Author: Timothy Ferriss
ISBN: 978-1785041853
The book basically consists of interviews with 130+ of the world's top performers. The questions are really well though and I am certain you will find many great advice from people that are top performers in fields of your interest (be it business, sports, art or else).
EXCERPTS
[This is one of the two books of Tim Ferriss that I really enjoyed (the other is 4-hour workweek). The others (Tools of Titans, 4-hour body, 4-hour chef) pale in comparison to the two.]
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s a short reminder that success can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take.
Jack used to say it’s okay to take a day off from working out. But on that day, you’re not allowed to eat. That’s the short way of saying you’re not really allowed to get unfocused. Take a vacation. Gather yourself. But know that the only reason you’re here on this planet is to follow your star and do what the Muse tells you.
That wonderland where we can flit from one superficial, jerkoff distraction to another, always remaining on the surface, never going deeper than an inch. Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you’re writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
“I’d rather die doing something I feel is great and amazing rather than be safe and comfortable living a life I hate.”
There is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Many are fooled into thinking they are the same thing.
Creativity operates differently. You work hard because you’re inspired to, not because you have to.
When you’re creative, you render competition obsolete, because there is only one you, and no one can do things exactly the way you do. Never worry about the competition.
When you are in your 20s and 30s and want to have a remarkable, fulfilling career, you must work hard. If you don’t work harder than everyone else, you will not get ahead. Further, if you are looking for work-life balance in your 20s or 30s, you are likely in the wrong career. If you are doing something you love, you don’t want work-life balance.
Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult. Almost getting into the wrong marriage helped me recognize and enter the right one. Falling sick made me focus on my health.
Happiness, or at least peace, is the sense that nothing is missing in this moment. No desires running amok. It’s okay to have a desire. But pick a big one and pick it carefully. Drop the small ones.
The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want, not what you’re “supposed to.”
Do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time.
Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself.
Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait.
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students.
“It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding what game you want to play.”—Kwame
Life will go faster than you know. It will be tempting to live a life that impresses others. But this is the wrong path. The right path is to know that life is short, every day is a gift, and you have certain gifts. Happiness is about understanding that the gift of life should be honored every day by offering your gifts to the world. Don’t let yourself define what matters by the dogma of other people’s thoughts. And even more important, don’t let the thoughts of self-doubt and chattering self-criticism in your own mind slow you down. You will likely be your own worst critic. Be kind to yourself in your own mind. Let your mind show you the same kindness that you aspire to show others.
Most “bad” recommendations I could reduce to “I have been successful, so do it my way.” The best advice is more like, “I can’t answer your question, but this might be a good way for you to think about it.” Everyone has their own journey. People who offer great advice understand that their goal is to help someone on their unique journey. People who offer bad advice are trying to relive their old glories.
“I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” –Marcus Aurelius
Feeling overwhelmed usually means one of two things: either my blood’s trapped in my head and I need to go exercise, or, more likely, I’ve overcommitted myself and my brain knows there’s no way I can reasonably get done everything I’ve set out to do. Usually the solution is to take a deep breath, look at the calendar, and start canceling things or moving deadlines until the paralysis evaporates. Feeling unfocused, on the other hand, usually means I haven’t quite locked into whatever I’m working on yet—that a part of me still thinks I can pull the ripcord and bail. It usually happens in the first three months of writing a new book. In the end, a lack of focus is usually just fear: fear that whatever project I’m attempting will go nowhere or fail miserably. Early on, I used to give in to that fear. Four books later, I know it’s just a ghost, and I can blow right through it without looking back.
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” –Bruce Lee
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.”
“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”
“If it hurts me, it must hurt the other ones twice as much.”
