#255: How to Turn Failure into Success

In this episode, we discuss another common request from listeners. I've gathered some of the best advice about coping with frustrations and roadblocks, and -- ultimately -- learning how to turn failure into success. These conversations are extremely valuable because they show you there is more than one way to achieve your goals. After more than 200 conversations with the world's top performers, you start to spot certain patterns. These are the shared habits, hacks, philosophies, and tools that are the common threads of success, happiness, health, and wealth. Behind each success story is usually a lesson on how to overcome failure. Aside from my own take on the topic, this episode includes conversations with: Arnold Schwarzenegger Malcolm Gladwell Bryan Johnson A. J. Jacobs Shep Gordon Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Soothe.com https://www.soothe.com/, the world's largest on-demand massage service. Because I've been broken so many times, I have body work done at least twice a week -- so I have a high bar for this stuff. I do not accept mediocrity, and I wouldn't expect you to, either. After much personal testing, I can affirm that Soothe delivers a hand-selected, licensed, and experienced massage therapist to you in the comfort of your own home, hotel, or office in as little as an hour. I was amazed at the quality of service and convenience. Think of it as Uber for massages, available in fifty cities worldwide. Download the app at Soothe.com https://www.soothe.com/ and use code TIM to get $20 off each of your first two massages. This podcast is also brought to you by MeUndies http://meundies.com/tim. I've spent the last year wearing underwear from these guys http://meundies.com/tim 24/7, and they are the most comfortable and colorful underwear I've ever owned. MeUndies are designed in L. A. and made from sustainably sourced MicroModal -- a fabric three times softer than cotton. Even better, it includes free shipping. If you don't love your first pair of MeUndies, they'll hook you up with a new pair or a refund. If you love the product, they have three different subscription plans -- so you'll never be bored with the ever-changing selection. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous, like the camo) and get 20 percent off your first pair. That's MeUndies.com/Tim http://meundies.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by soothe.com, the largest on-demand massage service in the world. Now, I've been broken so many times. I've had so many injuries from sports. I have bodywork done at least once a week, so I have a very, very high bar for this kind of stuff. A very, very high-quality control. And I was very skeptical of something that purported to be the Uber for massages. And I was blown away. I cannot tell you how surprised I was. And continue to be impressed by how high the level of massage therapist and body worker is through Sooth.

• 1:02Tim Ferriss?

  They deliver hand-selected, licensed, and experienced massage therapists to you in the comfort of your own home, hotel, or office in as little as an hour. I've used them in San Francisco, I've used them in Austin, I've used them in New York, I've used them all over. And you can, again, think of it as Uber for massages. It is available in 50 cities worldwide. The process is super simple. You choose the kind of massage you want, say Swedish, or sport, or deep tissue. You can even opt for couples massage. Then you set the length, the gender, and you request. Next thing you know, Sooth shows up where you want them with everything you need. They bring the massage table, sheets, oil, even music, so you don't have to worry about it. You can unwind and chill.

• 1:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sooth is in 50 cities, including most major US cities, and London, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, and more on the way. So, step number one: Download Sooth. That's S-O-O-T-H-E, in the iOS App Store or Google Play Store, and use code TIM, T-I-M, to get $20 off of each of your first two massages that you book. So, download Sooth, S-O-O-T-H-E, and then use code TIM.

• 2:18Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies, which I'm wearing right now. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 80s? Or as sleek as a Black Panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that is where MeUndies comes in. I have spent the last year wearing underwear from these guys 24/7, and they are the softest, most comfortable, most colorful underwear I have ever owned. And it says here in the copy, they want a seasonality hook. And this is, quote, "The summer and fall are the perfect time to update your underwear drawer," end quote. Now, I don't know why the summer and fall are specifically true for that, but I would say this, that when you look in your underwear drawer, in your underwear drawer, very often you'll see some that are a little ragged.

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:45Tim Ferriss?

  So check it out, meundies.com/tim. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am Tim Ferriss, your host, and this time around, we are offering specifically another edition of The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour by popular request. This is where I share the themed habits and other patterns that I've seen across more than 200 guests on the podcast. So we call them in as it relates to a specific topic or a specific question, and then give you the highlights. I've made it my job, each and every time I do an interview, to deconstruct world-class performers of different types, tease out the habits, routines, tactics, and so on, that set the average apart from the extraordinary.

• 4:30Tim Ferriss?

  And these Radio Hour episodes focus, as I mentioned, on one specific theme. And bring in tactical advice from several guests. This episode is about failure. One of the most common attributes in all of the successful people, however you define success, I have met and interviewed is that they have an ability, a cultivated ability oftentimes, to move through failure or view it differently. This is exactly when many other people simply quit. So, coming up, I talk to, for instance, the Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger about how failure propelled him forward.

• 5:06Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I remember Michael Jordan one time said in an interview that he missed 9,000 shots.

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  Then, mega bestselling author and one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, Malcolm Gladwell, shares his failures and what he learned from them.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  One of the most important things about me is how obsessed I am with those two flaws of mine.

• 5:28Tim Ferriss?

  Next, we learn from entrepreneur and investor Brian Johnson, the founder of Braintree, which was bought by eBay for a cool $800 million.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  So, at this point, I have no income, I have a child at home, and so I need to make ends meet.

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  Self-experimenter extraordinaire A.J. Jacobs then steps in to share a story about his favorite failure.

• 5:49A.J. Jacobs?

  You're gonna get rejected 98% of the time, you've just gotta keep going.

• 5:53Tim Ferriss?

  And Shep Gordon, who was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Rolling Stone Magazine, adds a story you won't forget. Shep is the man behind some of the biggest names in entertainment, and he understands and explains what separates those who get consumed by fame from those who are able to thrive in the moment.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  I would say 99% of the people I met in show business who were the kingpins were miserable.

• 6:16Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, I am often asked about my own failures. After all, I'm no stranger to struggles. I am not immune. I don't conquer insecurities and all obstacles with a mental karate chop every morning when I hop out of bed. So, I thought that we could give a specific example of one of my failures. And if you want to hear about some really, really dark times that I won't get into, you could listen to my new TED Talk from the main stage about fear setting. And you can find that has at least a million views right now, it just went up, tim.blog/ted. But in a business context, I thought I would focus on something that happened in the last few years.

• 7:01Tim Ferriss?

  And this can be very cathartic discussing failure and pragmatic because it helps you to uncover when you do a post-game analysis, what is holding you back ideologies perhaps, or mental models that need to evolve, or just simple blind spots. And this one is related to a TV show. I have tried TV several different times and I could give you some of the early failures, but I wanted to give you a more recent one. And it is a failure in quotation marks because I was able to transmogrify it into something else, and I will explain how. So, The Tim Ferriss Experiment was a TV show that was produced, I was one of the executive producers and the host, several years back with Turner Broadcasting.

