#122: The Magic of Mindfulness: Complain Less, Appreciate More, and Live a Better Life

This is another special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Usually, when I talk about strategies for living a better life, I focus on strategies for effectiveness and efficiency. That is, finding ways for you to be better without wasting time. Both of these are important, but fine-tuning those traits come naturally for me. Mindfulness is something that is difficult and usually overlooked by most people. So why is mindfulness essential? When it comes to achievement, most people just work harder. In reality, you want to first achieve more focus and clarity, which can help guide your effort. This is the real benefit of mindfulness. Once you incorporate it into your life, you complain less, appreciate more, react less, and fill your life with what's most important to you. More than anything, you'll learn how to be present and live in the moment. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim, which is non-spec. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run… This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. Mandatory disclaimer: Wealthfront Inc. is an SEC registered Investment Advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit Wealthfront dot com to read their full disclosure.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, it would seem inappropriate to me.

• 0:12Speaker 00

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. When your business needs a logo, website, business card, thumbnail, or any other design, I recommend checking out 99designs. I use them myself. I've used them for many years. I use them to create book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world, give your feedback, and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So check out some of my competitions in designs and some of your competitions in designs from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  design. So check it out, 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:13Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second.

• 1:54Tim Ferriss?

  I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials. So I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast.

• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

  But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So, check it out, guys.

• 4:07Tim Ferriss?

  This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 4:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between-isode, is a short little morsel, a tidbit for your mind, that will hopefully help you kick off a great weekend or week. If you want the longer interview format, where I talk to people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Josh Waitzkin, who's considered a chess prodigy, General Stanley McChrystal, etc., about their habits and routines, then you can find all of those at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. But this is going to be a wee bit smaller, and it's going to discuss mindfulness. Much of what I usually talk about is effectiveness, doing the right things, and then doing things rightly, in that order. So,

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  effective and efficient. And we'll get into a bit of that, but we're going to talk about, like I mentioned, mindfulness. And what that means is up for debate, depending on who you ask, but let's define it as a present state awareness that helps you to be non-reactive, and I'll get into why that's important. But before we even get into it, I will, of course, list out a number of tools that I've found very helpful, but the question is, why do I think it's important? And that is because it doesn't come naturally to me, and that is a huge handicap in life. For any type A personality, or someone who is hardwired that way, working on achievement is really easy. But we tend to do it, of course, by working harder. And this isn't the first place we should focus. As good old Abe Lincoln, who's misquoted on the internet everywhere, but I think this is a proper one,

• 5:53Tim Ferriss?

  has said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe." So perhaps we should spend more time sharpening our axe, the most important axe, our mind, before acting indiscriminately, which is, of course, a form of laziness. Mindfulness helps you to complain less, appreciate more, react less, and ultimately, do more of the important stuff. What's very fascinating, though, about mindfulness, so just being very focused on and aware of the present state moment, which includes your emotions, your reactions, etc.

• 6:25Tim Ferriss?

  That it works in the opposite. In other words, if you complain less, you develop more mindfulness. If you appreciate more, you develop more mindfulness. So it is a two-way street. And that gives you many more options for developing this skill that most people limit to, say, meditation, which the vast majority of people hate and feel like they fail at, so they don't do it. So let's get started. Some of these are macro, meaning I do them once a year, or once a week, once a month, once a quarter, and some of them are daily. We'll start with a really big one, the 21-day no complaint experiment. This originally came across my purview because of Will Bowen, who, at the time at least,

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

  was a Kansas City minister who had recognized that word choice determines thought choice. Think about this for a second. It's very profound, but what he did is even more interesting. So word choice determines thought choice. And in fact, if there are people who believe that consciousness and conceptual thinking develop along with vocabulary, right? So if word choice determines thought choice, that therefore determines also emotions and actions. But it's not enough to just decide you're going to stop using certain words you might overuse, though. You need to be conditioned. So if you fix the words, you fix the thoughts. How did Will do this? Well, he created a purple bracelet. It was a simple bracelet, kind of like the Live Strong bracelets that were yellow back in the day, and he would give these out to his congregation. Well, why did he do that?

• 7:52Tim Ferriss?