Over the last couple decades, I’ve noticed that the best, most enduring partnerships in business (and in life) are among people who are constantly growing together. If the person you choose to depend on is constantly striving to learn and improve, you too will push yourself to new levels of achievement, and neither of you will feel like you have settled for someone you eventually outgrow.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? [My advice is to] take risks, now. The advantages that college students and new grads have are their youth, drive, lack of significant responsibilities, and, importantly, lack of the creature comforts one acquires with time. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Barnacles of the good life tend to slow you down, if you don’t get used to risk-taking early in your career. I started numerous companies in my early 20s only to see them all fail, but I never thought twice about starting the next one. I knew after the first one that I loved the feeling of starting something, and I had almost no other responsibilities. Eventually, one of the startups did work out, but I was prepared to try as many times as it would take to win. If you are your sole responsibility, this is the time to step outside of your comfort zone, to start or join an exciting, risky project; to drop everything else at the chance to be part of something really great. So what if it fails? You can always go back to school, take that job at an investment bank or a consulting company, move into a nicer apartment. The advice to ignore (in certain situations) is to strive to become “well-rounded”—to move from company to company, looking to pick up different types of experience every year or two, when starting out. That’s useful in the abstract, but if you find that strength of yours (as an individual contributor or a team leader) at a company whose mission you are truly passionate about, take a risk—commit and double down, and rise through the ranks. Maybe you’ll be running the place before you know it!
#1 New York Times bestseller I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons.
In the big picture of our lives, we really don’t know whether a particular success or failure is actually helping or hurting us.
So the metric I now use to judge my efforts and goals is: Did I do my best, given who I was and what I knew at that particular time? And what can I learn from the outcome to make my best better next time? Note that criticism is not failure. If you’re not being criticized, you’re probably not doing anything exceptional.
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? I think people assume that you have to weigh all feedback on your product (whether it’s a podcast, an app, etc.) equally. Not all feedback is created equal, and not all ideas from your users are good ones! Taking too much stock in feedback can change the vision for your own product, and suddenly it won’t feel like yours anymore.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Don’t wait until you get a job to do the thing you want to be doing. For most careers, showing that you have initiative by working on projects related to your future job is a great way to get a foot in the door. If you want to be a writer or journalist, start keeping a blog that you update regularly! If you want to be a programmer, create and maintain a project on GitHub. Anything that you can point to on your LinkedIn that screams, “Hey, I’m passionate about this!” works.
Ignore anyone who tells you to go for security over experience.
My advice is to choose a profession that is really easy for you to do and that also allows you to be creative. If it is easy for you to do and somewhat difficult for your peers to do, you will not have to work too hard to be successful and you will have enough spare time to enjoy life. You will also be able to put in extra hours to blow out the competition every now and then, should that be necessary. If, on the other hand, you have to work long hours all the time just to be competitive, you will burn out and not enjoy life. One should not pursue a profession just because it is viewed, at the time you begin college, as the one that will have the most jobs or where you will make the most money. Technologies and infrastructures in the world are changing at an unprecedented rate. No one can predict what will be the best profession four years from now. If you are uncertain of your talent, get a broad education that does not narrow your options.
The best skill is to be able to communicate efficiently both in writing and speaking.
My message would be: “Sugar is toxic.” Sugar and other natural or artificial sweeteners are among the most addictive agents in our environment. When consumed in quantities that exceed the rate of metabolism in muscle or the brain, sugar is converted to fat, resulting in insulin resistance, obesity, and an increased risk of many other diseases, including cancers. While consuming fats and proteins evokes a feeling of satiety, consuming sugars induces a desire for more sugar within an hour or so. We evolved this addiction because, in the not-so-distant past, adding fat to our bodies at the end of a growing season when fruits were ripe was essential for surviving until the next growing season. But today, sugar is available all year round and is one of the cheapest foods available. So we continually add fat to our bodies.
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” –Joseph Campbell
“If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.” –Chinese proverb
“There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.” –Seneca
“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”
The Doctor and the Soul by Viktor E. Frankl.
The Tao of Power by Lao Tzu [a translation of the Tao Te Ching by R. L. Wing]
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.
