The Tim Ferriss Show - #289: How to Handle Information Overwhelm (and Social Media)

Episode Date: January 4, 2018

After reading Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors, many of you have asked me how I process all of the information I receive.This episode will help you manage information overwhelm, recommend... a few techniques for dealing with social media, and answer a few questions that have been frequently asked about building a world-class network and writing books.I hope this information strengthens the signal, discards the noise, and helps you make every piece of information that you choose to receive easier to process.Enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you’ll get 30 percent off your first order at AthleticGreens.com/Tim.This podcast is also 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!***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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Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement,
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Starting point is 00:01:25 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 I created Five Bullet
Starting point is 00:02:00 Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything
Starting point is 00:02:40 else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet 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. Social media. Let's talk about the abusive spouse we all know that we go back to because they give us a flower, and we walk back onto the internet, and first thing that happens is they throw a brick out of a window as we're walking on the sidewalk and catches us in the teeth. Anyway, a little dramatic maybe, but internet's a rough place and social media is certainly a full contact sport. And I do have a few guidelines or policies for myself that help me to maintain my sanity. Number one is that my phone is on airplane mode, I would say 80 plus percent of my day. This is particularly critical post dinner
Starting point is 00:03:47 all the way until I finish my morning routine the next day. So my phone is almost never on, or I should say off of airplane mode when I'm in bed. I don't like the health implications particularly, and I don't want to go into a reactive mode when I wake up.. I don't like the health implications particularly, and I don't want to go into a reactive mode when I wake up. I want to have my meditation and or exercise and sitting down doing, say, a five-minute journal or determining my top one or two priorities for the day while I have my tea. And then and only then, once I have calibrated my true north for the day and my one or two must-do to-dos that make everything else on the list easier or irrelevant, only then do I open the window in my bulletproof car and let the bullets start whizzing.
Starting point is 00:04:42 And that I'm only referring to in the case of text messages and potentially email. I do not have notifications on my phone for most things. I do not have email notifications. I do not have news notifications. I turned off all news notifications. I have no social media notifications. I want to be able to select the exact times that I engage, if I engage on social media. So a few thoughts. Number one is that if you don't want to amplify something or
Starting point is 00:05:15 encourage someone, then starve a given, say, tweet of oxygen. So the first, my default action for negativity or attacks is starve it of oxygen because I'll have people deliberately attack me just to provoke a response because it will get them, it will benefit them for me to respond. So I very, very, very rarely respond to any type of attack on the internet for many different reasons. Also because it will then, in almost a sunk cost fallacy type of way, engage me and make me feel committed to engaging. So if I send a retort and I think it's addressed them or in some way defeated them and they respond,
Starting point is 00:06:00 I will feel the inclination to respond yet again and then you're just wrestling in the mud with the pig. Makes you filthy. Makes the pig happy. So I opt out whenever possible. And I don't remember exactly who this is attributed to. But the quote is, the best revenge is living well. So that's how I feel.
Starting point is 00:06:20 The best revenge is living well. And the best way to live well is to ignore things. And the even better way to live well is to not see things. So I never look at, for instance, home screens on, say, Twitter. I will look at my at replies because many of my readers and listeners are very good at finding things I find really, really interesting and fascinating. Say, hey, Tim, I thought you'd really enjoy this study related to A, B, and C. Hey, Tim, you shared this video about blah, bitty, blah in Five Bullet Friday newsletter. I thought you'd love this video that very few people have seen outside of Poland. Awesome. Fantastic. That's
