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    Tag: Tim Ferriss

    • Designing the Sweet Life (La Dolce Vita)

      “A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      In a full confession that will surprise no one in my circle of friends and family, I struggle with the act of idleness. I rarely sit still, even on vacation, choosing to explore whatever place I find myself in, and too often stack too many activities into those “idle” days. There’s no lying on the beach for hours for me. The default is activity over idleness. I marvel at the pets for their ability to simply nap away hours of a day. If I nap at all I set the alarm for 15 minutes and get right back to moving about as soon as possible. And the idea of sleeping in? There is no snooze alarm in my world.

      But that doesn’t translate to being productive all of the time. We can putter about without really getting anything done. The world is full of people quietly quitting the work they have in front of them. There are plenty of people opting out of frenetic lifestyles. There are whole cultures built around the sweetness of doing nothing (dolce far niante: I’m looking at you Italy). So how do we restless souls learn to chill out a bit and live the sweet life (la dolce vita) ourselves?

      “Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

      The thing is, Thoreau and Ferriss, both known for promoting more strategic idleness in our days, have also produced some significant work that resonates beyond the moment they created it. For all their perceived idleness, there’s an underlying productivity hidden in plain sight. That’s what people miss in the idea of la dolce vita—it’s living the sweet life while still keeping the lights on with productive work. It seems we can have it all, if we create a lifestyle that is both pleasurable and productive.

      The trick is being far more strategic in our productivity, thus giving breathing room for idleness. We ought to know what we’re really setting out to do in this lifetime, and break that down into milestones. Milestones in turn are achieved through work strategically designed into our days. If that sounds like the antithesis of dolce far niante, well, I understand. But it really is the essence of living Thoreau’s “natural day”: filled with enough idle time to feel we’re not cogs in a machine while still producing something memorable.

      Productivity (and idleness) requires focus. Doing the work that matters most in the moment and then get on with living that sweet life. We’re all students of maximizing the potential of our lifetime. We ought to know what makes life sweet, and also meaningful. Designing a pace of life that balances the two is the essence of a sweet life.

      Ultimately, designing a lifestyle that maximizes our potential should be our focus. But potential for what? Wealth? Fame? Isn’t it really time spent doing the things that makes a life sweet? Time with people who matter a great deal to us. Time doing the things that make life a pleasure. Time structured in a way that it doesn’t feel like we’re biding our time but living it.

      So the question when designing a lifestyle is, “what will maximize the number of beautiful moments we may stack together in this finite lifespan?” Nothing brings focus to our days like remembering we only have so many of them. Memento mori. Stop wasting time thinking about it and go live it, today and every day we’re blessed with. The Italians are on to something, don’t you think?

    • The “What’s Our Fire” Exam

      “Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval

      We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really matters to us, and are we moving towards that? Sometimes examination tells us we’re on the right track, sometimes we find more smoke than fire. But we ought to sort out what’s going on either way.

      Examination doesn’t invite trouble, it offers a lifeline. We get in the habit of saying things that won’t rock the boat. I’d suggest that the boat ought to be rocked now and then. There’s nothing wrong with a spring cleaning for the soul. Purge all those pent-up resentments and simmering anger and give them air to breath. They’ll either ignite into a bonfire or smother for lack of fuel. But we can’t just live every day ignoring the growing inferno without being burned alive from the inside-out.

      Socrates famously said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Are we meant to be a torch or merely kindling for someone else’s dreams? Think of the things that we accept in our life that are frivolous and inconsequential on the surface, and worse, distract us from the things that might be life-changing given the chance. The thing that makes Naval’s statement incendiary is that we may find we’ve just been kindling all along. Isn’t it fair to ask, what is our fire, anyway?

    • The Thing About Busy

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” — Tim Ferriss

      We have a love/hate relationship with busy. We all want for more quiet time, but when we get it we quickly yearn for the energy of hustle and bustle. This is compounded by the story we tell ourselves that those who get ahead are the busiest and hardest-working among us. That might help make you a Partner at one of the “Big Three” consulting firms or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves why in the world we’d ever want that title? It’s a Faustian bargain—a deal with the Devil to have it all now in exchange for your soul.

      Screw that.

      Status doesn’t mean you’re successful at living. It just means you ground out more miles. Do we ever stop to ask what really gets ground in the process? Think about the last conversation you had with a “really busy” person. Was it meaningful or a transaction? Frazzled is a posture that doesn’t highlight one’s positive traits. To be calmly efficient is a choice; just as much of a choice as frazzled. But with better hair.

      We can be successful in life without sacrificing 300,000 heartbeats a week for the profitability of whatever stock symbol we happen to align ourselves with. The thing about busy is it’s a story we tell ourselves as an excuse for not doing what we really want to do. It takes courage to stop hiding behind busy.