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  And had a very good team on the Turner side, very good team on the production side, 0.0, who has done all of, as far as I know, Anthony Bourdain's shows, very gritty, very cinematic, incredible team. All the pieces were in place, and I did, before I got started, a number of analyses before signing on the dotted line for the deal, including descriptions of the worst-case scenario. And the worst-case scenarios, this relates back to the fear setting, which you guys should check out. So I did that, but of course it's limited based on a number of assumptions that you make about what could go wrong, what you think up at the time. I also did what's called a SWOT analysis, which is fancy sounding, but it stands for

• 8:29Tim Ferriss?

  strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. All right, so identifying strengths I can leverage for the show, weaknesses I might want to compensate for by hiring other people, or simply avoiding those particular areas. Opportunities, what could come of the show that I might want to be prepared for, have infrastructure for. And then threats, which relates to the fear setting and the premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils or bad things that could happen to pull on Seneca a little bit. What ended up happening with the show, there are a few things. Number one, for those of you who haven't seen it, you can just search "Tim Ferriss Experiment", it's available on iTunes at this point, is if you go to iTunes.com/TimFerriss, two R's,

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  two S's, and scroll to the bottom, you'll find the TV show.

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  The schedule was near suicidal. There were 13 episodes, I want to say, filmed in something like between 13 and 15 weeks. And I suffered some tremendous injuries because the premise of the show was that each episode I would tackle a new skill. I would start from zero. I would try to learn as much as possible with experts in the span of, say, a week, which realistically ended up being three or four days, and then test it in some type of high stakes final exam. And so we tried to parkour. We did rally racing. Suffered some tremendous injuries, which were caught on camera for your enjoyment. Poker, betting in Vegas, all sorts of craziness.

• 9:58Tim Ferriss?

  And we filmed the show and then we ran into a couple of issues and they were all related to distribution and regime change. So the issue number one was that people had trouble, meaning those in my audience, actually locating where the show was being broadcast. It was on, I guess it was HLN and then True, and it bounced around from here to there in between programming that didn't lend itself to any carryover audience. It was really dependent, not on endemic audience, but on me driving traffic or the division within Turner, Upwave at the time, driving traffic somehow.

• 10:42Tim Ferriss?

  What then ended up happening is there was a regime change. So what does that mean? That means that the entire division was shut down and people were replaced. So the contacts that I had, the relationships I'd developed, no longer worked at Turner. And the show, along with other shows, many other shows, were effectively put into the vault so no one could see it. It was really traumatic for me. Here I am, I'm sitting there, I have all of these injuries, some of which I'm still dealing with today, in my knees specifically, some in my elbows and forearms. Tore a lot of connective tissue and muscles during those 13 weeks.

• 11:22Tim Ferriss?

  And we have this end product, which we're really, really proud of, and then boom, the lights go out and no one can see it. So I had not thought about distribution challenges or...

• 11:35Tim Ferriss?

  Staffing slash resume problems that could crop up. And those were two major, major blind spots. It does not matter how good your product or service is if people cannot get it, or if you cannot get it to people. So I ended up being able to negotiate to license the program back and then do a launch with iTunes, which was fantastic. Thank you, Kevin, if you're listening. And it was a huge blockbuster, did really, really well. It was the most successful nonfiction TV show to launch on iTunes at the time. It was just tremendously successful and financially a win all around, which was spectacular. But it took a long time to get that done.

• 12:18Tim Ferriss?

  And it was brutalizing. And I took my notes from that and then turned around. And most recently, right now, in fact, it's being broadcast, a new television show called Fearless with Tim Ferriss and the Lesses in parentheses. And I used many of the learnings from that show, from the Tim Ferriss experiment, to make this show a lot easier to film, to produce and to promote. There are always challenges in television or publishing of any type. And the simple lesson you should take away, or moral of any story involving, say, a musician, an author or otherwise,

• 13:03Tim Ferriss?

  is that if you want to control distribution, you have to pay for the production of the product and have your hand in every possible choke point for distribution. So there is one. It was very, very, very painful for me at the time and caused a lot of psychological and emotional downtime for me. And that, hopefully, doesn't bore you. Hopefully, it is, I'm not gonna say inspiring in some way, but defangs fearlessness, not fearlessness, I don't even think that's a word, failure in a sense, because I'll do like, it's a fearlessness, fearlessness with Tim Ferriss. Because you see people on the magazine covers and you assume that they have got it all figured out

• 13:46Tim Ferriss?

  and they wake up every morning and they just do a front flip out of bed because they're so stoked to work on everything they have to do that day. It's just not the case. And we are going to, without further ado, dig into some of the stories of our esteemed guests. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five, maybe more, New York Times mega bestsellers. You see them everywhere. They usually get an entire wall in the airport stores. These books include The Tipping Point Blank, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He's been named one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine, has explored how ideas spread, investigated the root of success, and much more. He is a very, very tactical

• 14:27Tim Ferriss?

  guy, and I started off in our conversation by asking him if he could think of any failure that set him up for later success.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  I mean, it's all kinds. I, when I was a kid, I was in, this is one of many, but I was a runner, a very serious runner, and I-

• 14:52Tim Ferriss?

  What distance?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  1,500 meters and 800 meters. And I-

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  The puking distances.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yes. And I, I, in my third year of running seriously, lost races I thought I was gonna win. I mean, it kind of, what for me at that age was quite a dramatic fashion, and I quit running. And it was the first, I would regard that as the, of that, the first real failure of my life. Something I really wanted to do well at, I didn't. And I feel like it was hugely important, both because it made me think hard about what my priorities were, what, that I had placed running too high in that list. But more than that, it, I then

• 15:41Speaker 02

  later in life went back and thought a lot about why I quit and was dissatisfied with my reasons. So anything you can, this whole notion of circling back, I think is so important. I mean, it's, this shows God revisionist history, so it's explicitly about that, but- You know, I would almost obsessively revisit my reasons for quitting running and scrutinize them and say, is it right? What did I learn in the intervening five, 10, 15, 20 years about who I am, what I want, what it takes to be good at something? So that was a very valuable, a really valuable experience.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  At exactly the right time, because that's the age where, you know, where decisions, not decisions matter, but where I think you reflect on things in your adolescence in a way that you don't reflect on things later in your life.

• 16:36Tim Ferriss?

  What age was this, or what grade?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I was 15.

• 16:39Tim Ferriss?

  15. I always thought I was gonna go back at some point and be a ninth grade teacher. So, right around that like 14 to 16 range. Seems like there are a lot of very important forks in the road.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there is. I think you are, because so much is, everything is plastic at that age, right? So, you can mold it whatever way you want.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  And so it's just a kind of like, I think about what, how confusing and complicated those years are in retrospect.

• 17:08Tim Ferriss?