Starting point is 00:06:59 the stuff I want to see. So Twitter is useful for specifically looking at feedback via at mentions, but also connecting with celebrities or well-known people, I should say, who then can communicate with you if they follow you, or if you can catalyze, you can encourage them to follow you in a bunch of indirect ways, like retweeting things they've done, favoriting things they've done, following them, doing all three of those things at the same time, or in rapid succession, then you can DM with them and neither of you has to exchange personal information. That is how I've got probably 40 of the people who are in some ways above my weight class to be involved with Tribe of Mentors. But the different social media networks also, to me,
Starting point is 00:07:46 represent different types of neighborhoods. So Twitter is, of those I engage with, readily the most poisonous in a way. It's not the most violent. There are others that are more violent. But it's really a street, as I mentioned in the beginning, where you walk down the street and people are throwing potted plants at your head for no apparent reason and yelling at you and calling you names. And it's really a pretty
Starting point is 00:08:19 nasty neighborhood, not very friendly. Facebook is significantly better, I think in part because there is less anonymity. It's significantly better in my experience. And then one level further would be, maybe it's just my experience, but Instagram. I find Instagram to be a much, much friendlier environment. So I'm most inclined to look at a, say the entire bulk of comments to a specific post on Instagram because people aren't dicks as much. They're still idiots on Instagram. Don't get me wrong. And I also have absolutely no problem with muting or blocking people. So if someone comes to my profile, to my post, and they start berating me, I view that as them coming into my house, kicking off their shoes, or keeping their shoes on, putting their feet up on my dinner table,
Starting point is 00:09:12 and spitting on the floor. So they're not invited back. I routinely block and mute, just without any regard for whether those people are having a bad day and they're just off, they're gone. It's a one-strike-you're-out policy. And if I feel that I am already pre-agitated, meaning I have a lot going on, I'm feeling somewhat reactive or combative, I think very carefully about going on social media. And I think about it specifically at night. So let's say that I'm going to have a really late dinner. It's like 10 o'clock dinner, so I'm probably going to go to bed within the next two hours. And I'm tempted to go on Twitter
Starting point is 00:09:56 because sometimes I'll look at my verified app mentions and it's like, oh my God, such and such basketball player or such and such director or a person, athlete, whoever it might be, listens to my podcast. How cool. But that's, I would say, 20% of the time. 80% of the time, there's going to be someone who's like, Tim Ferriss is a stupid blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm going to get my knickers in a twist and I'm going to be all wound up and potentially angry right before going to bed. The worst possible time for me to be stuck in my head considering hypothetical arguments and how I could win those arguments.
Starting point is 00:10:41 Not productive, not helpful. So I think about that. I'm like, if I turn on this phone and I look at Twitter, there's an 80% chance that I will have a bad outcome. Okay, let's not do it. And I put it down. So those are a few of the ways that I think about managing social media, so to speak. Managing by neglect and cultivating selective ignorance, I think is very, very important because you have in social media companies with billions of dollars of capital in R&D and advertising and product development whose sole job is to take you off task. And one of the most effective ways to take you off task is to make you angry. All right. This is what many of the polarizing news outlets have figured out and used for a very, very long time. If it bleeds, it leads. If I can scare
Starting point is 00:11:40 you, make you upset, that takes you off task. So the advertisements you're going to see might do that. And certainly, I think in today's political climate, people are more interested in fighting than reconciling. It would appear the vast majority of people are taking what I would consider the lesser route to making themselves feel better. You can make yourself better, or you can make yourself feel better. You can make yourself better or you can make yourself feel better.
Starting point is 00:12:08 Those are not the same thing. You make yourself better by evaluating your own weaknesses, by evaluating your own strengths and working on yourself. It's hard work. It takes focus. It takes dedication.
Starting point is 00:12:22 You'll have painful moments. But ultimately in the long term, it makes everything easier. So as one of my mentors, Jersey takes dedication, you will have painful moments, but ultimately in the long term, it makes everything easier. So as one of my mentors, Jersey Grego, would say, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. All right, so you can make yourself better. If you want to make yourself feel better, you tear other people down, and you throw mud, and you spend time on social media biting ankles, and that might feel good in the short term but in the long term you're going to lose. You're going to lose in competition and you're going to lose your own self-respect and that I think is the perhaps the ultimate travesty. So