      Instead we might choose contemplation and conversation and the deliberation of taking meaningful steps. We might seek experience accumulation and relationship building. We could delight in pregnant pauses. We can give ourselves permission to celebrate deep thinking and active listening and finding the right word without Googling it. We can rejoice in finishing what we once so boldly started but put aside because we’ve been so damned… busy.

    • The Trick In the Compass

      “It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.” — Simone Weil

      The quote above is making the rounds on Twitter again, stirred up first by Maria Popova and recently by Tim Ferriss. When the student is ready the teacher will appear, it is said, and whatever brought the quote back to my attention, I was ready to receive it. Maybe you are too.

      The last time I consulted my compass, I was sitting in a parking lot in front of a sporting goods store, hearing the truth. He told me to stop writing about death so much, but accepted my answer that stoicism isn’t a preoccupation with death, it’s a reminder to live with urgency. It would be the last conversation we’d ever have, and I wonder at the exchange even now.

      The trick in the compass is that it doesn’t show true north, it shows magnetic north. The difference between the two is called the magnetic inclination. Magnetic north, simplified, changes with the molten core of the Earth. Its more fluid, if you will. We change in just such a way. Just like the compass, we must adjust our heading based on how far from true north our core has shifted our magnetic north. No wonder so many find themselves off course.

      Making ourselves clear to ourselves is a journey. It requires walking many miles, the consumption of vast amounts of poetry and prose, a good friend or mentor alongside, and certainly, a whole lot of writing. But mostly it requires stumbling over hard truths, picking yourself up and setting yourself back on the path.

    • Each Precious Moment

      “If you can be annihilated at any moment, then it’s each moment that’s precious. And if you don’t experience each moment, if you don’t understand how precious each moment is, then you are missing out. ‘cause that‘s all you can be sure of getting is right now.” – Sebastian Junger, from The Tim Ferriss Podcast

      I love Junger’s gruff quote above, for he bluntly points out what we all know and assume otherwise. This is all so very short, so enjoy each moment. Go out and find those micro adventures in between obligations. Say yes to the sunrise walks and the sunset celebrations and the meaningful conversations.

      For the second day in a row I was up at 5 AM and heading to the beach for a walk and sunrise. Distant lighting on the horizon was a spectacular pre-event. Feeling the warmth of the ocean in Miami as I walked the surf line helped lock in another memorable moment. These are the days you’ll remember, should you ever reach that future you.

      David Letterman asked Warren Zevon, in the last days of his life battling cancer, what he’d learned during the fight. Zevon’s answer was simple yet powerful: “Enjoy every sandwich”. And that’s what I thought to myself as I watched the sun rise up over the Atlantic Ocean. Just enjoy this precious moment. Experience it for what it is, and hope for another tomorrow.

      Miami Sunrise

    • Do Uncomfortable Things

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” – Tim Ferriss

      It’s easier than ever to master distraction. There are so many ways to push aside the importance of a specific task for the urgent du jour that pops up as a notification or to the top of your inbox. What is life but the prioritization of important things over all the rest? And yet we so easily cave to distraction.

      Important things fall by the wayside because they’re often uncomfortable. Or perceived to be. Certainly more uncomfortable than scurrying about in the familiar buzz of tasks and quick minutes. There were days when I’d look up, realize the time and see that I’d gotten none of the meaningful things I’d wanted to do completed. For those of us who want to feel accomplishment at the end of a long day, this can be a moment of painful self-reckoning.

      So why do we succumb over and over to the relative ease of distraction and the unimportant? Because it feels like no big thing at that moment, because we put the important task in a box of “uncomfortable”. Because busywork feels like getting things done, but easier than the task we ought to be doing. Because, because, because…

      “The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. Discipline is more reliable than motivation.” -Shane Parrish

      Uncomfortable has its own pleasures, just not always in the moment. Making a long term investment in ourselves through discipline seems more difficult in the moment, but deferred important tasks only amplify the longer you defer them. Pay me now or pay me later.

      Ultimately, the answer is to know what’s important for the long term and to have the discipline to stick to the tasks that matter in getting you there. Which requires embracing the suck and doing the uncomfortable important things until you forget that it was ever all that uncomfortable to begin with. And that infers that you have a vision for the future you and a clear map for how you’ll get there. The rest is disciplined action. Simple, right?

    • Pulling Dietary Levers

      “I guess I just encourage people to be much more attuned to all of the tools, right? So caloric restriction, dietary restriction, time restriction, right? You’ve probably heard me go on and on about my framework, the three levers; always pull one, sometimes pull two, occasionally pull three, never pull none.

      So time restriction… restricting when you eat, but otherwise not restricting how much or what. Dietary restriction is restricting some of the content in what you eat. So not eating carbs, not eating wheat, not eating meat… not eating sugar. Those are all forms of dietary restriction. And then caloric restriction is restricting the amount.