If you are struggling to figure out where you are headed in life or what you are passionate about, pay attention to activities, ideas, and areas where you love the process, not just the results or the outcome. We are drawn to tasks where we can receive validation through results, but I’ve learned that true fulfillment comes from love of the process. Look for something where you love the process, and the results will follow.
Persistence matters more than talent. The student with straight As is irrelevant if the student sitting next to him with Bs has more passion.
Over the past month, I’ve cancelled contracts and said no to new projects and interviews. I’ve started creating space to explore and doodle again. To sit and do nothing. To wander and waste a day. And for the first time in five years, I’m finally in a place where there is no due date tied to every drawing. No deadline for ideas. And it feels really right.
Leadership on the Line by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky,
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? What did I key into the sat-nav system of my life [where do I want to be 10, 20 years from now]? What is my ultimate destination? You have to look at that every time you feel overwhelmed. Remembering that destination will help you make the single most important distinction in life, which is to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? I think most recommendations are bad because they’re one-size-fits-all. “Take more risks.” “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” “Work harder.” The problem is that some people need to take more risks, while others need to take fewer risks. Some people need to ease up on themselves, while others are already too self-forgiving. Some people need to work harder, while others are already skating on the edge of burnout. And so on. So, I think the most useful kind of recommendations are about improving your general judgment—your ability to accurately perceive your situation (even if the truth isn’t flattering or convenient), your possible options, and the tradeoffs involved. Good judgment is what allows you to evaluate whether a recommendation is appropriate to your situation or not; without it, you can’t tell the difference between good and bad advice.
The books Superforecasting (by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner) and How to Measure Anything (by Douglas W. Hubbard) have some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. And Decisive (by Chip Heath and Dan Heath) explains four of the biggest judgment errors (like framing your decision too narrowly, or letting temporary emotions cloud your judgment) and gives tips for combating them.
Don’t be afraid of being wrong. Because being wrong is just an opportunity to find more of the truth. Second, stay flexible and be open to opportunities as they come your way. Most of the successful people I know did not know exactly what they wanted to do coming right out of college, and they changed their focus over the course of their careers. Be open to what the world brings your way. Don’t be afraid to change jobs or careers, no matter how much time you have already put into something. There is no urgency to have it all figured out.
If you define failure as merely losing, then you will think failure is just an outcome. And you might try to adjust your play to avoid losing even though your decisions were great (or repeat poor strategies just because you won executing them once). This would be the equivalent of deciding it is wise to run red lights because you made it through one safely a few times. Or to decide not to go through green lights because you got in an accident once doing that. Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won doesn’t mean I succeeded—not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run.
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” –Bill Gates
People react to kindness with kindness, to respect with respect. Relationships—even brief ones—are doorways to opportunity.
Language is intimate, and there is no way I could do the work I do if I had to communicate in translation.
The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness: A True Story by Joel ben Izzy.
“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”—Hal Boyle.
There is so much going on in a day, actions and distractions, it’s easy to get caught up and lose your vision.
Beyond a certain minimum amount, additional information only feeds—leaving aside the considerable cost of and delay occasioned in acquiring it—what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” The information we gain that conflicts with our original assessment or conclusion, we conveniently ignore or dismiss, while the information that confirms our original decision makes us increasingly certain that our conclusion was correct.
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.”—Betty Reese
“The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.”—John Rawls
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”—Warren Buffett
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”—Theodore Roosevelt
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”—Henry David Thoreau
“Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.”—Warren Buffett
“It is very important what not to do.”—Iggy Pop
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”—Peter Drucker
“In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.”—Albert Schweitzer
“Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers.”—Seneca the Younger
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”—Harry Truman
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”—John Gall
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”—William Bruce Cameron [Measure what matters.]
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”—Mahatma Gandhi
“I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment. They are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post: for support, rather than for illumination.”—David Ogilvy
While people often say there’s not enough time, remember that you’ll always have less attention than time. Full attention is where you do your best work, and everyone’s going to be looking to rip it from you. Protect and preserve it.
