Tim Ferriss on Super Learning and Pushing the Limits | Impact Theory

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Tom: Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.
You're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know
that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it.
Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that
will help you execute on your dreams.
All right.
Today's guest is the king of self optimization.
A man who is constantly learning and testing new theories in the real world so that he
can improve his skill set and do more.
His ridiculous list of accomplishments is proof that if you approach the world as a
student there's no such thing as the impossible.
Here are just a few of the seemingly unreal, albeit, entirely true highlights from his
resume.
He's a former MTV break dancer in Taiwan, the one time national Chinese kickboxing champion,
the first American to hold the Guinness world record in tango, a horseback archer, Princeton
University guest lecturer, and angel investor who has racked up a serious string of entrepreneurial
maga hits, including Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and Alibaba.
He is an unparalleled, self experimenter, professional note taker, and would be ninth
grade teacher, but you probably know him better for his best selling books "The 4-hour Work
Week", "The 4-hour Body", and "The 4-hour Chef".
Or perhaps you're more familiar with his number one iTunes TV show, or his unbelievably popular
podcast, which has been downloaded more than one hundred million times.
But even if you don't know him from any of that you're certainly going to know him for
his most recent book, "Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires,
Icons, and World Class Performers."
He's been called the Oprah of audio and the Indiana Jones for the digital age, please
help me in welcoming the New York Times best selling author multiple times over, the man
behind the Tim Ferriss Show.
The human guinea pig himself, Tim Ferriss.
Tim: Hey man.
Tom: Awesome my brother, how you doing?
Tim: Good to see you again.
Tom: Good to see you as well man.
Tim: It's all downhill after that intro.
Tom: I'm not so sure about that.
The sheer weight of this bad boy ... Tim: I know.
Tom: ... Tells me that it's not gonna be all downhill from here.
Tim: It was supposed to be one sentence a page.
Maybe a little check out book in the aisle.
I can't help myself.
Tom: Yeah I saw that.
If you had to boil it down to one sentence, what was your purpose in writing it?
Tim: The purpose in writing it was to create the ultimate cliff notes for myself and then
I got about halfway through it and one of my friends was taking a look at it and he
goes, "This is exactly what your readers would want.
Why don't you just publish it?"
And that led ultimately to the book, which is about half new material.
I would say 50 to 60% brand new.
Some brand new recommendations from past guests, new guests that people haven't met yet like
Jack Dorsey, who's a very impressive cat, and Cheryl Strayed and many others but the
six to 10,000 of pages of transcripts got boiled down to about 350 pages in here and
the vetting process was choosing what I had had a chance to apply myself or something
my close friends had applied at the highest levels.
Tom: Some of the people that you've interviewed in the book, Peter Thiel being the first one
that comes to mind of just mega producers or Reid Hoffman.
I mean it is absurd the number of people that you've come in contact with that are just
absolute apex predators in the world of whatever it is that they do.
I mean it's really, really incredible.
Tim: So Amelia Boone, I don't know if you've ever met her.
She's so tough.
My god, she's a three time World's Toughest Mudder champion.
She is full time attorney at Apple.
Tom: Woah.
Tim: She, in the 2012 Toughest Mudder, which is a 24 hour race.
You have to complete a course of obstacles for as many repetitions as you can and she's
done more than 90 miles in that case but it's like climbing ropes and carry-
Tom: 90 miles of obstacles?
Tim: Of obstacles and in eight weeks of after knee surgery more than 1,000 competitors,
90% plus of which are men, she came in second place.
Tom: Oh my god.
Tim: Out of everybody.
Tom: What do you think drives her?
Like that's crazy.
She's super successful but you don't do 90 miles in a 24 hour period without some intense
thing pushing you forward, if you had to guess.
Tim: If I had to guess I think it is pretty simple.
Now with endurance, ultra endurance athletes, one of the common questions is are you running
towards something or are you running from something?
Tom: Yeah, for sure.
Tim: Two things I really like about Amelia.
Number one, what would you put on a billboard if you could put anything on a huge billboard?
Tom: I love that question.
Tim: "No one owes you anything."
[crosstalk 00:04:56] That's her answer, so great, and then her other quote which I had
to put right on the top of her chapter was, "I'm not the strongest, I'm not the fastest,
but I'm really good at suffering."
Tom: Yeah.
Why does that resonate with you?
Because that sits at the core of my being, that very notion.
Tim: Out endure.
You can train yourself to out endure other people.
Tom: It really ... So when I think about what gifts, you've talked about this before.
Like everybody has a superpower and one of my superpowers is the ability to suffer.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: And it's one of those things that you say and you know it's kinda tongue in cheek
and a little bit funny but at the same time it's my fucking super power.