  He would ask them to do a 21-day no complaint experiment. So anytime they complained, they had to switch the bracelet to the other wrist and start the clock over. And this became hugely popular, spread via word of mouth. And at last count that I checked out, there were 6 million of these bracelets floating around because of, in part, his congregation. And then he wrote a book called The, I think it's The No Complaint World, or A Complaint-Free World, that's it, which is worth reading. But what is a complaint? This was an issue that I had with some of his descriptions. Because with his rules, he will ask you to switch wrists whenever you gossip, criticize, or complain. But again, the definitions can be a bit vague. He also requires you to switch wrists if you Tell someone else that they're complaining.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's kind of productive because it's constructive criticism. So here's where I drew the line, and you can use a rubber band, as I did for a long time for this, or a bracelet. I define complaining for myself as follows. Describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. And I added profanity to this because I was trying to curse less and emulate people like Matt Mullenweg, who's incredible and is one of the people who's been interviewed on this podcast. And what that means is if you say, "I was standing in line at the post office and this fucking idiot took forever," that's a complaint. You start the clock over. In the other word, in, uh, in the other words, in the other words, if you say, "I was at

• 9:18Tim Ferriss?

  the post office, the guy in front of me took forever, and I learned and I decided that from now on, I'm not going to go to the post office unless it is between 8:00 and 9:30 a.m.," something like that. Suggesting a fix, that is a pass. It's not a deal, but it's a pass. All right. So the 21-day no complaint experiment, this will change your life if you even attempt it. Even if you get one week through, it will change your life. So try it out again. And this is using not complaining to become more mindful, because it works both ways. All right, the next one is something that I try to do once a quarter or so, but even once a year is very, very helpful, and that is practice poverty for a week.

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  And this comes from Stoicism, and I'll have a lot more to say about Stoicism and Seneca in particular. But practicing poverty, poverty for a week, I'm going to paraphrase here, but in the words of Seneca, would effectively be limiting yourself to the cheapest of food, the coarsest of dress, the most meager of an existence for a week, all the time asking yourself, "Is this the condition I so feared?" And it teaches you to value the things that you should value and to realize that the worst case scenario really isn't Generally that bad. And this enables you, emboldens you, to take risks or things that you might previously consider risks, like starting your own company, moonlighting, ending a relationship, starting

• 10:44Tim Ferriss?

  a relationship, quitting your job, whatever it might be. If there's a financial component to it, you realize that the downside really isn't that bad. It's basically going back to college. And I think a lot of people in life spend their entire careers trying to get back to their quality of life that they had in college. So what does practicing poverty mean? It can mean many different things, but it means, for instance, for me, I would take one pair of jeans, wear those all week with like a cheap pair of vans, shoes, maybe a white t-shirt, only white t-shirts, like Hanes, and eat rice and beans for a week. And you get to the end of the week and you're like, wow, I actually saved a lot of cognitive load by not having to decide about these things. So there are benefits to that simplicity as well. All right. So practice poverty for a week and read up on Seneca.

• 11:28Tim Ferriss?

  I will be top secret, don't tell anybody. I have 27 hours of audio related to Seneca, I think it's 27, that is coming out very shortly. I'm super excited, so keep your ears peeled for that. The next one, the jar of awesome. This was not my idea. This was actually thanks to an ex-girlfriend who is a real sweetheart, is, I'm sure, still a sweetheart. And she created something for me called the jar of awesome. And this is because I'm very good at achievement and not always very good at appreciation. And this was a mason jar with jar of awesome in glitter, basically, on the side. And anytime something really cool happened that I got excited about, to avoid my forgetting

• 12:10Tim Ferriss?

  it next to immediately, because I tend to celebrate very briefly, if at all, I should write it down on a slip of paper and put it in the top of this mason jar. And it really had a tremendous impact. I kept it where I could see it, and it was a real mood elevator and emphasized the importance of appreciation if you want to have any real success. And I hate to use that word, but it's appropriate here, because if you only have achievement and you never appreciate the small wins, or the big things for that matter, and they have no duration, then it's a hollow victory, if you could call it a victory. So if you don't want to have a jar of awesome written on it because you'll feel foolish, you could just take a huge exclamation point, like put an exclamation point on the side

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  of a Mason jar or something like that and then drop these things in. It's an easy practice and a fun practice and I think, I don't have kids, but if I had kids, I would have them also put things into the jar of awesome. Next, this is a daily practice and I've spoken about it before. I talked about my morning routine, so I won't go into great depth here, but I meditate every morning and I failed in my mind at trying meditating for 10 years. Now try it for two or three days and get pissed off and quit. The method that worked for me was Transcendental Meditation, tm.org, you can check it out. There's things I don't like about their organization in terms of how they make you look at a picture