  What is, do you have any morning routines? What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like? Could be any day of the week. Let's just say it's a work day.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I, well, I was just saying earlier, I try, I think one should eat very little in the morning, so.

• 17:22Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you wake up?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  You know, 8. I have a big thing of tea.

• 17:27Tim Ferriss?

  What type of tea? Sorry, I'm gonna keep.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Lapsang Souchon.

• 17:30Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's great stuff.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Great stuff.

• 17:32Tim Ferriss?

  If you like, what is it? I remember a friend who was getting off of, he loved whiskey and he felt like the smell reminded him of some type of peaty alcoholic beverage, so.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has an amazing smell.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  It's a very controversial tea. And then I might, I might have.

• 17:50Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna pull a Malcolm here. Wait, wait, wait. Why is it a controversial tea?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Some people smell it and they just run in the opposite direction. They think it's, they're, they don't even think it's tea. I mean, I've never seen people have such a kind of, and there's a, there's a little coffee shop where I go often in the morning to have my tea. And they have it. I think I'm one of the only people who order it. I think they get it because of me. And it's like I walk in, they're like, you know, like a beeline for it. But it's clear that, you know, I'm in a distinct minority. It smells. I mean, you can smell it from quite a ways off. I might eat a little bit of oatmeal. That's pretty much all I'll eat in the morning.

• 18:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's your go, one of your go-tos?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. But not a lot. And then I look at three websites.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we're going to come back to three websites. So not a lot means like a cupful, a couple of spoons?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Like a, a cupful, a half a cup, something like that. Just enough that I'm, you know, have a reasonable something in my stomach. And then I will look at three websites. The first one is let'srun.com. The nerdy runners, all serious runners read let's run. Then I read marginal revolution, Tyler Cohen's column. And then I read ESPN.com, just to make sure nothing major happened in world sports. And then I start my work.

• 19:11Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, and what time is that then, when you're starting your work?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  So we're talking, we're now, we're still before nine. And then if I have writing to do, it's best to do it in the next, in the two hours that follow.

• 19:24Tim Ferriss?

  So before lunch?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:26Tim Ferriss?

  And what does your routine look like in those few hours when you start your work? What does that look like? Is there particular music you listen to?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Sitting in a coffee shop.

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  Sitting in a coffee shop.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  I'm, or you know, some restaurant, I'm not at home. And I'm not in an office. And I'm working pretty steadily. I'm not really easily distractible. Been around 11:30 or so, I kind of. Have to do other things. I mean, I don't stop working, but I stop writing.

• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Do you listen to music when you write? Do you just take in the ambient?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Music on in the... I write almost entirely in public places, so whatever. I don't listen to music myself.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  No headphones.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  But I like the noise, because I came of age in a newsroom, so I need that. I mean, I learned how to write in the middle of... When newsrooms are not noisy now, they used to be incredibly loud. So that's what I need to kind of get going.

• 20:20Tim Ferriss?

  And then do you... Is that when the bulk of your writing is done? Is that pre-lunch period, or do you write in the afternoons?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  No, I rarely write in the afternoon.

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  If I find... Yeah, journalists seem to be very adaptable, or former journalists. People who've worked at newspapers or had those types of daily deadlines.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're faster and also... Remember, writing is not the time-consuming part. It's knowing what to write. It's the thinking and the arranging and the interviewing and the researching and the organizing. And that's what takes time. You know, writing is blissful. I wish I could do it more. I mean, it's a break from all of the hassle of...

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  So let's just say end of work day to bed. What do your wind-down routines look like?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'll go running then, probably.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  After the end of the afternoon.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And although I'm injured now, but that's really the highlight of the day, of the kind of workday. Some days I'll go to my train with my track club. Sometimes I'll go for a long run, or I'll go biking, or I'll go do a CrossFit workout or something physical to get going.

• 21:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is your favorite movement in CrossFit or exercise, and least?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Well, I kind of... Runners secretly disdain any activity that's not running. So I...

• 21:36Tim Ferriss?

  I know enough runners to... You're right.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So I don't... I don't even want to think about favorite in that context. It's something I suffer through because it's necessary to ward off injury. And when it's over, I'm very happy. But, you know, I'm much happier if I can go and, you know, run eight miles with some friends.

• 21:58Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Pre-bed, anything in particular?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  No, I'll eat dinner, might read in the evening, I watch sports or TV.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have trouble getting to sleep or do you generally sleep easily?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I'm a, I come from a family of, we are champion sleepers. Gladwells are some of our, we're epic.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  Some of the best sleepers out there.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  We are some of the best. It is our, it is our defining characteristic that we're, and our definition of a bad night of sleep is so hilarious because it's like, you know, my father will say he had trouble sleeping and what that means is, he was up for 20 minutes between, you know, four and 4:20. I mean, that's a bad night of sleep.

• 22:36Tim Ferriss?

  So what flaws or weaknesses do you have that have turned out to be strengths in some capacity?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  This is like a job interview question, isn't it?

• 22:45Tim Ferriss?

  I was going to offer you a position to Ferris Enterprises, but I think you're too busy.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Well, probably, God, my.

• 22:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's only a job interview if you say, sometimes I just work too hard.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, in, in, in, in dealing with my own impatience and my sloppiness into attending to those flaws, I think I have done, that's been a really crucial thing in, in helping me achieve what I've achieved. So it's just.

• 23:25Tim Ferriss?

  Could you elaborate on that?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sloppy.

• 23:28Tim Ferriss?

  How are you, in what, in what sense?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  You know, I don't.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sloppy like, like clothes all over the floor?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no, sloppy about, I'm in a hurry. I, you know, I don't always double check.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Something I know, or I'll interview someone for forty-five minutes when I should interview them for two hours, or, you know, I'm just kind of like, I'm a good enough person, I'm not a perfectionist, like, fine, it's fine, let's, and so I've become so aware of that now, that I've compensated, and I have taught myself to be a lot more of a perfectionist, or I've forced myself to keep asking questions much longer than I would have. When I said earlier that it was these investments of time that had been so, that's what I'm talking about, that I've forced myself to invest more time in a lot of activities,

• 24:20Speaker 02

  knowing that if I did it my normal way, I'd be out the door, right? You know, I'd be thinking about what I want for dinner, as opposed to, so that's sort of a very, it's why I, by the way, I so object to, so when you, when you observe or measure someone's natural inclinations, you haven't got a picture of them, because you don't know what they do with those natural inclinations, right? So it turns out that one of the most important things about me is how obsessed I am with those two flaws of mine, right? So identifying those as my natural inclinations tells you exactly the opposite about me.

• 25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're compensating by developing the opposite.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  I am massively compensating for them all day long, right? It's, I'm obsessed with compensating for them.

• 25:08Tim Ferriss?