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? There are so many. “Scale.” No, don’t scale. Start small, stay as small as possible for as long as possible. Grow in control, not out of control. “Raise capital to launch a software/services business.” No, bootstrap. As in life, we form business habits early on. If you raise money, you’ll get good at spending money. If you bootstrap, you’ll be forced to get good at making money. If there’s one habit/skill an entrepreneur should practice, it’s making money. So force yourself into it. “Fail early, and fail often.” No. What’s with the failure fetish in our industry? I don’t get it. Of course, most businesses don’t make it, but the idea that failure is a prerequisite for success has never made sense to me. I don’t think it’s a notch in the belt. It’s just a failure. Further, many people will tell you there’s a lot to learn from failure. Maybe . . . But there’s more to learn from success. Failure may tell you what not to do again, but it doesn’t help you figure out what to do the next time around. I’d rather focus on the things that work, and try those again, than try to take lessons from the things that didn’t.
Few things bother me more than wanting to actually say yes to something today but being blocked by a previous yes I said weeks or months ago.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? I go for a walk. Preferably on a route I’ve never taken before. If it’s a routine route, I tend to ignore the surroundings and slip back into thinking about the stuff I’m unfocused on. But if it’s a new route, I focus outward and my mind clears up quickly. Seems like it has to be about 30 minutes or more to really do the job, but nothing refreshes me like walking in a new direction, toward something or somewhere I haven’t headed before.
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” –Benjamin Disraeli
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” –Niccolò Machiavelli
The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,
Rhinoceros Success by Scott Alexander.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” –George Bernard Shaw
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis.
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.
Do not drop out of college unless you truly have a better alternative. Some notable individuals have succeeded in spite of doing so, but it’s a serious obstacle to overcome for most people.
Ask yourself, “Would you say yes if this were next Tuesday?” It’s so easy to commit to things that are weeks or months out, when your schedule still looks uncluttered.
I avoid working on things that someone else could do, even if I enjoy doing it and would get paid well to do it. I try to give my best ideas away in the hope that someone will do them, because if they do them, that means I was not the only one who could have. I encourage competitors for the same reason. In the end, I’m left with projects that only I can do, which makes them distinctive and valuable.
Don’t try to find your passion. Instead master some skill, interest, or knowledge that others find valuable. It almost doesn’t matter what it is at the start. You don’t have to love it, you just have to be the best at it. Once you master it, you’ll be rewarded with new opportunities that will allow you to move away from tasks you dislike and toward those that you enjoy. If you continue to optimize your mastery, you’ll eventually arrive at your passion.
Propaganda by Edward Bernays,
the documentary The Century of the Self.
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
Don’t trust the gurus, whether a marketing guru or a life guru. Anybody telling you he knows better is—more than anything—disempowering you, because he is placing you below and himself above. The guru separates himself from the rest of us. Anything that creates separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all united, all the same, all small parts of the same bigger thing, the universe. I am especially thinking of all the online personalities telling you to work harder, telling you they are working more than anybody. When 99 percent of your life is your work, either you are really bad at what you do or you are completely off balance with the rest of your life; neither is something to be proud of. Anytime you see someone preaching, remember that this is smoke and mirrors.
Give your money to people who need it, not to charities.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection.
“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise, instead, seek what they sought.” –Matsuo Bashō
“The things you own end up owning you.” –Chuck Palahniuk
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” –James Cameron
“Don’t let the weight of fear weigh down the joy of curiosity.” Fear is really false evidence appearing real.
“Attitude puts aptitude on steroids.” Attitude is the soft stuff, but when the chips are down, as they so often are, it’s the soft stuff that often counts.
