The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 17: The Power of Negative Visualization (<10 Minutes)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1,

Starting point is 00:00:49 the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Welcome to another edition of the Tim Ferriss Show. This is Tim Ferriss speaking. I am at JFK and I am partially whispering so I don't get punched in the face by everyone sitting around me. I'm en route to Italy. I am super stoked. I haven't been there in ages. Ho dimenticato tutto of my Italian, but that's okay. I will improvise. This is a short audio essay, what I've been calling the in-between-isodes, and I'm borrowing that term. In this case, it is from a presentation that I gave, which many of you have not heard from Google IO. That was the event, and I'm calling it the power of negative

Starting point is 00:01:33 visualization. So we always hear about positive visualization, positive thinking. I think it happens to be overrated, and certainly from a pragmatic standpoint, there are times when you have to practice pessimism, very strategic, tactical pessimism to get what you want and avoid what you don't want. As always, you can find all of these episodes on iTunes or at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And if you enjoy these episodes, both the short ones and the longer one to two hour episodes please support it by going to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast actually I misspoke

Starting point is 00:02:14 but I have to catch my flight so I'll do it again 4hourworkweek.com slash books alright 4hourworkweek.com forward slash books and that is where you will find the Tim Ferriss book club books that have impacted my life greatly which i linked to then on amazon on audible typically one per month they're four or five up right now check them out and without further ado i hope you enjoy

Starting point is 00:02:36 this very very short episode thanks for listening all right so this is a photograph of las leñas in argentina where i went skiing with two close friends one of whom recently died of pancreatic cancer he was in his early 30s the same day i received an email notifying me that the 10 year old daughter of a close friend had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and this this was very recent, and this catalyzed, produced a profound sense of urgency in me to do bigger and better things in my life and to test new directions before some undefined point in the future. So I want to talk about the most effective pair of productivity techniques that I've come across since 2004

Starting point is 00:03:25 that have helped me, up to this point, test the uncommon despite the fear of ridicule, criticism, failure, and so forth. And both techniques, I cheated a bit with the format, some things we'll repeat, are borrowed from Stoicism, which was a school of philosophy from the Hellenistic period used by a lot of the Greco-Roman educated elite, including emperors and military and statesmen. The first is called negative visualization, and it's all related to the basic assumption that defining your fears instead of your goals is a key to doing anything uncommon, anything big. Negative visualization is what I would call preparation in practical pessimism. And that is defining in excruciating detail the worst case scenarios.

Starting point is 00:04:15 So as an anecdote, in 2004 I was working 14 hours a day in my own company, trapped in a beast of my own design, and knew that I had to take a two to four week retreat to either streamline the business and extricate myself or shut it down because there were issues with exit options. I didn't do that for six months because I was running an endless loop of what-if scenarios. What if I missed a notification from the IRS? What if we lost the biggest customer we have and therefore had problems A, B, and C? The problem is those fears weren't actionable, just like poorly defined goals aren't actionable. Then I came across the writings of Seneca, Lucius Seneca,

Starting point is 00:04:58 who was an advisor to the emperor in his day in Rome, also what you might consider the most successful investment banker and playwright at the time in Rome. And I performed an exercise that he suggested, which was taking out a piece of paper, in my case, an eight and a half by 11 sheet one evening, and detailing in the first column all of the terrible things, the worst case scenarios that could happen if I did what I was considering, which was this retreat. For you, it might be a change of job, it might be proposing a new project. It might be ending a relationship. It could be any number of things.

Starting point is 00:05:30 All of the negative things that could happen. Second column, all of the things that I could do to minimize the likelihood of those things happening. And then the last column were all the line-by-line actions I could take to get back to where I was then, to re-achieve the status quo, so to speak. Maybe getting back into the industry that you believe to start your own startup, whatever that might be. And in that instant, I saw that on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being most impactful,

Starting point is 00:05:54 I was looking at a unlikely transient pain of about two and a potential life-changing permanent change of 10. And I took the trip. I took the trip, and that's why the book happened. That's why the World Championships in Tango happened. Everything that brought me to stand here today, I can trace back to that one evening, that one exercise. So let's move to practice. The second piece, the second technique, is rehearsing the worst-case scenarios. Seneca would put it thus, set aside a number of days each month where you are satisfied with the cheapest and scantiest affair, meaning food, the roughest of dress, all the while asking yourself, is this the condition I feared?

Starting point is 00:06:40 What you're doing is exposing yourself to negative emotions like fear, embarrassment, lack of finances, so that you're inoculated when you later have to make hard decisions, ask for hard things, or reject, refuse things, so that you can act despite these emotions. Cato, who was viewed as Seneca as the perfect stoic, wore darker clothing than his expected light purple, didn't go with a tunic. He was very out of style in his day. And he did so that he would learn to be ashamed of only the things that were truly shameful and to ignore the millions of things that men would otherwise have low opinions of. So it's very important that you practice your worst case scenario.

Starting point is 00:07:26 What you'll find is that many of the fears you have are based on undervaluing the things that are easily obtainable. So those are two techniques that have resulted in the greatest gains, all of the uncommon, all of the big things I've been able to do. And I would encourage you, before trying to define your goals, to focus on defining your fears.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Thank you very much. And I would encourage you, before trying to define your goals, to focus on defining your fears. Thank you very much.

The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 17: The Power of Negative Visualization (<10 Minutes)

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