The Tim Ferriss Show - #400: Books I’ve Loved — Tim’s Four Must-Read Books

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types—from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books—the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors — in the form of books — from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.To kick things off, here are four of my recommendations, which I had originally included in the back of The 4-Hour Workweek. I called them “The Fundamental Four.”Please enjoy!Books mentioned: The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz, How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy, One Simple Idea: Turn Your Dreams into a Licensing Goldmine While Letting Others Do the Work by Stephen Key, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts, and Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello.This podcast is brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. The first person I call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. Kelly is a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes.Kelly created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It’s like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos. It walks you step-by-step through Kelly’s proven techniques to relieve pain and improve your range of motion. Right now, listeners of this podcast can try Virtual Mobility Coach totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. And after that, you can get 50% off your first six months. Just go to thereadystate.com/tim and use code TIM50 at checkout. Relieve pain, recover faster, and improve your performance in the gym with The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. Visit thereadystate.com/tim and check it out.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.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.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This podcast is brought to you by The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What on earth is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility

training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at The Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. I was introduced to him for a bunch of reasons. I've seen him perform near miracles on me and many others. He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in The 4-Hour Body. He was in Tools of Titans. He's been on this podcast. He also nursed and coached me through the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was the Tim Ferriss experiment. And I made it through those 13 episodes because of Kelly. Would not have survived. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach.

It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starrett in your pocket because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly, but now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos. It walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. There are a lot of things you can do with this program and you got to check it out. It's encyclopedic, but simultaneously really easy to navigate. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts, and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of

pre- and post-exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually. So those will help you warm up before your workout so you can run faster, jump higher, lift heavier, all with a lower risk of injury. And if you're not in pain or working out, Virtual Mobility Coach also has a library of daily maintenance videos. Great way to speed up recovery on your off days, which also helps a lot with sleep, much of that stuff.

And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal. You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get the Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. It is a two-week free trial. So you should try it out. Kelly is super legit. He is literally the person I text and call

with the most sophisticated slash esoteric questions about recovery and injuries I've inflicted upon myself. He knows what he's doing and his stuff really, really works. So try it for free for two weeks. And then after that, if you decide to continue, you can get 50% off your first six months. TheReadyState.com slash Tim and use code Tim50 at checkout. So again, that's thereadystate.com slash Tim and use code TIM50 at checkout. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it,

to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short-form series that I'm doing, simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate, and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also

the case for you. Please enjoy. So to kick things off, here are four of my personal recommendations, which I had originally included in the back of the four-hour workweek when it was published in 2007, back when I had hair. I called these four books the fundamental four, and I still do recommend them to a lot of people. They are so named the fundamental four because they were the four books I recommended to aspiring lifestyle designers and entrepreneurs prior to writing The 4-Hour Workweek. That was a long time ago. They are still very well worth reading.

And here's the sequence that I suggest very specifically. The first is The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. This book was first recommended to be by Stephen Key, an ultra successful inventor who has made millions of dollars licensing products to companies like Disney, Nestle, Coca-Cola. The list is very, very long. It is the favorite book of many super performers worldwide I've spoken with, ranging from legendary football coaches to famous CEOs. Many of my podcast guests have also brought this up, and it has more than 100 five-star ratings on Amazon. The main message is pretty simple. Don't overestimate others and underestimate yourself. I still personally read the first two chapters of this book whenever

doubt creeps in. Note that it is a little dated. It is outdated in some respects in terms of tone, so you just have to accept that as part of the package. But nonetheless, I find it to be a very helpful philosophical and psychological reboot because in my experience, especially in the last, say, 12 months, I've realized that it's not just enough to automate and streamline. And I've noticed in the last handful of months, stress creeping in, in the form of having to fix a lot of things and feeling strained for time to create much of anything. And the solution is not just removing the niggly minutiae that are bothering you. You need a compelling, big goal. You need an inspiring, abnormally large objective to chase. And this book really helps with that type of reorientation.