  Have you received a lot of bad advice along the way as to what you might do professionally, or has that not been the case?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I don't, I'm not an advice seeker about those kinds of things, nor much of an advice giver, so I haven't really gotten a lot of, and also, my position is, you can't know, I've kind of stumbled into most of the things I've been doing, I much prefer simply to be open to opportunity than to plan my path, I think that's a better, for me, anyway, I don't know, I mean, people are different, so some people need to plan, but I'm not a, I don't think ahead, really, at all.

• 25:49Tim Ferriss?

  Next up is a very impressive entrepreneur and investor Brian Johnson. That's Brian with a Y. He sold one of his companies, Braintree, to eBay for 800 million, then took $100 million from that sale and launched the OS Fund, which stands for operating system, and it is intended to support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. And you can look up OS Fund to see what he is up to. It is quite fascinating and will blow your mind in terms of scale and scope that he uses in thinking of his investments. Brian's story is not only a scrappy rags-to-riches story, but he is someone who succeeded in a technical field without any formal technical

• 26:34Tim Ferriss?

  training. I find it extremely inspiring and potential expanding. It shows you that the options you think you have in front of you, A or B, for instance, often neglect the C, D, and E that are standing right to the side. I asked him to describe what happened between his first business in cell phones, believe it or not, and his massive success with Braintree.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Well, the short version is the cellphone company went remarkably well, but it was not going to make me enough money to retire by 30. So I had to find something bigger. So I started a voiceover IP company with three founders, and it was just before Skype and Vonage. And the short of that is we had the wrong team, wrong product, wrong timing.

• 27:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds perfect.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  We did everything wrong. No, we did have a problem. We actually built something. We got customers.

• 27:24Tim Ferriss?

  And this was also in Utah?

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Yes. And we had revenue. So like, we actually built something, but in reality, like, we were not set up to succeed. So that failed. And then on the heels of that, I started, I joined another guy to do real estate development. And the short of that is we, that failed because of some bad decisions we made. And so, without income for two years, I was dead broke. And so I applied for 60 jobs found on Monster and the other job sites at the time. Nobody would hire me. Like, it was just, I think it was so clear that I was, I had no intention of staying a long time. I tried to make the resume look like it, but just never was the case. So, nobody would even give me an interview and then...

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  Additional skills, loyalty, fierce loyalty to employer.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  And then I read, I saw the newspaper one day, I had a list of the 50 richest people in Utah. And I thought, bingo, like, that's what it is. I will write an email to these 50 people. I'll say, I'm young, I'm smart. I, I'm trying to become an entrepreneur, but I just need some money on the side. So I'll become your right-hand man. I'll do whatever you want me to do. And no one responded. So at this point, I'm like totally desperate. I'm sure you, I'm sure you get a fair amount of those emails these days. I do, and you know, I'm empathetic to it. Yeah. I totally am. So at this point, I have no income. I have a child at home. And so I need to make ends meet. And so I find this job posting in, again, I think it's Monster. It was selling credit card processing door to door. And basically, it was like, if you could- So business to business?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yes. Like marching up and on the street, walking into a retailer or a restaurant. Let me help you set up a merchant account. Yes, or- Get a point of sale system. Yes. Or mostly change. Everyone already had existing service. Got it, got it. And so the requirement was like, if you could fog a mirror, you could work these guys. It's a hundred percent commission. Like, what's, they don't care if you don't succeed. Right, right. But to your point on the sales side, I would go to inside of business. I figured out pretty quickly, the industry was really messed up. Like, the technology was terrible and people were just generally plagued by the industry because it was just unscrupulous. All this dishonesty and complexity. And so I figured out that was the hook because my product had zero differentiation.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  It was exactly the same as 500 other providers that walked in the door, you know, every day. Right. And so I'd walk in, I'd say, all right, Tim, like, right when you saw me walking in, you'd be like, all right, sales guy. All right, I'm not interested. I've got stuff to do. Then when you heard me say credit card processing, it's like, please leave. Strike two. Yeah, like, leave. So I would say, Tim, if you give me three minutes of your time, I will give you a hundred dollars if you don't say yes to using my service. And usually they'd say like, okay, that's interesting. Like, what does this guy have to offer? And I would open my pitch book and I'd walk them through the industry. Here are the providers, here's what they do, here's how they do it, here's what I do. I'm the same as everyone else. Except with me, you get, you know, honesty and transparency and great customer support. And so I became this company's number one salesperson. I broke all their sales records

• 30:16Speaker 03

  following this really simple formula of just selling honesty and transparency in a broken industry. That's super interesting. And-

• 30:24Tim Ferriss?

  So a couple of questions, I just want to rewind for a second. With the real estate company, what were, if you're comfortable talking about them, like what were the bad, what were the worst decisions? What were the fatal mistakes?

• 30:36Speaker 03

  So I'm really proud of actually what we did. We launched a $50 million mixed use project in one of the best places in Utah.

• 30:42Tim Ferriss?

  Mixed use means residential plus commercial.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. Bottom floor and small shops. And Fannie Mae came in, they were our equity investor. I was, we really put together a great project. The single biggest flaw was storage space. So empty nesters showed up to buy and there wasn't sufficient storage.

• 31:00Tim Ferriss?

  And storage for just all of their extra stuff that they wanted to take out of the big house and move into.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 31:06Tim Ferriss?

  This community living space.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  So then sales stalled in phase one. The bank got anxious. So.

• 31:11Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, got it. So just didn't account for that.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:14Tim Ferriss?

  That need.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  That was the big blunder. Being human is remarkably tough, right? We do so like you and I before this discussion, we were talking about all the funny irrational things you and I both do that's inconsistent with our thought patterns.

• 31:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  And I guess a couple of years back, maybe a decade ago, I got into irrational behavior, reading Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational and Thinking Fast and Slow.

• 31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Thinking Fast and Slow, Danny Kahneman.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. So I started reading all these books and I became increasingly convinced of my own, what was it? Fickle-ness and inability to actually act rationally in life. And once I became aware of that, I think I became much softer in my opinions and confidence levels of life where I, I want to question thoroughly everything I do all the time. And of course I miss all layers a lot of time, but I try to be present in knowing that when I make a decision, there's all kinds of layers behind it, many of which are probably flawed. And if I went back and evaluated it. So I suppose it's just being present and knowing it exists and how flawed we are in our abilities, when really we think we're perfectly logical and consistent all the time, we're just not.

• 32:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. There's, Dan Ariely's book is great, Predictably Irrational. Also, a lot of really solid business takeaways in terms of.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 32:26Tim Ferriss?

  How people, I remember the example he gave. In a presentation, I'm not sure if it's in the book, I'm blanking, of the checkout process that The Economist magazine tested.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right.

• 32:39Tim Ferriss?

  And it was like, you know, get the print edition for this amount by itself, get the digital edition for this amount by itself, or get both for this amount. And how, you know, changing the pricing and removing or adding options affected the the average order size.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:52Tim Ferriss?