I dropped out of university to start my own company, helping businesses build websites. At the time, my friends and family thought I was mad. But my mother has been the person who’s given me the security to do what I do today. Of course she would have preferred that I had gone to university and had a solid educational foundation to stand on. But most of all she says to me: “Do what you really feel like doing, and I’ll be here for you no matter what.” It’s probably this support that’s made me feel like there’s nothing in the world that’s impossible. You just have to dare to do it. If you dare, then you have already gotten further ahead than 99 percent of all the others.
“If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” –Colonel David Hackworth
The Passion Trap: How to Right an Unbalanced Relationship
How to Actually Change Your Mind by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The name of the game in what I do is lifting the most weight. However, the way to get the strongest is to lift what is optimal and not what is maximal. In general, lifters and coaches tend to lift too heavy, too often. I think it’s human nature in some ways to try to take on more than we can handle. But to make progress, you need to lift and do things that are more realistic. Any time you overreach, you are putting yourself in a compromised position.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Don’t worry all that much about your first job. Just start, and let the work teach you. With every step, you will discover more about who you want to be and what you want to do. If you wait for the perfect and keep all of your options open, you might end up with nothing but options. So start.
Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins
City of Thieves by David Benioff
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” –Leo Tolstoy
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” –Terry Pratchett
The quote I would emblazon on a billboard is: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Simple. So important. I think we often get distracted by, well, life, or social media, or whatever. At the end of the day, we can see that we haven’t really moved the needle on what we truly care about.
If you take risks, you will sometimes fail, but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means you have to dust yourself off, get up, and redouble your efforts to succeed.
“If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, you must go together.”
This advice also applies to entrepreneurs who have one foot in the business and one foot out. That’s okay at the outset (heck, Phil Knight of Nike worked as an accountant for years, and Sara Blakely of Spanx sold fax machines until she was certain her idea would take off). But at some point after your idea has launched, the hedging has to stop. You can’t build a significant business with one foot out the door. Entrepreneurs often cling to their conventional work like a security blanket—out of fear rather than necessity—even after they can afford to pursue their venture full-time. My advice to entrepreneurs: Once your idea has gained traction, cut the umbilical cord. Your idea can’t take flight if you don’t leave the nest.
Don’t worry about making money. Don’t stress about having a plan. Don’t think about networking or setting yourself up for the next thing. Try as hard as you possibly can to find something you love, because the depressing reality is that most people never find a career that they’re truly passionate about. For many people, the real world is a slog and they live for the weekends. It will never get easier than right now to recklessly pursue your passion. Do it.
I will always be better off consuming a smaller amount of high-quality information than trying to consume it all. I think that lesson can apply to a lot of things. For instance, you’re better off spending quality time with one friend on a given night than trying to run around and see everyone.
“You can only do your best”
I have learned that when I overcommit, I lose focus and desire to do the work at hand. So this is why learning to say no is very important to me. Sometimes, however, loss of focus is a symptom of something else, that you really don’t care for your work. This needs a lot of reflection and discussions with mentors to figure out whether you need a break, a vacation, or a change of career.
Sugar Blues by William Dufty
“In order to become a Grandmaster, you must already be one.”
“I wake up each day with the firm conviction that I am nowhere near my full potential. ‘Greatness’ is a verb.”
I learned more than anything to strive to be completely open and transparent in my relationships. That has led to fewer but higher-quality relationships over time, and it has freed me from worrying as much about what other people think. Now one of the most important buzzwords in my vocabulary is “authenticity.”
Much of one’s attitude toward life depends on their level of optimism. An optimistic person will invest more in him- or herself, as the deferred reward is expected to be higher. A pessimistic person prefers the immediate returns at the expense of the long-term outcomes.
Ignore advice, especially early in one’s career. There is no universal path to success.
I had not appreciated the maxim “Time is money” until recently. But for those whose time is a scarce resource, learning to say no to meetings is a necessary skill. Sitting through an unproductive meeting has huge opportunity costs. It seems obvious, but people struggle with equilibrating time and money. There are many organizations that fret over small, direct expenses, yet have no misgivings about keeping superfluous staff tied up in a conference room for hours. In recent years, I have become better at judging the opportunity cost of time.