Like people look at me and say, "Okay, well how have you been able to do this?"
Because truly you spend enough time with me you will know very, very quickly I am not
the brightest person and I don't pride myself in that so that's not like, I don't ... I'm
not torn up about it.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: Not the brightest person.
Didn't have any extreme advantages or anything growing up.
Certainly not physically more impressive than the next person but my willingness to suffer
is absurd ... Tim: Yeah.
Tom: ... And when you direct that at something that you care about, my whole thing is the
way that I think about it is I'll outlast anyone, right?
On a long enough timeline I can accomplish and when people really start to look at that
but then it comes back to the next question, which I want to know from you is what is the
driver?
What's that thing that makes you be so willing to suffer?
Tim: It's the promise of that crack hit for me, which is the aha moment.
Tom: In you or in you and other people?
Tim: It's both and the reason I get such a high from it is if I can crack the code in
the sense that I find something that saves people hundreds of hours or myself hundreds
of hours in the learning curve for a particular skill or a particular type of recovery or
fill in the bank, just an elegant or non-obvious solution to a longstanding problem, I'm like,
"Okay, I can't wait to see how people are gonna respond when I provide that to 1,000
people and I see, for most of them, the vast majority just go holy fuck."
If you take someone for instance I didn't learn how to swim until I was in my 30s.
I think we may have talked about this.
I grew up in Long Island but I was deathly afraid of drowning because I had some near-drowning
incidents and some lung issues.
Now at this point I was taught by this gentleman named Terry Lockland something called total
immersion, which I first learned from a book which I was introduced to by Chris Sacca who's
a billionaire investor in this book oddly enough.
But you can take someone, which I did with Terry at one point for the Tim Ferriss Experiment,
the first TV show I did.
This mother of two I think, Sarah, who had never been able to swim, couldn't even put
her head under water in the pool comfortably and four days later open water swimming 500
meters in the ocean in like 40-foot deep water freestyle and when you show someone an impossible
like that, it's not only possible but that they can crack it really quickly, that's my
drug of choice.
I just get such a high out of it.
The other thing, why am I willing to suffer?
I'm willing to suffer because I guess much like you I feel like I have my deficiencies.
I have plenty of weaknesses.
To go to the extreme is partially present because I feel like the most interesting things
happen at the fringes first.
Tom: Reading the press kit for your book, I had that overwhelming sense of holy hell,
what you've just spent the last however many years collecting are all of those gems that
either other people just haven't aggregated or they haven't distilled or they haven't
been willing to look at.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: But now exists in one place, which is incredibly exciting.
Now one of the promises in the press kit was that you could test the impossible in 17 questions.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: What are some of the questions?
Tim: So the questions are actual questions that coincided with milestones or inflection
points or just a fork in my own life.
It's actually laid out these questions, about 12 of them, coincided with exact points that
I can remember.
Some of them would be, for instance, what if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
This is a question that I ask myself when I had my first job out of college.
Talk about suffering.
I mean my desk was in the fire exit.
It was completely illegal.
I slept under the desk, the whole nine yards and don't regret a minute of it but I was
a technical sales guy.
Outbound sales guy, so we had inside sales and outside sales and my job was to close
deals with CTO's and CEO's for multi-million dollar data storage systems.
At that point storage area networks fiber channel and what I realized at one point was
that all of the seasoned sales guys, who were doing far better than I was doing, were making
phone calls between nine and five.
Those were the office hours and I said, "Well, I'm clearly not doing an effective job mimicking
them.
What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?"
It's a very recoverable experiment.
If it doesn't work, then I can always go back to what I was doing.
Doing the opposite meant making the calls between let's just say 6:30 and 8:30 and then
5:30 to 7:00, 7:30 and it was just a hypothesis.
Maybe I can get a hold of the people I need to get a hold of more effectively when the
gatekeepers aren't there and that's exactly what happened.
I started booking more meetings and closing more deals than the majority of the guys in
the company and it was just from asking that question.
What if I did the opposite for 48 hours and you can apply that to many, many things.
Some of the others would be, well, this is one I asked in 2004.
If I had a gun against my head and could only work two hours per week, what would I do?
I know it's impossible, what would I do?
And that type of ludicrous question was necessary to break my thinking patterns and stress test
my own assumptions of what was possible and you find that that is a learnable skill.
Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize, who's really good at these types of questions.
I mean he's attempting to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity in very innovative
ways.
He would ask, for instance, start ups who come to him for angel investment.
He'll say, "What would you have to do in the next six months," I'm paraphrasing here.