  So fascinating.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  Or adding in, basically, not a red herring, it's not, I don't think the right term, but a straw man of an option that they don't even really want you to choose, but they'll add the cheaper option just so they know you'll, because they know that 50% of the people will take the middle option.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  Which would have been the cheapest before, but you would have then not chosen it.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. Just like restaurants, I think, put like, the most expensive pricey item in the top right corner to say like, here's a $75 option, everything else is cheap at $32.

• 33:19Tim Ferriss?

  Same thing with wine.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:20Tim Ferriss?

  Very common. When you are feeling, and maybe, maybe the answer is you don't feel this way, but when you're feeling, say, overwhelmed, how do you unpack that and try to reduce the sources of that overwhelm?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  I've gotten so much better over the years. Now, I just call a friend and just say, you know what, I'm feeling overwhelmed and I feel terrible and I don't think I can do this and, right, just saying it out loud, like, yeah, I actually, I can, I got this, but I just need to get that off my chest and I'm all right. And so, when I deal with, when I work with entrepreneurs now, people I'm investing in or otherwise, I say like, if you want to chat at any time of the day and say anything, right, no judgment on my side, just say it out loud, do it. And I think there's just, it's, it's hard to do hard things, I guess, as Ben Horowitz would say.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  Horowitz, yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  And having the ability to be vulnerable and honest and transparent and raw with other people is immensely helpful for me.

• 34:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. But you weren't always, you didn't always do that.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  No, I was extremely private and guarded and I owned everything, I didn't dare come out, you know, let go and.

• 34:26Tim Ferriss?

  I think, I think men are particularly bad at that.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 34:30Tim Ferriss?

  I, yeah, I've struggled with this myself, and you're so on point, it's such a simple answer, seemingly self-evident and obvious, right, but.

• 34:43Tim Ferriss?

  I think it points to something I've noticed about myself, and I tend to be stuck in my kind of prefrontal cortex.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:49Tim Ferriss?

  But if you haven't kind of thought your way, if you haven't rationalized your way, or that's not right, reasoned your way into a problem, it's hard to reason your way out of it.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  Just by relying on the sort of internal pro and con list.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:05Tim Ferriss?

  And like schematic of something that is purely emotional, or maybe based on some operating system flaw that you're experiencing.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  So yeah, just calling a friend.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's like what I love about the friendships I have, is I can go into a conversation, and I know when I leave, two things will happen. One is they will have challenged my mental models, that I can't challenge, I can't see my mental models, and I can't challenge myself very well. But someone else can see it so clearly, and they can just call it out, right? And number two, is when I leave the conversation saying like, "I want to become a better person," right? And "I want to do more in life, and I want to work harder." Like, those are the two things I think I value the most in the interaction. So I want to be that for other people, right? That when they bring something to me, I can flip it and say, "Yeah, here's a different model for you to contemplate." And two, hopefully when they leave, they say, "You know what? Yes, like, I can do this, and I've got that much more energy to go about it."

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  A.J. Jacobs is one of my favorite people. He is a comrade in arms in the wacky world of self-experimentation. He does all sorts of odd things, as I do. He is the author of four, maybe five, New York Times bestsellers, and he chronicles all sorts of shenanigans, including, for instance, in his book, The Know-It-All, he covered his quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and learn everything in the world. The Year of Living Biblically was his attempt to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. It's a fantastic book, by the way, guys. I learned more about religion in general from that book than any quote-unquote "serious" book. It's really, really well done.

• 36:39Tim Ferriss?

  And of course, Drop Dead Healthy, which documented his mission to become the healthiest person alive, and there's more out there, I am sure. I asked A.J. about one of his favorite failures.

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  One of your favorite personal failures. And what I mean by that is specifically a failure that led in some way to a later success.

• 37:05A.J. Jacobs?

  Right.

• 37:06Tim Ferriss?

  Or set the stage for a later success.

• 37:09A.J. Jacobs?

  Well, I have had many, many failures, as we've discussed, and I am a big fan of them, you know? And rejection, that's one of the things I try to teach my kids all the time, like, you know, you're gonna get rejected 98% of the time, you've just gotta keep going. One, I don't know if this falls into the right category, but NBC, a couple of years ago, optioned my life, one of my books, and it was gonna be a comedy, where every week it was this writer did another wacky experiment and chaos ensued. And it was a total failure. It didn't get picked up. But the lesson I learned was, I actually made a conscious effort, I was like, you know what?

• 37:54A.J. Jacobs?

  This may or may not get picked up, but I am going to consciously enjoy this experience and get everything I can out of it. I got to meet Donald Sutherland, played my father-in-law. My wife was played by this woman who had much bigger boobs than she did, so she loved it. And it was just a blast. And I would go into meetings and I would see, be like, you know, what if, what if the main character, who was named AJ, what if he did this? And they're like, oh, AJ would never do that. I'd be like, huh, well, I, no, maybe he would. But it was just so much fun. And there's one producer, who I read a book of hers, and she's like, yeah, if you cannot

• 38:36A.J. Jacobs?

  enjoy the process, then you're screwed, because the chances of getting a movie actually made are so infinitesimal. So enjoy the process, enjoy the walk up the mountain, not just the summit. That was, that was a big lesson.

• 38:51Tim Ferriss?

  Most embarrassing failure at an experiment. So aside from the micro-expressions.

• 38:56A.J. Jacobs?

  Right.

• 38:57Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, most embarrassing failure at an experiment. Did he give up or refine his approach?

• 39:02A.J. Jacobs?

  Interesting, yeah. Well, I, I mean, I think my life has been a series of embarrassments and humiliations. So, you know.

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, in a way, you engineer your.

• 39:10A.J. Jacobs?

  That's true.

• 39:11Tim Ferriss?

  Experiments to be embarrassing.

• 39:12A.J. Jacobs?

  Yes, exactly. Because I'd also think that makes meta better, uh, better copy is, you know. And that is actually one thing I was thinking about that I learned doing this podcast is that, um, being humiliated on radio is actually sometimes makes for better radio. So, uh, when I'm doing interviews and I ask a question and the person is like, God, that's a dumb question. That is beautiful.

• 39:42Tim Ferriss?

  Always makes the cut.

• 39:43A.J. Jacobs?

  That's gold. Yeah. So I, I may not look that, sound that good on, on the podcast, but I think it's entertaining. So, um, but yeah, I would say many humiliations. I, I don't know if this counts, but this is the first one that comes to mind is, uh, I was working at Esquire magazine and we asked the actress Mary Louise Parker to pose nude. And I was, uh, tasked with asking her and she said, well, I will pose nude, but only if the editor of the piece also poses nude. And I was the editor. So, uh, I went to my editor in chief and he was like, all right, well, do it. Take off your pants. That's your job. Uh, so I had to pose nude for a very well-known celebrity photographer.