The most important one by far is realizing that the real measure of a good life is “How happy and satisfied am I with my life right now?”
I came to realize that the key to a great life is simply having a bunch of great days. So you can think about it one day at a time.
So the longer-term challenge is simply designing your life so that you have more of this stuff and less of the fluff. Look at every activity as you go through your day and think, “Is this contributing to getting me a better day—today—and if not, is there anybody in the world who has managed to design this activity out of their lives and still succeed beyond my level?”
[My favorite “failure” has been] making unemployment creative, and not getting a job or hanging out with people just because one is “supposed to.” My best ideas came from when I was not distracted or tired from a job or social needs but had the freedom to think big and think crazy, yet had the time to think it through. That said, a good education (computer science and law) and the discipline that came from highly motivated job experience (I definitely needed the money!) were also essential.
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” –Leonardo da Vinci
Don’t plan on “winning the lottery” right away, because it usually doesn’t happen. Doing a good job and building your assets is like winning the lottery, but over time. You gotta work hard every day, make progress every day, and make money every day. Over time, you’ll be in good shape. If you do win it in the first year, hey, I’ll be the first to congratulate you—but don’t count on it.
I think procrastination is a major part of the creative path. If you think you are just wasting time in general, even though you may not know it, your mind and body are solving problems you can’t face head on. So it’s okay to take a walk, get lost in a bookshop, watch a movie, or go for a swim (just don’t get lost on your phone).
Pick your early jobs based on what gets you the most valuable experience. If you want to be an entrepreneur, don’t dive directly into doing your venture but go get work at an early-stage startup to learn the ropes and get paid to make your early mistakes. Only after getting the necessary experience and knowledge should you strike out on your own. This is what I did, and although the startups I worked at were mostly failures, I don’t think I could have succeeded at my own thing without that experience.
Many of us have bought into the cliché “pursue your passion.” For many, that is terrible advice. In your 20s, you may not really know what your best skills and opportunities are. It’s much better to pursue learning, personal discipline, growth. And to seek out connections with people across the planet. For a while, it’s just fine to follow and support someone else’s dream. In so doing, you will be building valuable relationships, valuable knowledge. And at some point your passion will come and whisper in your ear, “I’m ready.”
“Know before you go.”
“The acquisition of riches has been for many men, not an end, but a change, of troubles.” –Epicurus
“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” –Eleanor Roosevelt
The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity by Daniel Reid.
I always feel like sports are a microscopic view of life. The same principles and lessons apply, but they are more apparent in sports.
The Champion’s Mind: How Champions Think, Train, and Thrive by Jim Afremow.
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks,
Ignore the advice to specialize in one thing, unless you’re certain that’s how you want to roll. Ignore giving a shit about what other people think about your career choices or what you do for a living—especially if what you do for a living funds your career choices. Ignore the impulse to dial down your enthusiasm for fear it’ll be perceived as unprofessional.
When it comes to building an online audience, a big mistake people make is trying to be everywhere at once. They’re scrambling to generate a ton of mediocre content to fill up a seemingly endless number of social feeds and online platforms, which leads to dismal results. Trying to crush it on every platform, especially if you’re a one-person show, is not a wise or sustainable use of your time, talent, or energy. Even if you have a team, I still recommend choosing one platform to focus on at first. Before committing to another content channel or social platform, ask yourself, why exactly do you want to be on this platform? What are the specific business reasons you’re going to commit time, energy, and resources to regularly creating and engaging in that space? Does this really make sense given your other time commitments and big-picture goals? One thing business owners don’t realize is that every social media platform you’re active on becomes an open channel for customer service. People will ask questions there and, yes, they’ll complain there, too. Think that through. Have a process in place for someone on your team to sweep social channels on a regular basis so you don’t create a customer service nightmare for yourself. Just because you can be active on a platform doesn’t mean you should.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger
We were faced with a classic example of “don’t ask customers what they want, figure out what they need.”