Starting point is 00:13:00 some thoughts on social media but focus on making yourself better, not making other people feel worse and yourself feel better. That's a loser's game. And when in doubt, fucking starve it of oxygen and focus on what you're supposed to be doing. Because social media ain't it, generally speaking. Good luck. So I get asked a fair amount, how do you contend with the sheer volume of information and advice that you hear and receive from, say, podcast guests, right? Because I'm doing six podcast episodes a month. They are two to four hours in length, typically. And it could seem that I, and maybe even my listeners,
Starting point is 00:13:47 would be getting waterboarded with details to the extent that they wouldn't be able to absorb or assimilate them. And it's pretty simple for me. There are a few different tactics and I would say beliefs that allow me to get a lot out of it without feeling overwhelmed. The first is actually something that relates to writing after doing extensive research, because you suffer from the same problem. I have 15 notebooks with 1,500 pages of notes, and I'm writing a 200-page book, if you're not me. How am I going to condense all this? How am I going to remember the most important parts? And what Cal Fussman, who is an incredible writer and also a very gifted interviewer, was taught at one point
Starting point is 00:14:31 by a very famous novelist, and then he told me the story was, the good shit sticks. So the good shit sticks just means don't stress about it. The really standout stuff has a strong foothold in your mind and it will either stay with you or it will come to you when you need it. So have that confidence. If you are paying attention and you're present when you take the notes and you're present when you're listening to people so that it can make an initial imprint, the good shit sticks. So just have that faith. I hate to use that word typically, but just have the faith that if you're present and really paying attention when you're reading or writing something down or listening to someone, that the imprint has been made and the good shit has stuck. That's number
Starting point is 00:15:16 one. Number two is actually borrowed from Derek Sivers. So very well-known entrepreneur, a philosopher king of sorts in the programming world, also a tremendous musician. And his policy for evaluating opportunities is, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. So if it's not a hell yes, it's a decline. And I think that similarly, when I'm interviewing someone and I have a notebook at all times when I'm interviewing someone, if they say something that really grabs me, I mean, it's not, oh, that's kind of cool. It's like, whoa, I get pulled by the shirt. I'm like, what the fuck?
Starting point is 00:15:54 That's, oh my God, that's amazing. I have to do that. Then I note it down, all right? If it's lukewarm, I don't highlight it. If it's lukewarm, kind of cool, I pay attention. It makes the imprint, but I don't note it down. So at the end of, say, any given three-hour interview, I may only have four or five highlights of things I want to test. What's important at that point is that I put it into a calendar. If you want to try something or if you want to purchase something
Starting point is 00:16:25 within the two hours after that interview, I set down some type of next step. So I either go on, say, Amazon Prime, boom, I bought it, I'll have it in two days. Or I go into my calendar, it's like, okay, I want to commit to scheduling, say, voice lessons after I did a podcast with a very well known musician. I said, all right, I want to schedule voice lessons. It's got to be done now or it's just never going to happen. So as soon as I finished, I got into Slack, started to communicate with my assistant. I also did some preliminary research, looked at my calendar as to where I would be, thought about what my parameters and criteria might be, and boom, it's in motion. So in my world and in many worlds, if it doesn't happen now or it's
Starting point is 00:17:06 not put into the calendar, it's not going to happen. It will never happen, right? So that's part two. And I would also say part three is another belief, and that is you don't have to do a million things right. You really just have to get a few things right and have first principles, which is why I enjoyed so much my interview with Ray Dalio, who manages the largest hedge fund in the world. He is always thinking about first principles because you have principles, strategies, tactics, and then everything else, right? For instance, if you want to be an artist, okay, you could use every latest tech tool, the different crayons and markers and pencils and get really stressed out about which of these to use. But ultimately, you need to have the fine motor control
Starting point is 00:17:59 and then you need to have the ability to see, right? So learning to be an artist or learning to be a physicist in some ways is learning how to see, which is what Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, said to me. And I thought very deeply about this. I said, okay, this is a first principle. I can think about that. And if I cultivate that skill, my ability to observe, that then filters down to 20 other fields. Okay?