      And so if you are never pulling one of those levers, which means you are eating anything you want, any time, how much, whatever, that’s called the Standard American Diet (SAD)…. We’ve been running a very good natural experiment on that for the last fifty years and the data are in. So it turns out that less than… 10% of the population are genetically robust enough to tolerate the SAD… But for the rest of us the 90% of us schmucks… the SAD is lethal. And so you’ve got to come up with a way to escape the gravitational pull of the SAD.” – Dr. Peter Attia, on The Tim Ferriss Show

      We all know this at a certain level, don’t we? We’ve all seen what the standard American diet does to those who eat it. But escaping the gravitational pull of it is the trick. What I love about this statement by Attia is how he lays it all out there, simplifying it to three basic levers. Always pull at least one, sometimes two or all three. And never none.

      Chart your food consumption over the last week and ask yourself, how many days did I pull none of the levers? For most of us, it’s most days. Notice there’s nothing in here about exercise either. We tend to think that exercising cancels out the crap we eat. That might help burn off the calories, but doesn’t account for whatever that crap is doing to your body as it circulates through your system.

      When it comes to things like diet I like simplicity. Doing a no carb diet is a pain in the ass when you travel a lot, so maybe you don’t pull that particular lever and opt for intermittent fasting or limiting the number of calories you consume that day is the better way. Pull one to three levers in a day and see how it transforms your body over time. With discipline and work we might just reach escape velocity. Pull a couple of levers and get in at least an hour of moving to drop the SAD from your days. I’m happy just thinking about that.

    • Something Bigger Than Yourself

      “This idea of ‘just follow your passion’, I don’t even have an understanding of what that means. Even though my whole life I have been very clear about the way I wanted to create change, and for whom, it wasn’t this out of the box understanding that we were going to use different forms of capital and support it with the right kind of talent to work a system to create real change …. I would say just start.

      Don’t start by asking ‘what is my purpose’, what is my passion? Start by asking what are the problems that need to be solved? Which ones attract me? And take a step towards that. Take one step and the work will teach you where you need to take the next step. Build tools in your toolbox. If you still don’t know what your passion or your purpose is after you take those steps, follow a leader and learn from that leader. There’s something so powerful… in apprenticing. I would say I apprenticed for fifteen years. And… skipping steps, particularly because life is shorter than we think it is and it’s longer than we think it is, it doesn’t serve the world and it doesn’t serve you.

      Just commit to something. This we don’t tell young people, or even old people. We don’t expect that enough. I think the cult of the individual is also the cult of optionality. And the secret is that when you commit to something, particularly something bigger than yourself, it will set you free. And suddenly you will find a freedom and layering of life that you never understood you had.” – Jacqueline Novagratz, from The Tim Ferriss Show

      The funny thing about Commencement speeches is that they’re full of grand visions and language and guidance for the graduating class. Yet few ever act on the very best advice they hear that day. The quotes above offer some of the best advice I’ve come across for people stepping out into the unknown world of their “career path”: Build tools in your toolbox. Take one step towards solving the problems that need solving, and then another. See where it takes you. When you’re unsure, find a leader worth following and learn from them.

      The thing is, this isn’t just timely advice for the Class of 2021 (or the frustrated Class of 2020 for that matter). It’s great advice for any of us from someone who has walked the path, tripped a few times along the way and risen to greater heights as a result. For all the talk of changing the world most people profess in unguarded moments of truth, the vast majority of us walk the path of career growth and embrace the cult of the individual (living my best life!). There’s nothing wrong with individualism, it just doesn’t do much to change the world.

      Deeper in the interview, Novagratz speaks of tackling problems that won’t be solved in our lifetime. There are plenty to choose from: poverty, racial equality, fixing the climate change mess and a hundred other problems that warrant solutions but are too big for one person to tackle. It’s a funny thing, thinking about taking on a project that you won’t live to see solved. But aren’t we all working to create things that will outlive us? Raising children, building a business, making art, writing… all are beyond ourselves. And so is meaningful change.

      When I hear someone like Novagratz speak, I recognize the small thinking I’ve been guilty of in my own lifetime. Thinking about things bigger than yourself is a path towards immortality, in a way. It’s creating something that will outlive you. Shouldn’t it be something that positively alters the course of humanity? If that seems too bold, well, maybe we aren’t giving ourselves enough credit for what we might accomplish. If we’d just commit and do the work. The work of our lifetime.

    • Leaning Towards High Agency

      “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something? So, how am I going to get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience? You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyverish sort of way. And that’s your approach to the world.” – Eric Weinstein on The Tim Ferriss Show

      I was brought up to follow the rules. Thinking that adults knew something in this world, I would follow rules of behavior and take no as the answer. Fall in line, do your part, don’t question things… passive, low agency characteristics.