• 40:27A.J. Jacobs?

  And it was, it was quite humiliating and, and vulnerable and, and also highly insulting because I was, you know, there, he was, he's a big photographer. So I had like 10 assistants, like gorgeous 20-something female assistants. And I was like, oh my God, this is so embarrassing, but they could not care less. They were like, they were like, no interest in my nude form. So that was like, that was tough for my ego. And then it came out and they actually published the picture and we got some subscription cancellations, I believe. So it was, uh, overall, it was a, it was a dark time.

• 41:10Tim Ferriss?

  Shep Gordon has worked with some of the biggest names in the entertainment universe, from Alice Cooper to Bette Davis, Raquel Welch to Groucho Marx, Blondie to Jimi Hendrix, Sylvester Stallone to Luther Vandross. I mean, the list is just crazy. And his job, among others, was to make them as famous as humanly possible. With that mandate, there were many massive successes and highlights, and also equally massive PR and management failures. I asked Shep to explain any of the rookie mistakes that he sees a lot of people making in his world.

• 41:50Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other rookie mistakes that you see a lot of people making in the position of something like a manager, or that you made that come to mind? Any particular sort of archetypal or critical mistakes?

• 42:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's less a list of mistakes than it's a mistake of intentions. What I see, at least, from the people I see and talk to, is they're not in the business really for service. They're in the business for greed. And out of greed, you just do stupid things and your visions blur. If you're in it for service to your artist, which is really a manager, I mean, again, there are different types of managers. There are managers who are power guys, who I get it, they build empires off it, and they're great for their artists. But I think, you know, I have an assistant who has a daughter who's being sought after by everybody in the music business, record companies, managers, publishers. She's a beautiful

• 42:44Speaker 05

  21-year-old girl, Lily Meola. And I see the difference between the phone calls that come in for her and the things that I do for Alice. Like, I wake up for Alice.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  And I think about how am I going to enhance his career? How am I going to, you know, right now, we're running Alice for president. We wrote into the show a piece where Hillary beats up Donald Trump in the show. And we have an Alice Cooper president, we're selling T-shirts, we're going viral. And it's fun, it's funny for us, but it's me waking up and thinking, what can I do to add to Alice's career? And most of these young people I see coming around, when I sit and talk to them, they ask for advice, they're not asking advice for their artists, they're asking advice for them. How do I get more clients? How do I, how can I get a piece of publishing? How can I?

• 43:39Speaker 05

  I think it's a general rule, maybe for humanity, as our civilization moves along, but I think it's motivation more than actual things wrong, because I think, again, there's no school for management, so every manager is going to make lots of mistakes.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  It reminds me of a story I've heard you tell, I think it was in a commencement speech, actually, I might be misplacing that, but you were talking about a guide to cooking rice from, I want to say, some type of...

• 44:09Speaker 05

  From His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly, and 90% of it or more was about the intention of when you select the rice, when you boil the rice, and only perhaps 10% of it was was technical. Let me ask you, how do you maintain that orientation, or how did you come to have that service orientation? Because, of course, I would imagine, all things equal, you want to be financially successful as a manager, so that you can do the things you want to do, and so on, and I guess it's a byproduct of making your clients financially successful, but how did you maintain that lens of service over greed? Did it ever get the best of you, and then you correct course, or did that, has that not been the case?

• 44:56Speaker 05

  You know, it's a very timely, great question, because I really thought my life was completely random. And I couldn't understand any of the decisions I made. I never questioned my decisions. You look in the mirror and you say, "Why would you possibly do this? Doesn't make any sense." And things like, "As a manager, you have a right to commission the life of the projects you work on." So I worked on Beatles anthology record, for example. I have a right to collect commissions on that. I always chose not, if I'm not working with the artist, I didn't want to take their money. So I chose never to do it, which when you look in the mirror, you say, "What are you, a schmuck?"

• 45:37Speaker 05

  To yourself. But if you have a strong foundation and you can feel that foundation, which is, you know, I shouldn't really be making money off these, they're going out, living their lives, their life, it's not my life. You go back to, and I always thought all those choices were just random, like maybe I was, it was ego thinking I was a good guy. Or I don't know what the motivation. And when I wrote the book, I realized that I'm actually living my father's life. And he was a man of pure service, pure service to me and my brother. And he really gave up almost everything else in his life, but was joyful. Because he was serving us. And as I met mentors along the way,

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Roger Vergey in particular, I saw how, he was the first person I really met, who was very successful and very happy. Most of the people I would meeting, I would say ninety-nine percent of the people I met in show business, who were the kingpins, were miserable. They were cheating on their wives, they were alcoholics, they were, they were just miserable, they were just drowning in pain. And I think that those kind, my dad first and then seeing the mentors, made me think, you know, you're gonna die with the money, enjoy the moments you hear on the planet, and if service is a way to enjoy it, and comes naturally to me, I, I, I don't want to fight it by falling into the traps of, all those normal traps of greed.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  Stuff I'm good enough at what I do that I can make a living.

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I've heard, I've heard, and I want you to correct me here, but that it took something like 10 to 12 years for Mike Myers to get you to agree to do the documentary. Maybe you can give me some, some color there, but the follow up to that is going to be, why a book? Why do a book?

• 47:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I am, I've always cautioned my clients when I started working with them that if I do my job perfectly, I have a good chance of killing them because I will make them so famous that they can't survive. So I've always had a very corrupted view of fame. I realized that's what I do for a living and I'm good at it and it can provide great stuff for people, but they have to be prepared that they're gonna take a fall and hopefully get up from that fall. So the last thing I really wanted to do was test myself. Why would I really want to, you know, to make any documentaries aren't financial. I didn't view it as being of service to anybody or anything except my ego and I didn't want to have to deal with fame. I just didn't want to have to flirt with it.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  I saw too many people I love fall victim to it. So I said no and laughed and then I had some near death experience and didn't know it luckily. I mean, it was beautiful and I woke up in a hospital room, very drugged out and by the second day realizing I was very alone, that my life was fairly isolated. I was in a hotel room, I just, I mean, a hospital room, I just almost died, feeling very high and I think very starting to feel really sorry for myself, which is unusual for me because I'm usually feeling how lucky I am. And right in the middle of that, Mike called. Hey Shep, how you doing? And I said, you know, I'm really doing miserable. It's one of the few times in my life I can't find the footing. I'm like, sort of kind of lost a little bit.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  And he said, well, how about doing the movie now? Now we have like a really dramatic moment to go to. And I think my ego probably said, cause I was feeling sorry for myself. I said, yeah, yeah, maybe that's a good way to come out of this thing if I live. Let's do the movie. So I got well, got some good help from my friends and maybe a month later remembered that I had told them we would do the movie. So I called them up. Hey Mike, how you doing? Great. I said, you know, did we have a conversation when I was in the hospital? I said, do the movie? And he said, yeah. You said, go ahead and do it. I staffed up. I got six people working here.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Okay. And I really assumed that like my cousin in San Diego would see it. Uh, boy, that he would abandon the project or I, I didn't. It was hard for me to think of it as real. And I, I knew Mike socially. I didn't know him professionally, except enjoying his talent. And I didn't realize how driven he was. And he spent the next year of his life, seven days a week, 24 hours a day on this thing. I, I did nothing. But I remember about 11 months into it, I got to New York and I, he invited me up for a cup of coffee and say hello. And I went up and I walked into his apartment. It was like walking into CSI.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  It was pictures of me every part of my life, all over every wall. You don't want to see the side of it. They had the criminals.