Tom: Sure.
Tim: "... To 10X the economics of your business?"
And if they say it can't be done, he's like I do not accept your answer.
Literally he just says, "I do not accept your answer, try again."
What's very important here is to realize the expectation is not that you'll magically in
10 minutes come up with a plan to achieve your 10 year goals in six months but that
you may get halfway there, right?
Tom: And largely just to shift your paradigm, right?
I know Peter very well and his whole thing is if you're ... Naturally we think linearly,
right?
Until you break out of that and start thinking exponentially, you're never going to get the
kind of breakthroughs that you want.
There's two things I think that people don't understand about being an entrepreneur.
Number one is there's a ton of mundane stuff that you're gonna have to do, like this set.
My wife and I were hand painting it, which is stupid by the way.
It should've been done and sprayed but we found ourselves in a situation where that
shit had to be hand painted.
As I'm going through, literally at 3:00 AM, painting this set I thought this is the part
of being an entrepreneur that people don't see coming.
Tim: That's not on the magazine covers.
Tom: Yeah exactly, so it's like and do you right your willingness to suffer?
Do you gut check?
Do you get through?
And then the other thing is how do you break out of your dogmatic linear thinking to get
through to the big aha moment?
The I have a gun to my head, I only have two hours which then becomes the four-hour workweek
because of a Google test and they thought that it was ridiculous that it'd be two hours.
Nobody's gonna believe that.
I love that story, which then obviously has massive paradigm shifting changes in people
and what I find so fascinating about asking what is it that I would need to do or what
would stop me from executing a 10 year plan in six months is it forces you to sort of
abandon all hope of clinging to what you already know.
That's the only time that you're gonna do something differently is you have to approach
the problem from a radically different way.
Take Uber for a second.
Uber was one of those few ideas that the second I saw it, I was like, "Oh my god, that's so
brilliant," but I had never stopped to ask the question, "What would it take?"
Riding in a cab stressed my ability to suffer, right?
That's how much I fucking hated riding in cabs.
It's just such a bad experience.
Drivers are horrible to you.
The cars are disgusting.
If you call them and have to wait, I mean it's a joke right.
All of it is just terrible terrible but I never asked the question.
What would it take to revolutionize this?
Getting down to asking these wildly divergent questions, and I love your question about
what if I did the opposite, because by definition it shatters the dogma.
Tim: Yeah.
Even if you don't think it's gonna work, what if I do the opposite for 48 hours?
Even if I'm almost 100% or 100% sure it's not gonna work or be beneficial, as long as
you cap the downside in someway right?
Tom: Do you red team blue team?
Tim: I do, oh yeah.
Red teaming, for those people that don't know, this comes from military.
It could be in any division of the military where they'll take, let's just say, five guys
blue team, five guys designate them red team and the job of the red team is to either,
say, get into a building that the blue team is supposed to protect, defeat defenses that
the blue team has created, or you can do this in a corporate setting and Marc Andreessen
who's another billionaire and just fascinating guy, incredible engineer also.
They'll red team ideas.
They will create what he would call a counter veiling force.
If we're in a venture capital general partner meeting and you come up with what you think
is a great thesis or a great company, even if I think it's a good idea I will and I'll
take several other people and we will attack it and try to tear it to death, tear it to
pieces and he calls it the torture test.
That is also a form of red teaming, so I'll do that with all sorts of things.
Tom: I also find that red teaming, like being on the red team itself, sharpens your own
thinking.
One, it's just a good exercise to be able to put yourself in the other side so you don't
have to have other people always to red team.
You can actually flip over.
Tim: Yep.
Tom: Back in high school I used to do speech and debate and in debate you had to take both
sides of the argument.
You had to be able to go back and forth.
It made you so much more compelling because you knew the weaknesses of both sides because
you got used to playing that.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: And so like in the military where in that moment you are investing everything into
getting into that space, right?
I'm going to break the US defenses.
I'm going to get into this room.
I'm going to show them that I'm better, right?
If you can, and we do that here at Impact Theory, is to put yourself ... Even if you
don't end up debunking it, practice being able to put yourself on the other side.
Tim: For sure.
Tom: Because one of the things, dude, I fear this more than I can tell you which is getting
trapped in my own dogma because I need to codify the world.
I need it.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: Which is why this book is so fucking interesting to me because it's basically a
bunch of codifications that are instantly powerful.
They have that punch, you follow it up with their own contextual stuff, which I think
is brilliant by the way, but you're giving the codifications but in codifying the world
it tends to calcify for me, right?
Tim: Sure, sure.
Tom: And when you look at genius being a young man's game it's like I didn't get enough done
in my youth youth to be okay with that.