Starting point is 00:18:23 So if you don't fixate on the tiny little tools, they can be fun, the apps and so on. Don't get me wrong. If it grabs you by the shirt and you're excited, try it. But you only have to get a few things right. And by that, I mean you only need to cultivate a handful of skills, deal-making, negotiating, nonviolent communication, prioritization by, say, reading something like The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, and you're good. You're going to win at the game of life if you don't drown in the lower level detail, right? So just have the confidence that it's not about doing a million things right. It's actually about saying yes, hell yes, to a handful of things
Starting point is 00:19:05 and then saying no thank you to a thousand, ten thousand other things. So those are a few of the approaches that I use and I often will very frequently use Evernote to keep track of different notes that I've taken on various interviews. And with articles online, for instance, I will pull them using the Evernote Clipper offline into Evernote, and I will read all these articles in Evernote. And when I find little tidbits that I find useful, unlike, say, Kindle, where you can highlight things and then review your highlights. In Evernote, with something that's just a mishmash pulled off the internet, what I'll do is I'll put three asterisks before what I find really interesting and then bold and underline it. Then all I need to do is in those notes, if I want to do a quick refresh on what I found very important at the time, is I'll do a
Starting point is 00:20:02 control F, which is find, and it'll say found seven instances of star, star, star, boom. And then five minutes I can do my review. And I would say last but not least, try to specialize in, as I mentioned, first principles and those higher level tools. But secondarily, try to focus on Kathy Sierra, who's amazing, first said it this way to me, on just-in-time information, not just-in-case information. So if you think about it, how many books have you read, nonfiction books, and you're like, just in case I need this. I'm interested in, I remember way back in the day, import-export. I want to be an import-export. This was a long time ago. And I read it, and that was with the understanding,
Starting point is 00:20:48 but I suppose not with all too much clarity, that I probably wouldn't use that for years. So what happens? If I need to use it years from then, and it's a book, I just need to reread the damn book. So instead of doing that, focus on just-in-time information. So it's like, all right, I have this to do tomorrow, next week. So instead of doing that, focus on just-in-time information. So it's like, all right, I have this to do tomorrow, next week.
Starting point is 00:21:10 These are the ways I can prepare. Boom. And you're on it. Instead of just-in-case information. And that also relieves a huge psychological burden. Oh, hi. Thank you for joining me for another video. This is my dog, Molly. And this is a wooden wine glass. I'm going to talk to you about mistakes that people make networking. What a dirty word that is. And I'll talk a little bit about how I've built my own network as it were. My advice in short is to go narrow and to go along. All right. So that involves deep relationships with a small number of people
Starting point is 00:21:47 and then playing the long game. What many people do is they go to an event to collect business cards and then they follow up with people with whom they have no common interests in the hopes of some type of transaction in the near term, the next few weeks, the next few months. That can work. But what I would suggest you do is if we're looking at events, which can be very, very high yield, look at either volunteer events where you can volunteer, all right, or super high-end events where you can attend and pay a premium to attend. And in the former category, I can give you an example of a tipping point for the four-hour workweek, my first book. And that
Starting point is 00:22:31 came about by going in part to South by Southwest 2007. And my tactic was, as an attendee here, which is fairly expensive, to go to moderated panels. And then when a panel ended, instead of flooding the scene to get in line to talk to a panelist, I would actually talk to the moderator, who people tend to ignore. And I would be very, very humble to the extent I could and say, it's my first time at South by Southwest. I'm pretty nervous. I just wrote my first book. I don't know anybody. I'm not going to pretend to understand everything about tech. I don't. But I'm really interested in A, B, C, D, and E. And I'm originally from this part of the world. And these are some of my interests. Is there anyone you think I might enjoy meeting here?
Starting point is 00:23:22 Now you have, say, Mary or Joe, whoever, saying, yeah, you should meet Mike such and such. Then I go and find Mike, or I'm introduced to Mike, and I already have that social stamp of approval of one person. Okay, now I meet that person, and we talk, and there's no explicit ask. This is really important. I do the same thing. Just got to South by Southwest. My first time here. I apologize, kind of a random introduction, but I don't know anybody. And I have my first book out.
Starting point is 00:23:54 I really don't know what to do because I have my launch coming up, but I'm here to learn. That's it. I'm here to learn and meet people. I don't even know what to ask for. And talk to them, talk to them, talk to them. And then if the timing seems right, and it may not, it may never be right, but if it is, you can ask, is there
Starting point is 00:24:12 anybody else here you think I should meet up with or buy a drink for? Who can I buy a round of drinks for? Just to have fun, cool people who I might be able to hang out with, and who might enjoy hanging out with me. And then you go to the second person, and so on. And now, all the way up to this point, I've not made a single ask, other than the question, is there anybody else you think I might enjoy meeting? Now, at some point, you will then have a small gaggle of people, and probably you'll be buying booze. At least that's my tactic. It's fairly, fairly easy to buy booze for people. And then everyone's talking. So let's say you have a
Starting point is 00:24:53 group of people in tech or you have a dog who wants a treat. He's coming back to say hello. A bunch of people in tech who are talking about tech things and they're saying things like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Ruby on rails. And I don't know what that is. As a guy, I'm talking to the guys here because women generally don't have this problem. Don't pretend like you know everything. It's really not endearing. So they would say something like blah, blah, blah, Ruby on Rails. And I would say, you know, so sorry to interrupt. This is deep in the end of my ignorance pool. I don't know what Ruby on Rails is. What is Ruby on Rails? And every once in a while, I would interject and ask for clarification just to learn. Eventually, after two or three rounds of drinks, someone will say, who are you again? Like, what do you do? What
Starting point is 00:25:36 are you doing here? And then you can offer a little bit. You say something like, well, I just finished my first book. I'm really nervous. It's coming out on such and such a date, and I don't know what a book launch is. So I'm here to try to meet people and learn different skills to figure that out. And then you stop. You don't give them a two-minute or three-minute pitch. And chances are someone will ask, okay, well, what's your book about? And then you can give a little bit more. And then let's say you're in a group of eight people. You watch the one or two who are going to have more follow-up questions.
