Tim Ferriss Quotes
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I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
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There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
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Every time I find myself stressed out, it's because I do things primarily driven by growth.
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The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.
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The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.
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I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.
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There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth.
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Nothing can match the wonderment that comes from staring up into the star-filled canopy above and realizing that you are a part of that creation.
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Money doesn't change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
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It's amazing how someone's IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
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The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'
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World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.
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One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.
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What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.
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Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.
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There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.
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I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
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Rather than spend my life on data entry and typing, I also take photos on my iPhone of business cards, wine labels, menus, or anything I want to have searchable on-the-run.
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I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.
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If we define risk as 'the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,' inaction is the greatest risk of all.
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I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly.
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I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m.
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If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.
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Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you're moving.