I have done nothing that is going to earn my a Nobel prize, let's start with that.
Tim: Oh me neither, for what it's worth.
Tom: To continue to do profound things, it's like you have to reinvent yourself.
We just had Michael Strahan on the show and his business partner Constance, who's just
an unbelievably talented woman and she has every 10 years forced herself to do a totally
new career.
Tim: Cool.
Tom: Which is amazing and he was saying that's basically what makes her so effective because
she's not drawing on the moment, she's drawing on all these different angles of attack onto
her core skill set.
Tim: Right, so one of the questions that you can also ask, just like what if I did the
opposite for 48 hours, I'll give you another question that I think you'll really like.
It's one of the 17.
What can I learn from the people I hate the most?
Tom: Wow.
Tim: Now this does two things.
It forces you to separate your morality from your search for effectiveness.
It also helps you to develop some degree of empathy and those two are very powerful.
What can I learn from the people I hate most is a very, very useful practice.
I'll journal on that very often.
In terms of patterns, we were talking about some of the things I've spotted, meditation
or journaling are performed by close to 100% of the people that I interview.
The question, just to come back to that that I thought you might enjoy is, and this is
an example of taking something from someone I disagree with on almost every level.
Newt Gingrich.
One of the questions that Newt would ask himself and others is are you hunting antelope or
are you hunting field mice and the story he would tell is that of a lion in the Serengeti.
He's like, "If you're always chasing field mice as a lion, you'll get a snack.
You might even survive but you might end up starving because you're getting these little
Scooby snacks."
That's not his words, mine.
"That make you feel good and give you the allusion of accomplishing something real,"
and for me that's translated into are you being busy or are you being productive?
Tom: Yes.
Tim: Right?
Tom: Yes.
Tim: And that was a question, I want to say it was about five years ago or so, this antelope
versus field mice.
Just the story, the parable and the metaphor was so strong for me that I put that up where
I would see it everyday.
Tom: All right let's take a hard right.
There's some interesting stuff in here about creativity.
What are some of the most interesting and useful lessons about creativity you pulled
from the book?
Tim: The first that comes to mind is setting really low expectations and this-
Tom: Not what I was expecting you to say.
Tim: Well not what a lot of people expect and when I spoke to, say, Paulo Coelho, who's
sold 100 million plus copies, The Alchemist, et cetera.
You talk to Rick Rubin.
Let me give his example first.
When he has a musician who's stuck, great musician but they've developed performance
anxiety about song writing for whatever reason, he will say, "Do you think you could get me
one sentence or maybe two words that you like by tomorrow?
That's it, two words.
Can you do that for me?"
He gives them a micro assignment.
Best writing advice that I probably ever received, and I've received a lot of good writing advice,
but I can get myself really wound up because I expect perfection to flow from my fingertips
like magic and that never happens so then I beat the hell out of myself and that makes
me less likely to put pen to paper in the first place.
I'll procrastinate, which is why if you write two crappy pages per day you've won the day.
That's a successful writing day and that does a few things.
It helps you to maintain enthusiasm because you're constantly winning and of course on
many days you'll write more than two.
You'll get to two then you'll go to five or to 10 but if you're on an off day you write
two crappy pages.
Even if you never use it, it's a successful day and that I think for longer term projects
and extended creativity is really important.
The story that this writer told me with that tip, he said, "Okay this is where this comes
from.
Did you know that IBM, when it was the 800 pound gorilla it was an undefeatable sales
force?
Do you know what one of their rules was?"
I was like, "No."
He says, "Well what do you think their quotas were?"
And I was like, "Well I'm sure it was really high because they wanted to motivate their
guys to get after it."
He goes, "No their quotas were the lowest in the industry."
Tom: Wow.
Tim: And the rationale was we don't want our sales people to be intimidated to pick up
the phone.
We want them to feel like they're gonna pass their quota quickly, which they did and then
they shot well past it and clobbered the competition.
Tom: That's interesting.
Tim: The counter intuitive pairing of low expectations leading to higher performance
is really odd, right?
Tom: So let's ask the obvious question then.
As somebody who's had a lot of employees at the height I had, over 1,000 employees, that
feels dangerous.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: And it feels dangerous and I think I have my own answer but it feels dangerous
because some people, especially when an organization gets that big, they're looking for a place
to hide and you give it to them.
Tim: Yeah I think that the winning combination is selectively low quotas on a daily basis
with high expectations for metrics on, say, a quarterly or annual basis.
You're tracking the numbers.
You want them to hit home runs but it doesn't have to be one at-bat.