Asking myself the question, “When I’m old, how much would I be willing to pay to travel back in time and relive the moment that I’m experiencing right now?”
Focus on effectiveness—what your actions will actually accomplish—and not self-actualization or other ways of trying to feel good about yourself.
Think about what you will add to the world. Some lucrative professions (e.g., ultra-high-tech finance) are dubious applications of human brainpower.
Fear is a friend of exceptional people.
It took a few more successful albums, and some unsuccessful ones, to understand that the success of a project very often has nothing to do with the quality of a project. Sometimes really good projects fail commercially. And sometimes projects that might not have artistically hit the mark as I would have liked have had great commercial success.
There are so many elements that go into making something successful—all of which are out of your control. You’re in control of making your project the best it can possibly be for you, but you are powerless over most of what happens after that. Even if you do your best in terms of marketing and promotion, you have no control over how people react to it. Seeing an album that I felt was really good not do well commercially taught me the reality of the ups and the downs of honest work, and that has served me since.
For instance, I left Google in 2008 to start a company, and the first two or three things didn’t work out. Pinterest launched in 2010. It didn’t really start growing quickly for another year or two, and it really took off around 2012. That’s a four-year period where things weren’t going awesome. But, I thought: “That’s not that long. That’s like med school before you go into residency.”
I feel like a lot of people in Silicon Valley serialize their lives. They think, “First I’ll do college. Then I’ll do a startup. Then I’ll make money. Then I’ll do X.” There’s some truth in that [approach], but most of the most important stuff has to be parallel-processed, like your relationships and your health, because you can’t make up the time by doing more of it later. You can’t neglect your wife for four years and then say, “Okay, now it’s my wife years.” Relationships don’t work that way, and neither does your health or your fitness. . . . Figuring out a system, so that the stuff you need to do all the time happens, even while you might be placing disproportionate focus on one thing, is pretty important. Otherwise, you’ll be setting yourself up to be lonely and unhealthy in your future.
“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.” –Seneca
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”—John F. Kennedy
When you stop caring about being right in the eyes of everyone—versus being right in your own eyes and the eyes of those who matter to you—it’s amazing how little you care to waste energy trying to convince people of your view.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded.”
Another piece of bad advice: “Protect yourself from stress and your life will be better.” Protection from stress serves only to erode my capacity [to handle it]. Stress exposure is the stimulus for all growth, and growth actually occurs during episodes of recovery. Avoiding stress, I have learned, will never provide the capacity that life demands of me. For me, balancing episodes of stress with equivalent doses of recovery is the answer.
In a real sense, to grow in life, I must be a seeker of stress.
“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”—Elbert Hubbard
It’s a reminder that when you challenge the norms, when you make your voice heard, you are guaranteed to receive criticism, but in the end, it’s all worth it. The alternative is being invisible, and that’s not how I live my life.
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? Talk therapy. Talking and thinking about your fear is great—who doesn’t like to talk about themselves for an hour? But it will keep you in the loop of your thinking mind, often for decades. Emotional problems need to be dealt with emotionally, not intellectually.
So don’t trust the adults too much. In the past, it was a safe bet to trust adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the 21st century is going to be different. Whatever the adults have learned about economics, politics, or relationships may be outdated. Similarly, don’t trust technology too much. You must make technology serve you, instead of you serving it. If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims and enslaving you to its agenda.
This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. But this advice has never been more urgent than in the 21st century. Because now you have competition. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the government are all relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. We are not living in the era of hacking computers—we are living in the era of hacking humans. Once the corporations and governments know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you and you won’t even realize it.
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. . . . Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” —Viktor E. Frankl,
The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. Feeling as though you are trying too hard indicates that your priorities, technique, focus, or mindfulness is off. Take it as a cue to reset, not to double down. And take comfort in the fact that, whenever in doubt, the answer is probably hidden in plain sight.