Starting point is 00:26:11 And then eventually, maybe, in a group of eight people, you say to one of them afterwards, you say, look, I have a ton of books that my publisher has sent me. These are review copies and advanced copies. I don't know what to do with them. I don't think you'd actually read the whole book, but there's a 20-page bit that I think you'd really enjoy on X, Y, and Z, because you know that. You've already ascertained it through the conversation you had. And you say, if it wouldn't be a burden, if you'd enjoy it, maybe I could send it to you. But if not, that's cool.
Starting point is 00:26:50 And I would say 90% of the time they said, yeah, sure. That'd be cool. I'd love to see it. And that's how it all happened, guys. That's how the book hit the New York Times bestseller list, was by doing that over and over again. And this is the key point. You don't have to be a networking whore. You don't have to sell yourself to the highest bidder or compromise and spend time with people you don't like. You can find people who are A-class players in a given world who you want to spend time with, who have similar values and hobbies. So that one person out of the 10 who said,
Starting point is 00:27:21 yeah, cool, no, I'd love to check it out. The vast majority of those people from 11 years ago are still my friends today. And that's going narrow and going long. 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?
Starting point is 00:27:44 Have you written a book? No, I'm going to write a book. Have you written any books before? No. 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,
Starting point is 00:27:57 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 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.
Starting point is 00:28:12 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, you're all in. All of your chips are into this book. So how did I know that I should do the four-hour work week? Was it that obvious? Was it clear? Was I dying to be a writer? Which, by the way, I don't think is a necessary checkbox. You don't have to write
Starting point is 00:29:05 the book yourself necessarily. Open by 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. All right. 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
Starting point is 00:30:00 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.
Starting point is 00:30:49 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, right? So he felt like he was trapped. And then I had a friend who had started his own company who similarly is making decent money, but felt trapped in a monster of his own making. And I felt these notes would help them. Did not want to write a book at that point. Actively did not want to write a book.
Starting point is 00:31:31 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 nervous breakdown. Repeatedly. Okay? That has more or less been the case for every book that I've written. I'm at five now. 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 going to 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,
Starting point is 00:32:33 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 for our 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 launch, ended up hitting the New York Times bestseller list, and now it's millions of copies in 40 plus languages. But I don't think
Starting point is 00:33:23 you get to millions of copies in 40 plus languages trying to. But I don't think you get to millions of copies and 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,
Starting point is 00:34:00 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. 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
Starting point is 00:34:34 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 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and
Starting point is 00:35:11 just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. You may have heard them everywhere. They're growing like crazy. They're an innovative platform for doing several things, but especially improving the hiring process, making it slick and elegant and easy. One of the hardest parts of running any business, growing any business is finding and hiring the right team. I've seen this firsthand in close to 100 startups now. God, I'm getting old. From all over the world at different stages of growth. And nothing can quite drain your resources and cost you time and money like making mistakes in hiring. ZipRecruiter developed their own system
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Starting point is 00:37:30 to take their fitness and so on to the next level. For me, step number one is having some form of nutritional insurance. That's how I would look at it. And the nutritional insurance needs to make sure all of my basic needs are met, all the boxes checked, regardless of travel, schedule, missed meals, and so on. There are going to be times in the new year when your diet and exercise will get interrupted. Life will interrupt it. And during those times, you want a safety net.
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