I think it's also very context and role specific but if we're talking about creativity in particular,
right, so not necessarily work output, the approach ... There are a number of prolific
writers who have said, Neil Strauss said this, "There's no such thing as writer's block,"
which drives me crazy.
I'm like come on.
You might be a mutant like X-Men of writing but for the normal humans, come on.
Give me a break.
He goes, "No, no, no.
Hear me out."
Number one, he is a trained journalist and journalists tend to have writing block beaten
out of them because their boss is like, "Oh you can't find the right prose for your 500
word article?
Get it in by five o'clock asshole," and they're just like, "Oh wait, this isn't school," and
they're like, "Yeah deadline, that's your incentive.
Writer's block my ass," and he's like, "Oh okay."
But he said and what they learn is, he said, "There's no such thing as writer's block."
He said, "What that is is performance anxiety that you've imposed on yourself because your
expectations are too high."
He's like, "Just lower your standards.
Lower your standards until you get started."
Tom: Can I back you up here for a second?
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: Oh god this is embarrassing but I've at least admitted it before.
When I first started doing Instagram I was like I want to really up Instagram's game,
right, so I'm gonna make these posts really mean something and I want to actually impact
somebody and if you read one of my posts you're going to be impacted.
Then there was one day, nine hours later I had lost my entire Sunday writing this Instagram
post and I thought, "This is not scalable.
Like, you cannot write a nine hour Instagram post."
Because like the comments would be like, "It's long but it's worth the read."
So I thought, "Wait, people actively don't want to read this shit.
Their friend has to convince them to do it and I just spent nine hours writing it.
This is madness."
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: So I said, "Okay, I'm gonna write this stuff in 20 minutes, like, simple as and they
get what they get in 20 minutes and it is what it is," and I started getting better
reactions.
It was like oh my god.
It's hilarious.
Tim: Oh it is hilarious and I give you another example which is Ed Catmull, president of
Pixar.
Pixar, I mean for god sakes, I mean Pixar and he said to me, "The early versions of
our movies," and I'm paraphrasing of course but, "They're all crap."
And he talked about a few of my favorite movies.
He said, "Oh yeah, they're all crap.
We have to just toss them out and start over."
I said, "Wait a second."
I backtracked and I said, "So you just mean the movies when they start are really rough
drafts and then you have to refine them?"
He's like, "No, no, no.
That's the misconception.
They think the early version of the movie is just a rough draft of the later one."
He's like, "No it's completely different.
We literally scrapped it and started again from scratch and then those starting from
scratch stories became some of the most popular successful movies."
Tom: Wow.
Do you find that a lot?
Because when I write I will often hit that point where I'm like this is so bad that trying
to just continue to make it better is the wrong idea.
I need to start over and then if you can put words to this next emotion you will be my
hero.
You get into this dark place, right, the writing is not going anywhere.
You're not able to get it out for whatever reason.
That concept that you can feel in your mind, you can't articulate and get it on paper and
then you get this moment.
For me a lot of times I just get angry enough that that then becomes that energy that I
need and you talk about putting one song on repeat.
I've used this song a lot, is the song 'Faint' by Linkin Park.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: Which is hyper aggressive.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: And I'll put that on over and over and over to keep that energy because if I get
angry enough at my shit writing, I get this breakthrough moment where I can start from
scratch and all of a sudden I can feel my brain speed up and then I can write but it
took like that however much time of getting fed up.
If you can put words around that moment.
Tim: Well I'll put a phrase to that moment.
Tom: Perfect.
Tim: "What makes you angry," was one of the key pieces of advice that I was given by a
writer named Po Bronson.
When I asked him what do you do when you have writer's block, he said, "What makes you angry?
Just write that."
And that was also the advice that I was given by Whitney Cummings and a few other stand
up comedians.
How do you develop material?
What makes you angry?
Write about that.
I think anger, as opposed to just labeling it a bad thing, can be very useful fuel.
So what makes you angry and let's just say you're writing about something that doesn't
require or seem to require anger.
Well, if you can't get started it doesn't matter, so write about something else.
Write about what makes you angry and either you'll be able to sort of parry that into
this other subject once you get going or you'll end up writing something completely different
and it'll end up better in the first place.
Tom: And what does it mean to copyright your faults?
Tim: Ah yeah, this is a great one.
Copyright your faults, this is from Dan Carlin.
Dan Carlin is the host of my favorite podcast.
It's just incredible.
'Hardcore History'.
Tom: Yes.
Tim: And anyone who hasn't heard it should start with Wrath of the Khans.
If you have to buy it, buy it.
Trust me but copyrighting your faults.