The next book is How to Make Millions with Your Ideas, Subtitle, and Entrepreneur's Guide. That is by Dan S. Kennedy. This book is also dated. Keep in mind, these recommendations are originally from 2007, but it still does the job. This is a menu of options for converting ideas into millions of dollars. I read this first when I was in high school and have read it many times since, let's call it six to 12. It is like steroids for your entrepreneurial cortex. The case studies range from Domino's pizza to casinos to mail order products really lay out a spectrum of options. And that's kind of the point. If you think of business,

and in quotation marks, business represents in your mind, a very specific one type of business model, a path that is codified, maybe calcified, like venture backed startups, and you go from your seed round or your convertible debt to your this to your that. If you only have one script that is associated with business in your mind, this will help to stretch you. It is very, very effective for that. I would also suggest combining, and I'm cheating a little bit here and adding an extra book, but there is a book by Stephen Case. This is the amazing inventor who initially recommended The Magic of Thinking Big to me. There's a book he wrote called One Simple Idea. this is the amazing inventor who initially recommended the magic of thinking big to me. There's a book he wrote called One Simple Idea. That is the main title. One Simple Idea,

subtitle, Turn Your Dreams Into a Licensing Goldmine While Letting Others Do the Work. So it's a compelling title. It's an excellent book about licensing. So instead of venturing, instead of doing the manufacturing yourself, instead of handling a lot of the nuts and bolts and operations, how can you, if you are good at inventing license products, and I know readers who have read the four-hour workweek, one specific person of mine, Steve, hey Steve, you're going to recognize this, but I don't have permission to tell this full story, who read the four-hour workweek, then read One Simple Idea, and he's now making up to $85,000 a day with some of his products. That's certainly on the high end of outcomes, but it's not completely impossible. And there are many other successes. The next book I want to mention, so the third book of the fundamental four, is The E-Myth Revisited, subtitled Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It.

This is by Michael Gerber. This is a classic. Gerber is a masterful storyteller, and this classic of automation discusses how to use a franchise mindset, not necessarily the business model, but a franchise mindset to create scalable businesses that are based on rules and systems and not outstanding employees. I've certainly felt the pain of making the mistake of trying to focus on hiring Michael Jordan's as opposed to having sufficient systems in place. And this can be very, very beneficial, this book, either when you're first thinking of starting your first business or as another reboot. If you've strayed from the path of systems and rules and process, this provides an excellent

roadmap told in parable for becoming an owner instead of a constant micromanager. And for those of you who have a lot of time in the trenches, you will probably recognize that it is easy to fall into the trap of micromanaging or just looking for the superstar employees who are going to be completely self-driven without any guidance to solve your problems. And there are aspects of that we could discuss in a separate forum. But suffice to say, if you're stuck in your own business, this book can help you get unstuck. That's the E-Myth Revisited. The next one is, and this is the fourth of the fundamental four, is Vagabonding, An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts. Rolf Potts is the man. He's

great. He's become a friend. I read this book a long, long time ago. This is, in fact, the book that got me to stop making excuses and pack for an extended hiatus trip overseas. It covers bits of everything, and don't discount it because the subtitle has long-term world travel in it. Maybe that's not what you want to do, but it covers a lot. It's helpful for determining your destination or destinations if you're thinking about travel, adjusting to life on the road and re-assimilating back into ordinary life. But it also includes great excerpts from famous vagabonds, philosophers and explorers, as well as anecdotes from ordinary travelers. And this is really a philosophical reset. This book helps you to better value time wealth while recognizing the limitations of money as currency in the end, which most people want to trade for an experience, which gives them an emotion. So it really helps to deconstruct your own thinking about materialism, success

as quantified by money, and the trappings that we all fall into, the trappings that we all succumb to at various points. It happens. And this book is one that I've read at least 10 times. I still have my original copy. This is the first of two books. The other was Walden that I took with me on my first 15 month mini retirement around the world. That was from 2004 onward where all the tango stuff and all the craziness happened in my life. And it really did change my life. So Vagabonding is the fourth book of the fundamental four. And the sequence, again, that I recommend, not mandatory, but that I would recommend is The Magic of Thinking Big, number one, How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan Kennedy, and or Stephen Key's One Simple Idea.