      But I also grew up bending the rules ever so slightly in my favor, or breaking them outright. At four taking my three year old sister for a walk to visit my grandparents a mile or so away across a busy road? Let’s do it. At eleven or twelve taking my dad’s Playboy magazines and trading them with the neighbor’s dad for his Penthouse magazines and charge money for the other kids to read the articles? Seemed okay to me.

      But somewhere along the way you slip into the workforce and pick up obligations. Maybe you enter middle management and start following the HR playbook. And slowly, over time, you become passive and decidedly low agency. You become… sheepish. But somewhere inside you that inner maverick chafes at the wool coat. And then you listen to a guy like Eric Weinstein talk about high agency, you hear the example of the main character on The Martian finding a way. And you understand.

      “It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable.” – Sarah Blakely, Spanx

      We generally accept things the way they are. But what if we questioned things a bit more? What if we tried a different way to do the thing that didn’t work the first or second time? What if we developed higher agency within ourselves to set our lives in the direction we want it to go? To be more Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sara Blakely or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs in our own careers? In our own lives?

      “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk

      I think it starts with where we are right now in our lives. Living through a pandemic in our own way with Zoom or Teams, a laptop and a mobile phone at the ready. We’re all dealing with restrictions on travel and social distancing, some with a much harder hand to play than others, but as the stoics would tell us, we must play the cards we’re dealt anyway. And what do we do next?

      “What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn’t think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

      While we were complaining about shortages of toilet paper there were thousands of people figuring out a vaccine to make this problem go away. Right now, there are people building companies, writing the next great novel, inventing things or doing critical research that will outlive us all. The next big thing, created in the same time of COVID that you and I are living through. So what are we doing with our time? How are we going to work through whatever it is that isn’t working and finding a way through? A way to finally get it right?

      “There is an awful lot of fails before you get it right.” – Elizabeth Isabella, Scripted Fragrance, an Etsy business featured on CBS Sunday Morning

      I heard the Eric Weinstein interview on Tim Ferriss a few years ago now. I had the High Agency dogma reinforced in a George Mack Twitter thread a while back now too. In general I’ve leaned into higher agency in my own life. But still have a lot of fails before I get it right. Don’t we all? Keep trying.

      “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs

      We might not ever get to a point where we’re mentioned in the same list as Schwarzenegger or Jobs or Blakely or Musk, but then again, maybe we will. But only if we pivot more, find a way forward or through, and shake off the passive. Time marches on. Will we?

    • Islands of Time, Cornerstones of Castles

      “Behind the issue of how we allocate time lurks the even more fundamental issue of what we want to get out of our lives.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In reading Koch’s book it struck me how profoundly influential he was in Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week. Not a shock, really, since Ferriss often refers to Koch’s book as one of his cornerstones. I suppose I’d always thought of his use of the Pareto Principle as the essential takeaway, but didn’t realize the extent to which Koch urges lifestyle design himself in his book.

      The 80/20 Principle offers the usual business cases for who you spend your time with and what you spend your time on in business, but I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting the deeper dive into the self that he thrusts upon you. I’ll tap into this book in future posts, but wanted to explore Koch’s top ten highest-value uses of time. Here they are:

      The Top 10 highest-value uses of time:
      1. Things that advance your overall purpose in life
      2. Things you have always wanted to do
      3. Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results
      4. Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results
      5. Things other people tell you can’t be done
      6. Things other people have done successfully in a different arena
      7. Things that use your own creativity
      8. Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part
      9. Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively
      10. Things for which it is now or never
      – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      The list is fascinating on a lot of levels as a look at what a “highly successful person” prioritizes. I’ve put that in quotations because not everyone has the same belief about what success is, but you can’t take away that he’s accomplished quite a bit using his belief system. We all have this lurking issue of time, for we aren’t immortal, are we? So what would you prioritize?

      Well, Koch suggests making four lists to identify your own 20 percent that you should prioritize. He segments them as “islands”, or small segments of time, under which you list the things you’ve done that have contributed disproportionately towards each. The segments are: Happiness Islands, Unhappiness Islands, Achievement Islands and Achievement Desert Islands (periods of greatest sterility or lowest productivity). Your task is straightforward: Identify each, and then act accordingly in how you prioritize your time.

      Ah, yes… Making lists is one thing. Acting accordingly is quite another. And this is where most people fall off. And this is what Thoreau meant in one of his most famous quotes:

      “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Thoreau would have seen common ground in Koch’s list, and he himself pointed the way in Walden:

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Ferriss also mentioned Walden as a cornerstone book, and it is for me as well. But cornerstones only mean something if you build your castle on top of them. Otherwise they’re just a few rocks oddly places that someone else might trip over if they were distracted with their own life. Koch’s four islands are a great guide for prioritization and action.