Dan was a radio guy before he was a podcast guy and he was constantly getting criticized
because he would go into the red.
He would shout and he was really loud and he'd go up and he'd peak and drive all the
audio people crazy and then he'd get really low and whisper and they're just like, "Dude,
come on.
You're killing me here.
Making my job really hard," and his supervisors at the time they're like, "Look kid.
What people want is this deep dignified baritone voice for the radio."
I don't have voice for the radio so I can't do it but-
Tom: Says the guy with 100 million downloads by the way.
Tim: Yeah right, right.
Exactly.
Tom: Which is terrible timing, I've been meaning to tell you.
Tim: Oh thank you.
It's time to do the reveal now.
Tom: Right.
Tim: But that's a whole separate story, the accidental podcast but later on he had such
a distinctive voice that people started complimenting him and he's like, "Okay."
Now this so-called weakness that he was unable to fix so he didn't fix it, not only that
but he avoided fixing it by having the intro guys, the guys who'd be like, "Please welcome
or please enjoy blah blah blah, Dan Carlin," and he'd say, "He shouts, he whispers," or
something like that.
He had the intro guy do a caveat so that he didn't have to change his personal style,
which later then became this huge asset and his term is copyright your faults.
Now if someone imitates me, that's my jam.
That's my shtick.
Copyright your faults and of course there are weaknesses you should address but then
there are flaws that can be converted into strengths.
I think that's another way to catalyze creativity or just creating anything is to realize that
some of your biggest flaws may in fact be assets.
Tom: Right.
Tim: And so that could be a question you ask, right?
How might some of my biggest weaknesses be strengths or assets?
I think that's a very useful question to journal on which I tend to do just about every morning
is freehand journaling in what are called 'morning pages'.
Okay we're talking about creativity, morning pages we should talk about.
Julia Cameron describes them as spiritual windshield wipers and the way I would translate
that is when you do morning pages, and you might just be complaining.
Like your lesser self, your worse self coming out on pages.
Just bitching and moaning is you get that out of your system for the day so you don't
have it ricocheting around your head like a stray bullet for the rest of your waking
hours interrupting everything else.
You just trap it, you freeze it on paper and that practice has been tremendously liberating
not only from a well being standpoint but from just freeing up my CPU so that I can
focus on things that are more important.
If I have all that, "That guy and that and that.
I should say bah," all that bouncing around all day.
It's like you have anti virus software just slowing down your, "Why is it so slow?"
It's like yeah because you're thinking about these stupid grudges that you're holding against
people for trivial bullshit.
Like who cares if the guy at Starbucks bought the last of cashews you idiot.
Tom: Sounds deeply troubling.
Tim: Yeah like, "Ferriss pull it together."
If I get it on paper though I'm like okay I've dealt with that.
Tom: Now in the book you encourage people to bounce around.
What's one thing that you hope nobody skips?
Tim: The book's broken into three sections.
You have healthy, wealthy, and wise which is a nod to Ben Franklin.
I mean they're all interdependent, right, because they're sort of the three legs of
the stool.
Healthy, wealthy, and wise.
I do think you need all three.
Derek Sivers is this programmer monk philosopher king start up entrepreneur who started CD
Baby, which was the largest marketplace for independent musicians at the time.
Sold it for I think 24 million dollars but he and Seth Godin I think are two examples
of people who are very good at genuinely in real life following contrarian rules that
work exceptionally well.
Derek has a couple of one liners that I think are really fantastic.
I'll give you a few.
One is, "If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs."
That's a good one.
Tom: Yeah.
Tim: Just absorbing, not even absorbing, just reading and watching and listening to more
isn't enough.
You have to apply it.
You have to use incentives.
You have to have rewards and punishments set for yourself so you actually get things done,
timelines, et cetera.
That's one.
Another one is, "Don't be a donkey."
He says that to himself all the time.
"Don't be a donkey, don't be a donkey," and the reason is there's a, I want to say, it
might be a philosopher's paradox but I don't think it is.
I think it's just a parable about burdens ass.
Burdens ass, about a donkey- Tom: Good name.
Tim: Yeah, my favorite porn.
No that's not it.
It's about a donkey ... Sorry, too much caffeine.
It's about a donkey who is thirsty and hungry and there's water on one side a few feet away
and hay on the other and he can't decide rather to do the hay first or the water, the hay
or the water, and he dies of thirst at the end of it.
He couldn't do them sequentially.
Tom: Right.
Tim: This is Derek's recommendation to his younger self and really to any 20 or 30 something
but it applies to everybody, which is in effect you can do almost everything you want in life
but you can't do it at the same time and if you can just dedicate yourself to one thing
for even a year and then the next thing for a year you can do those 10 things but if you
try to do all 10 at once you're gonna be burdens ass.