Then you have The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, and then Vagabonding. But certainly you can pick and choose and grab one of those out of order. Vagabonding also, I noticed after many years, had no audiobook. So I produced that audiobook myself and released it. You can find that in my audiobook club on Audible. If you just go to audible.com forward slash Tim's books, you can find that. I'm going to give you guys one bonus book, and I know I'm cheating, but the bonus book is Awareness, subtitled The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony DeMello. So the book Awareness, subtitled The Perils and Opportunities of

Reality by Anthony DeMello. This short book has completely captured me. And just in the last two years, I've probably reread it five or six times. And when I feel myself bleeding into overwhelm or feeling scattered, this is one of the first break glass in case of emergency steps that I take. I pick it up and I read a few chapters. It was first recommended to me by Peter Malouk, who's associated with wealth management, investing and finance. He was on the podcast because he said that it gave him peace of mind for weeks at a time. And it was a bit of a non sequitur in our conversation. And I took a note

about it. I grabbed the Kindle version with very low expectations because come on, the title sounds super generic. In some respects, awareness, okay. There are a million and one books that claim to be about awareness. What the hell does that mean anyway? The subtitle is more interesting, The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. So I grabbed it with low expectations, devoured it in three days, and I have bought dozens of copies to give to friends. I mean, 20, 30, 40, 50 to give out to friends. I have an entire shelf in the guest bedroom in my house that is full of copies of this book for guests to take with them when they leave. It found me at the right time, and it won't resonate with everyone, but it has equally impacted several of my close friends and buddies I've recommended this to.

So it's worth checking out. Awareness by Anthony DeMello. Those are, you want to count it, four, five, four, five, six books. And I'm going to leave it at that for now. Thank you for listening. And I hope you check out one of those books and find any of them, even partially as valuable as I did. And if you find that, they will be worth the time. 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 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. This podcast is brought to you by the Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach. What on earth is that? Well, let me back up. The first person I personally call for help with my athletic recovery or mobility training is Dr. Kelly Starrett at the Ready State. I've known Kelly for more than a decade. I was introduced to him for a bunch of reasons. I've seen him perform near miracles on me and many others.

He's a good friend, but he's also a mobility and movement coach for Olympic gold medalists, world champions, and pro athletes. You might recognize the name because Kelly was in the four-hour body. He was in Tools of Titans. He's been on this podcast. He also nursed and coached me through the Destroy My Body for Entertainment TV show that was the Tim Ferriss experiment. And I made it through those 13 episodes because of Kelly. Would not have survived. Now Kelly has created a program called Virtual Mobility Coach. It's like carrying a virtual Kelly Starret in your pocket

because most people are not going to have direct access to Kelly. But now you do. Every day, Virtual Mobility Coach gives you guided mobility videos, walks you step by step through Kelly's proven techniques to relieve pain, improve range of motion, improve performance, on and on and on and on. There are a lot of things you can do with this program and you got to check it out. It's encyclopedic, but simultaneously really easy to navigate. If you're in pain, you can pull up a picture of the human body, click on what hurts,

and from there, get a customized regimen to help find relief. If you are working out or playing a sport, Virtual Mobility Coach offers all sorts of pre- and post-exercise mobility sequences for more than 50 sports and activities, actually. So those will help you warm up before your workout so you can run faster, jump higher, lift heavier, all with a lower risk of injury. And if you're not in pain or working out, Virtual Mobility Coach also has a library of daily maintenance videos. Great way to speed up recovery on your off days, which also helps a lot with sleep, a bunch of that stuff. And right now, listeners of this podcast get a special deal.

You can try Virtual Mobility Coach. You can get Kelly Starrett in your pocket, totally risk-free for two weeks without paying a penny. It is a two-week free trial. So you should try it out. Kelly is super legit. He is literally the person I text and call with the most sophisticated slash esoteric questions about recovery and injuries I've inflicted upon myself. He knows what he's doing and his stuff really, really works. So try it for free for two weeks. And then after that, if you decide to continue,

you can get 50% off your first six months. TheReadyState.com slash Tim. Use code TIM50 at checkout. So again, that's TheReadyState.com slash Tim. And use code TIM50 at checkout.