• 50:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  So, uh, and, and movie came out and, um, at first I was really embarrassed, especially with the name. Uh, I couldn't look anybody in the eye. When they'd say, oh, oh, I hear you got a movie. What's it called? And I would feel my eyes go down to the floor and I would say, super mensch. I could not look anyone in the eye. And, uh, the film company asked me to come out for a screening somewhere in the Midwest. It was the first time I had seen it with the audience. It was at some film festival and I was really embarrassed. I mean, like a truly embarrassment, super mensch, like, oh my God, this is, this is

• 51:07Speaker 05

  so egotistical, uh, so now what, it's so not what my vision of myself is, but, but I started questioning my vision of myself. But anyway, as the movie's over, I walk out into the lobby of this very Aryan couple. They almost looked like the top of a wedding cake.

• 51:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  Standing there and the woman had tears in her eyes. And they just stood in the corner, they waited for everybody to take pictures, you know, the things that happened after a screening. And I walked over to him at the end, said, oh, so glad we wanted to talk to you. We just moved here from St. Thomas and our children had grown up and they're, we were empty nesters and we came back and we realized we have so much to be blessed for and we just don't do enough good stuff. And watching the movie made us realize we have to change that in our lives. We'd love to start with you. And we don't have much, but we're hunters and you said you like to cook and eat. We have a lot of venison in our freezer, can we give you some venison?

• 52:08Speaker 05

  And I went back to the house, got the venison. It turned out my roommate in college was their next door neighbor in St. Thomas, they had a picture of.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  When I saw the effect it had on those people, and then I came back and I started getting emails and calls, we spoke about Rick Rubin before, that's how we reconnected. Out of nowhere, I hadn't seen him in thirty years. He got ahold of me and said, can I fly over to Maui and spend some time with you? I saw the movie and I really could use some time with you. And he came over, I hadn't seen him in thirty years. So it affected all, the first thing, a package I got when I got home was a, this beautiful birdcage, came from Africa and it had like fifty white silk flowers in it and one pink one. And this four page letter from a girl, nineteen year old girl who said, listen, I'm not different

• 53:00Speaker 05

  than the other flowers, but I know if you would let me out of the cage, I could really help my people, but you know, just these things coming from every corner. So that was sort of a side note. And I had a friend, Roy Choi, a chef, who had a book signing in New York when I was there, he's on Anthony Bourdain's imprint. And I never met Anthony and I was a huge fan of him. At the book signing, he walked over to me and he said, hey, I want to do your book. Hmm, maybe this is a moment where I can try and figure out what motivated me and maybe if there's anything in what motivated me that other people can use, maybe some techniques that I never was aware of, but that I can find by looking backwards.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  And that's really the exercise and they agreed that if I didn't want to put out the book, I could give them back the money and we just ended. So that was the journey for me was to try and see is it, Mike always said there are these interconnections and I always thought of my life as random to see are there, are there connectors that could help other people along the way and hence the book.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  And what impact would you like the book to have?

• 54:06Speaker 05

  I, I would like people to realize how lucky they are. I end the book with maybe the, one of the things that maybe I can add to some people's lives, particularly here in America, which is just where you drop out of the womb, you won the game. You win, you won already. You're in America, you have a chance. You can get clean water, you get food, hopefully you get some love, there's not a bomb dropping on your head every second. That alone is, is something to meditate on every day, how special you are and how rarefied it is to be born into something like this. And then maybe the second thing is to try and see the miracle in everything. So that when you see somebody who your, your initial reaction is hatred, or you see a snail

• 54:51Speaker 05

  walking on the ground and your initial reaction is kick it out of the way, to try and see the miracle in it. If you see the miracle in it, because everything is a miracle, you're not going to be able to hurt it. You're going to have a different attitude towards it. To the person you hate, you're going to feel sorry for, that they don't see the miracle in themselves. And sorrow is a much better emotion than hatred, selfishly for yourself. And in there, there's also practical, you know, how you try and make business into compassionate business, how you try and make it a win-win, not winners and losers. And I talk a lot about how you create history, things like guilt by association, taking a non-famous person and putting them next to famous people, the fame starts to bleed off.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  And we live in a fame-driven world, so for commerce, fame is important.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  So I want, I want to ask you about regular practices in your life related to Buddhism and appreciation in just a minute, but since you brought it up, could you describe what you did for Anne Murray that pertains to your, your last example of that fame by association?

• 55:55Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah, Anne was a great example of guilt by association. She's a wonderful singer, one of the purest voices I've ever heard. She was a schoolteacher in Toronto. Went on a TV show for the summer and sang a song called "Snowbird", which became a number one record around the world, huge impact. But she was very, very, very Canadian white bread. And, but she wanted to make it. She wanted to be on Midnight Special, which was a big show there. She wanted to play in Vegas. She wanted to do all the things that stars do.

• 56:29Speaker 05

  But she wasn't a star. She was a girl who had a hit record that nobody really knew who sang it. So she came to me for management. And one of the first things I did with her was try and, because the song was so big and so strong, I knew that I could include her and stuff if I had her with important other people. So I booked her. At that time, Alice Cooper had a group called The Hollywood Vampires, a drinking group. And it was John Lennon, Harry Nielsen, and Mickey Dolison, the Monkees. Big faces at the time, particularly John Lennon, who was in his dark era and was not being seen at all. When he left Joko for a while, he was in California. Everyone knew he was there, but nobody was seeing him. And the press were anxious to see him.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  So I booked her in California on Thanksgiving, which I thought was very funny because she was Canadian.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  I tried to make it all as absurd as I possibly could. And I got the guys, I went to see the guys and I said, "I got that on my hands and knees", and they all, I used to drive them all home at night. Because they all got too drunk to drive and nobody could afford cars. So I was the designated driver. So I got that on my hands and knees and I said, "Guys, I'll drive you all, all the time, but you gotta come help me with this girl from Canada."

• 57:54Tim Ferriss?

  Finally, the next man needs no detailed introduction. You might know him as the Terminator, the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I asked Arnold about the biggest sacrifice he has made while climbing the ladder of success.