"Should I do this or should I do this or should I focus on this or should I focus on this?"
Don't be a donkey.
The other one that, for me, was so helpful to hear is I think he calls it, it's like
95 versus 100%.
He tells this story of moving to around Santa Monica and his friends getting him into biking
on the bike path, so up and down the boardwalk right on the water.
And so being a type A personality he would get a stop watch and he'd start it and he'd
huff and puff and race as hard as he could all the way down to wherever and he would
time himself and everyday, no matter how hard he did it, 43 minutes.
43 minutes, just wouldn't improve.
43 minutes.
And this thing that should've been enjoyable became painful in his mind.
He started to avoid it.
He'd be like, "Ah, there's other things to do.
No instead of bike riding I'll do this other thing," and he realized at one point, "This
is really pathetic and this is really bad that something that should be enjoyable I
am avoiding because I've made it so painful.
I said why don't I just go for a bike ride and enjoy it?"
He goes for a bike ride and it's just a leisurely cruise.
He's chilling, he's riding around and he's seeing dolphins in the water.
He's standing up, looking around, noticing things he hadn't noticed before.
At one point, this is Derek, he goes, "At one point I looked up in the sky and there
was a pelican and I said wow pelican and it shit in my mouth."
I was like, "Ahh."
He was like, "It was the best bike ride ever."
I was like, "Okay."
He's having a great time, pelican shit in the mouth not withstanding and he gets back
and he looks at his watch and I think it was 45 minutes.
And he's like, "Wait, what?"
All that huffing and puffing, all that sweating and leg cramps and pain was for an extra two
minutes off the clock?
That's outrageous.
He started applying that to his entire life.
He's like when it starts to get ... Now look.
There are exceptions to all of this but he said, "When I start to get really stressed
out I just stop because I realize 95% is enough for getting almost all the results that I
want and making it sustainable," and this comes back to the creativity right?
It's like if you always try to crank 100%, you're like, "I need to get 2,000 awesome
words out today," that's like trying to hit 43 minutes every time and huffing and puffing.
Tom: Right.
Tim: And you're gonna start putting things off.
"Oh I need another cup of coffee.
Oh my god my shoes are so dirty.
I need to fix my shoes before I can go out and write."
Tom: Possibly let that stand.
Tim: And you'll do anything to put it off because it becomes this intimidating task.
So yeah, sort of the 95 versus 100% is another one.
Oh I've got another one, I have to share.
Tom: Please.
Tim: This is one of my favorites.
Shaun White ... Two things that are very interesting about Shaun White.
Well there are a lot of things but he holds the all-time record for medals at the X Games.
He has, I think, two gold medals at the Olympics and two things worth nothing for him and this
comes back to the high expectations thing.
I asked him, "What is your self talk when you come out of the gate for a gold medal
run at the Olympics?
What do you say to yourself?"
He thought about it and the short version is who cares.
The short version is, "Who cares, I think this is a really big deal.
Snowboarding, going down snow on this contraption but at the end of the day I'm gonna go home,
I'll see my family," which he borrowed from Agassi.
When Agassi sort of had his comeback that was how he took the pressure off in very,
very high pressure situations was to say, "Who cares?"
Which is effective when you put in the training.
If you put in the training you don't need to stress in that last minute.
The other thing I took away from Shaun is when he has a really serious goal, like a
gold medal at Sochi or whatever it might be, he also has a completely absurd goal to offset
how stress inducing that can be.
At one point it was, "I want to wear American flag pants on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine."
That was the other goal.
He has some ludicrous goal to offset the serious stuff.
Tom: Wow that's cool.
Tim: I've started trying to incorporate that in my life.
[crosstalk 00:38:58] Tom: What's an absurd goal that you have right
now?
Tim: Okay, so this is an exclusive.
This is breaking news.
Tom: Here we go.
Tim: And we'll see where it goes.
I'm a little hesitant to even share this but I'll give a teaser, I'll give a teaser which
is sufficient.
Goal, I want this book to be everywhere.
I want everyone to read this.
Like a friend of mine said, "I bought 4-hour Workweek for a few people who really needed
it for changing chapters in their lives or starting a company.
I've given 4-hour Body to people who want to lose weight.
This one I would give to everybody."
I have very big goals for this.
I have some other plans, which I can't go into huge detail with right now, but to create
a fragrance for men.
Tom: Really?
Tim: And I mean fucking look at me.
I'm from Long Island.
This is like a tuxedo for me.
Don't really wear cologne or anything.
