enjoying it and it worked out. By far the biggest financial wins of my life, probably forever, quite frankly, have come from the initial experiment of doing a real world MBA where I expected to lose all the money I put in, 120K over two years.

And that just blows my mind. So that was the best investment I've ever made. And you can mimic it in other smaller ways, whether you want to, or dream of being a novelist, or dream of being an A, B, C, D, or E. You can create that type of real world education. All right. Should you write a book? Should someone or anyone write a book? I get asked questions about launching books all the time. How can I make my book a bestseller? Have you written a book? No, I'm going to write a book. Have you written any books before? No. Why are you writing a book? And we get into this conversation. And ultimately, I ask one question, and that is, for the period of a year, can you make this your number one priority? For a period of at least a year, can this be your number one? If you have a company, that means your business is number two. If you have a family, that means your family is number

two. Can this be your number one priority for a year? That's the general litmus test because if you put out a mediocre book or even a good book, a good enough book, which by the way equals shitty as Brian Grazer, legendary film and TV producer would say, it's more of a liability than a help. Okay. So a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. You can't take it back. So as Michael Gerber told me, who wrote the E-Myth Revisited, which is a book that had a huge impact on me before I launched the four hour work week, he said, if you're going to write a book, write a fucking book, meaning like you're all in, all of your chips are into this book so how did I know that I should do the four-hour workweek right was that obvious was it cleared it was like dying to be a writer which by the way I don't think is a

necessary checkbox you don't have to write the book yourself necessarily open by Andre Agassi by the way Augusty Andre Agassi, by the way, Agassi, Andre Agassi was ghostwritten, but it was a collaboration that took a long time and a lot of Andre's time. Beautifully written, but nonetheless required a lot of focus from him. So you can have a collaborator, but my, I suppose, hurdle was it was easier for me to get it out of my head than it was for me to live with it in my head. It was less painful to put it down than to have it ricocheting inside my head. And I had all these experiences from 2004 to, say, end of 2005, where I was restructuring and reformulating my entire business to run without me, traveling the world for 18 months without any set schedule, meeting all these case studies. And I was teaching a class

at Princeton twice a year, sometimes in person, sometimes remotely in high-tech entrepreneurship, where I was sharing my findings about scaling a bootstrapped business. And that slowly morphed into lifestyle design, how to create a business or career to allow you to take advantage of the most valuable non-renewable resource, which is time. So I'm already giving these two to three hour classes and I would take notes. And over time, because one of the students said, why don't you just write a book and be done with it as opposed to teaching a class of 40 students, which was actually a snarky Princeton student response. It wasn't a real suggestion, I don't think. Nonetheless, I had insomnia for many, many, many, many years,

and I couldn't get to sleep because these chapter ideas would come, these stories would come to mind, and I just couldn't get to sleep without jotting down a little note on a piece of paper. And I ended up with a huge pile of paper on lessons learned and so on. And I knew that at least two of my friends, and there were two specific friends of mine, one who was trapped in a decent paying job where he had no time, disliked what he was doing, but he could finally afford that nice car. So he felt like he was trapped. And then I had a friend who had started his own company who similarly was

making decent money, but felt trapped in a monster of his own making. And I felt these notes would help them, okay? Did not want to write a book at that point. Actively did not want to write a book. All right. But I felt a moral obligation to share this material somehow. And a few of my friends who were authors recommended that I explore the path to publishing it. And I made a few assumptions going into it. Because keep in mind, I did not want to write a book. I assumed it was going to be extremely difficult and brutal to write the book, which it was. I mean, we're talking repeated moments of doubt. I should throw in the towel. I am going to have an nerves breakdown repeatedly. Okay. That has more or less been the case for

every book that I've written. I'm at five now. Okay. The second assumption was that I was going to probably hate the book itself, which I did, okay? And that has been largely true for every book I've done. Assume that up until a year after the book comes out, you're gonna look at it and be disappointed with what you've produced. Given that, the third assumption was that I would write the book,