• 58:14Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I think that there's no two ways about it that the toughest choice was to get my bikini wax before Conan the Barbarian. No, I think, you know, definitely the toughest choice was to run for governor because I really felt very passionate about becoming a public servant and I felt really strongly that I could do a better job than the politicians in Sacramento. I felt that the politicians screwed up the state, that's why we had blackouts, that's why we had huge debt and deficits and no one could get along, Democrats and Republicans couldn't work together and it was just a huge mess here.

• 58:59Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And I felt that I could do a better job. But at the same time, I recognized the fact that I just finished Terminator and Terminator 3 came out and I became the highest paid actor at that time in the world. And so that meant that I was not going to be able to make two movies a year and make this kind of millions and millions of dollars. So am I willing to go and walk away from all that money, potentially over a hundred million dollars over the next, you know, seven years? And so then there was the family question. You know, my wife was not very enthusiastic about it.

• 59:41Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  She comes from a family that had, politics had a tremendous impact on the family and side effects. And so she felt like the same would happen to our family. And so there were all of those debates, but eventually after long deliberation and thinking about the whole thing, I did make up my mind and I decided to do it. But it was a very, very tough decision to make because I had to think about all of those different aspects and, but I went for it and I felt very passionate. And then after I made the decision, I was 100% behind it and I felt like I had a need to serve the people and to give back to this great, great country that gave me everything.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  What do you consider your greatest failure? And how did it set up or shape your future successes?

• 1:00:30Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  Well, I think that you have to recognize that it doesn't matter who it is. The most successful person in the world can tell you honestly that they also had a tremendous amount of failures. It's not always just success. The key thing is, is that we learn from the failures actually more than from our successes. And it doesn't matter if you talk about the best, you know, basketball player. I remember Michael Jordan one time said in an interview that he missed 9,000 shots. You know, and here he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player in the world. So yes, you missed. And I remember that, you know, Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball players.

• 1:01:11Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  Remember 19, I think it was 1941 or so, when he had the best baseball season and he averaged 406, 406. And, and that meant that 40% plus, 40.6% to be exact, he was successful with his hits, with his batting. And 60% therefore were failures. So think about it, and this is the greatest, you know, baseball player, that this record still stands today. So it just shows you that everyone has failures and everyone, and, and, and so the key thing is, is that you learn from these failures and you move on. I had my failures in bodybuilding. I lost bodybuilding competitions.

• 1:01:53Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  Most people only know my victories, which were a lot, but I've also lost. I lost in weightlifting. I lost in powerlifting. I embarrassed myself many times trying to lift the 500 pounds on a bench press in front of 2,000 people in a beer hall in Germany. And I failed and it crashed on my chest and I couldn't make it. But eventually I did make it. And I lost, you know, I had failures in the movie business. I remember I had a lot of movies that went through the roof, but then there were movies that went right in the toilet that were not as successful. Books that came out with, that were on a New York Times bestseller list and then others that didn't, you know, live up to the expectations and, and failed. So yes, we have those kinds of things. And to me, the key thing is always, and you know, that we learn from it.

• 1:02:37Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  I have failures also, I remember in my personal life and I learned from that, you know, and then you move on again. What is important is that you get up. When you fall. The winner always gets up and the loser stays down. That was what's the difference. So to me, the important thing is always that when you when you when you fail on something, you dust yourself, you get up, you dust yourself off and you move on and have again a great vision of which direction you want to go. Pick another goal and keep moving forward. What tip did you receive at an older age that you could have used in your twenties? Well, there's a lot of things that we learned throughout the the years, obviously.

• 1:03:18Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  But I think the main thing that that comes to my mind is charity. You know that when you're young, you don't think about that you should reach out and you should help others. So, you know, like I was only thinking about my goal to be on that stage in London at the Mr. Universe competition. And just like Reg Park, my idol, that won three Mr. Universe competitions and then became Hercules in the movies and all that. I wanted to have that trophy on that same stage as he wanted. And that was the only thing that in my mind. And then after I won that, it was winning Mr. Olympian, Mr. World and all the competition become the greatest bodybuilder. That's all I had in my mind. There was total tunnel vision.

• 1:04:03Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  And but then later on, I learned luckily that how important it is to also not only think about me, but to think about we and to go and to help others, that a lot of people that need help. If it is help people that need help in their training and to go around and and help people and hold seminars and teach them about training and about the importance of exercising the right way. If it is that to make sure that everyone can do sports, like I got involved in Special Olympics and started helping Special Olympians to do sports and specifically to do weight training and powerlifting and they introduced into the Special Olympics movement, powerlifting competitions, which are now worldwide and they're very, very successful.

• 1:04:48Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  We started Special Olympics specifically in Austria also and got all the ski races together to start and to help me and support me and to start Special Olympics and work together with the private. Private sector and the government notice and then eventually, you know, I'm studying after school programs and then becoming the chairman of the president's council on physical fitness and travel around the country through all 50 states and promote health and fitness and bring everyone together and then eventually led to running for governor. So I think giving back and recognizing that every one of us needs help. I got plenty of help to be where I am today. There's no such thing as a self-made man. As I always say, you know, there's people that helped me to be where I'm today. So it is up to me now

• 1:05:32Arnold Schwarzenegger?

  to inspire other people to help them and to go and reach out and to help them. This is what made me be get involved in the environmental movement and in this environmental crusade. And I just love giving back where you don't think about what is in it for me, but you know, how can I help this great nation of America that gave me all the chances in the world and it opened up so many doors of opportunities. I would not have accomplished any of the things if I wouldn't have come to America. And, you know, so to give something back to me is extremely important and I want to have kids learn this as early as possible that part of being successful is to give also something back.

• 1:06:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there you have folks, the Tim Ferriss Radio Hour on failure with some of the superstars I've spoken with in more than 200 podcast episodes now, close to 250. Hard to believe it all started with getting drunk with Kevin Rose at my kitchen table. The Tim Ferriss Radio Hour continues to be an experiment. So please, please, please, I would love your feedback. Tell me what you liked. Tell me what you don't like. How would you improve the format? Let me know on Twitter at T Ferriss, T F E R R I S S, or in the comments on the blog post that accompanies this episode. So every episode has show notes with links to anything that we talk about and so on. And you can find that and show

• 1:07:00Tim Ferriss?

  notes for every other episode at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, as always, thank you for listening.

• 1:07:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

• 1:07:54Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very short, it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies, which I'm wearing right now. Have you ever wanted to be as powerful as a mullet-wearing ninja from the 80s or as sleek as a Black Panther in the Amazon? Of course you have, and that is where MeUndies comes in. I have spent the last year wearing underwear from these guys 24/7, and they are the softest, most comfortable, most colorful underwear I have ever owned.

• 1:08:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:09:21Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:10:03Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:10:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:11:29Tim Ferriss?

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