Occasionally smell like I've been chased by hyenas or something if I'm sweating a lot
but I was like how funny would it be if I came out with a Tim Ferriss fragrance?
Oh my god.
Tom: That would be amazing.
Tim: How hilarious would that be?
Tom: What would Tim Ferriss smell like?
Tim: That I can't disclose but I do- Tom: Oaky?
Tim: Oaky, like tequila.
I think it'd be like a rough night.
[crosstalk 00:40:22] Tom: That could be the name.
Tim: Yeah, tequila and pine needles.
It's like what happened?
Tom: Tim Ferriss: A Rough Night.
Tim: Yeah, that's right and it'd be like a rough night by Tim Ferriss.
I want to have the cheesiest advertisements.
You know, like the unbuttoned dress shirt with the fancy watch looking like Blue Steel.
I just want to make it as ludicrous as possible but it will actually be ... I'm talking to
some of the best of the best people in that world right now.
Tom: Wow.
Tim: It's like one part complete spinal tap and then one part serious I actually want
to make something cool but that to me is just a psychological release valve so that when
I'm getting really wound up about this for whatever reason, I can think about that.
It just makes me laugh my ass off.
When I have two glasses of wine, I chill out.
Always pairing one serious with one absurd goal I think is brilliant.
It's so smart.
I've been doing that since he first told me about it and it's really improved the quality
of my life and my results.
I also don't feel like I have all my eggs in one basket.
I'm diversifying my identity in a way, which I think is very important.
Tom: All right, last question.
What is the impact that you want to have on the world?
Tim: The impact that I want to have on the world right now would be creating a benevolent
army of super learners who test the impossibles and teach other people to do the same.
That's it, so whether it's 100,000, a million, people who have mastered meta learning acquiring
skills who are also willing to test the impossibles, test the assumptions, and have the uncomfortable
conversations that I think this country is largely dodging, that gets me all excited
and if they're able to then impart that to more people.
My goal is to make me obsolete as quickly as possible.
I think the goal of any really good personal trainer should be to make themselves obsolete
and unnecessary as quickly as possible.
That's my goal.
Tom: That's awesome man.
Tim, thank you so much for coming in the show.
Tim: Yeah thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Tom: Absolutely.
Guys, you are going to want to get this book talking about the toolkit to build that army
of super learners who are out there, actually making an impact in the world.
I have a feeling that this is gonna be the book, I'm not kidding when I say that I have
not been this excited to read a book in a very, very long time.
It's the kind of book where you're gonna go in and no matter what it is that you're facing
right now in your life, whether it's in healthy, wealthy, or wise categories, there's gonna
be something there from somebody who's living it.
They've done the kind of thing that you want to do and they're giving you the real world
advice from right there, that minute in their life which is incredibly exciting and there's
two things about it that I like.
One, the elements that they give you are very punchy.
They're short.
They're succinct.
It's easy to remember.
The good shit sticks.
It's gonna be a lot of stuff that really sticks and will resonate with you, will echo through
your own mind, but he also allows them to give their own context.
It's not word in the abstract, it's actually, take Jamie Foxx for instance.
It's not just Jamie's quote about how there's nothing beyond fear, it's actually explaining
what that means and being able to put it in the context real world for him at that moment
and getting that allows these phrases to have depth.
I can't tell you how obsessively I collect those codified nuggets of wisdom.
My Evernote is bogged down.
I swear my iPhone is actually heavier from the number of those kind of nuggets that I've
collected and if you look at this tome, it comes with the promise of that kind of stuff
in it.
If you're like me and you've read everything that this man has written, you've listened
to all the podcasts, you know he is not for play and what he delivers always is usable
and that usability is my obsession.
Join me in getting that copy.
I'm gonna be buying an absurd number in the name of Impact Theory and we're gonna be doing
some kind of big giveaway.
Yeah, if you haven't already read it go out and get it.
It's available now.
Dive in.
Tim I cannot thank you enough for being on the show my man.
Tim: Thank you.
Tom: It is a pleasure.
And of course Tim, we have to ask though.
Tim: Yeah.
Tom: Where can they find you online?
Tim: They can find me just about everywhere.
They can find me @tferriss, with two R's and two S's at Twitter.
Tim Ferriss on Facebook.
Tim Ferriss on Instagram.
Doing some fun stuff on Instagram these days and for sample chapters and all sorts of other
goodies, ToolsofTitans.com would be the place to check it out.
Tom: Awesome, well guys he's got some of the best goodies and giveaways and just ongoing
value add stuff so be sure to check it out.
Toolsoftitans.com.
All right guys.
Until next time, be legendary.
Take care.
Hey everybody.
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