and if it even changed the life of one or two people, that would justify all the pain, all the self-loathing, all the loathing of the book, all of the opportunity cost of putting it together. Right. And that last but not least, it was easier for me, less painful for me to get it out and throw a Hail Mary and hope for the best than to keep it inside of me and wonder what if. Okay. So a lot of different check boxes and the book, keep in mind, four hour work week was rejected by 27 publishers. And, uh, then when it was finally printed, first print run was about 10,000 copies. You don't even get national distribution with that. Nobody really expected a whole lot. And then with the same amount of focus that I put into the writing,

put into the launch, ended up hitting the New York Times bestseller list. And now it's millions of copies in 40 plus languages. Okay. But I don't think you get to millions of copies in 40 plus languages trying to write a book for the world that is going to help your business. I just don't think it happens. I've never seen it happen. And instead, check all the boxes that I mentioned. And I wrote this book for two friends very specifically. And by personalizing it in that way, by talking to them in a very conversational way, we ended up with the results that we had. Could have very easily gone a different direction. But if you can listen to everything I've just said and you think to yourself, I should write a book, then by all means, go for it. But for most people, this doesn't mean I am a great writer, therefore you need to be a great writer. No, I'm just saying it was

less painful for me to put it out than to keep it in my head. All right, what are some unusual habits that I have or absurd things that I love? All right, let's start at the top. Since I spend a lot of time trying to be analytical and rational, I have a few prized superstitions. One is that I don't use red ink for signing anything. And I want to say I picked this up somewhere in Asia, but that could be completely made up. I don't use red ink for signing things, even a check at a restaurant. All right. The second would be I don't cheers with water. Pretty sure I picked that up from an Italian. No cheersing with water. So I'll actually fist bump other people at a table, which I did at a really fancy dinner two

days ago and people thought it was very odd, but everyone else had wine. I hadn't actually, I drained my glass. That's another thing. So even if it's an empty wine glass, no, it has to be full of alcohol. And so I went around fist bumping other people's glasses of wine. Pretty odd, I would say. Let's see, in addition to that, very personal. It's not a superstition. I suppose it is. It's more of a good luck charm.

The number 555 is very good luck to me because I finished the last line of editing my second book, The 4-Hour Body. I looked up at the clock in Samovar Tea House in San Francisco in Hayes Valley at the time, and it was 5.55, and I love repeating numbers. So 5.55, if it shows up on my phone, I always take a screenshot of. And if I look at my phone and it's 5.53, 5.54, I'll wait, wait, wait, screenshot. So I always take a screenshot of 5.55. Another unusual habit, I don't think of it as unusual, but people have told me is unusual, is leaving my phone on airplane

mode 80 to 90% of the day to avoid distraction. This is particularly important when I go to bed. So I will put it onto airplane mode and it doesn't come off of airplane mode until I've finished my morning routine. Because if I wake up and I see a barrage of texts and emergencies, real or manufactured, forget about meditation, forget about everything else. And I use a meditation timer on my phone, 20 minutes plus two minute exit phase, roughly. And if I look at my phone to start that timer and it's notification text and so on, forget about the quality of that meditation session. So very frequently my phone is on airplane until I have finished the first hour of my day, my boot up sequence. And then I'm ready to face whatever might otherwise make me overly reactive.

Many people do intermittent fasting of 16, 18 hours, but I'll do five, seven, 10 days of fasting. I'm not a doctor. Don't play one on the internet. So do not be stupid. Only do that with medical supervision. I have many doctors at my disposal and I have them to help me and supervise me. That can be very dangerous if you do it unsupervised. And the last odd thing that I like not to end on the don't die fasting bit is using a makeshift eye shade when I go to sleep so I travel with various types of eye masks the sleep master being the best in my opinion but it's very thick it's hot so what I started doing when it was warm and I wanted to cover my eyes so I wouldn't get woken up too early, is I would take a t-shirt and I would fold it lengthwise. Okay, so imagine I'm folding a t-shirt lengthwise and then I'd lay it, lay the folded edge right here along my nose so it's kind of

covering my head and tuck one side under my head so it's pinned to the pillow and I just go to sleep that way. So almost every night I go to bed with a t-shirt tucked under one side of my head, kind of draped over this way with the fold right here at the bottom of my eyes. So what are your unusual habits or absurd things that you love? Because as they say, normal people, just weirdos you don't know well enough yet. So let me know what your weird habits are. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

that provides a little morsel of fun for 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. 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.