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

  of an Indian guy with a beard and they give you the blah, blah, blah and they charge a good amount of money, but it was worth it for me because there was accountability and it was very secular after the fact. And they focus on logistics and contingency plans a lot in the teaching, but something like Vipassana or otherwise could work very well. I meditate for 21 minutes each morning. I'm supposed to do it in the afternoon, I very rarely do, I do it right after getting up and it's like a warm bath for your mind. People will get all woo woo about meditation. This is where you're sharpening the axe and what I find is that if I take the 20, and it's 21 minutes because I take 60 seconds just to fidget and be an idiot and get settled

• 14:13Tim Ferriss?

  and then I count the 20 as my session, if you take those 20 minutes, you will get, I would say, and this is obviously just spitballing, but 20 to 30% more done that day of important things with 50% less stress. So it is a huge ROI on that time. Even if, as is common for me, and I have an episode with Rain Wilson, best known as Dwight from The Office, coming out soon, where we talk about meditation, even if you only focus on what you're focusing on, your breath or whatever, for 30 seconds, a minute in that 20-minute session, it is a successful session. If you want an easy way to get your foot in the door with this stuff, download one of

• 14:57Tim Ferriss?

  the apps or both, Calm or Headspace, and just start using guided meditations in the morning. And you don't have to start with 20 minutes, start with five minutes and do it consistently for five to seven days to establish the habit, then you can up the time. Okay, next. Morning pages or journaling in the morning. When I get up, I won't go through the whole morning routine because I've done that elsewhere. But when I journal, which is very early in the morning after meditation, well, early in the morning, meaning in my morning, I usually get up between 7:30 and 10:30. So not exactly Jaco Willink. Sorry, Jaco, I'm working on it. In any case, the five-minute journal, just buy one of these. Honestly, I have no financial stake in this, but you could certainly try to replicate

• 15:40Tim Ferriss?

  it yourself, but having it in one bound book is very helpful. In effect, what you're doing is five minutes in the morning, five minutes before you go to bed. And the AM piece is simply writing down three bullets for I am grateful for... dot, dot, dot, three things. What would make today great? One, two, three. Daily affirmations, I am, blank, blank. And then at night, before you go to bed, three amazing things that happened today? One, two, three. How could I have made today better? And I have had friends reach out to me who have, or fans for that matter, who have listened to everything that I've talked about for years, and they say this was the big game changer for them. Now, I have some recommendations because I found that I am grateful for... dot, dot, dot, blank, blank, blank. You tend to use the same things over and over again.

• 16:24Tim Ferriss?

  My healthy family, or my wife, or my kids, whatever it might be. So I suggest that you write down a number of categories and that you insist that you have no two days where the items are exactly the same. And this is something I haven't talked about before, but I think this could be very helpful. So in the five-minute journal, or in your morning pages, if you use that type of approach, and you can just search for a blog post called What My Morning Journal Looks Like, Ferris, and you'll see what mine looks like for morning pages. A little bit different. When you're doing this list of items or things that you're grateful for, I would recommend four different categories.

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  The first is a relationship, an old one that really helped you in some way, or that you valued. Okay? Relationship is number one. And I tend to try to pick an old one because it forces you to go through the memory banks a bit. Number two is an opportunity you have to And perhaps that's just an opportunity to improve, an opportunity to go to work. It doesn't have to be something extremely unique, but an opportunity you have today that you're grateful for. Number three, something great that happened or that you saw yesterday. Okay? And number four is something simple near you. And this was actually a recommendation from Tony Robbins, and you can listen to my episode with him for a lot more on his habits.

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  But in other words, they can't all be my career, the this, the that, these big abstractions, or the gigantic items. You want to get good at appreciating the small things because the small things are the big things. And if you don't notice the small things, the tendency is also not to fully appreciate or be present with the large things. So something simple near you, or something simple, like the cloud outside the window, the coffee that you're drinking, the pen that you have, whatever it might be, something really small and simple, or I should say just simple. So I'll go through that again. Number one, when you're putting down your list of things you're grateful for, and even if you just did this instead of the five minutes, I don't think it'd be extremely valuable. So an old relationship that helped you a lot.

• 18:32Tim Ferriss?

  Number two, an opportunity you have today. Number three, something great that happened yesterday. Or something good. Four, something simple near you. Okay? That's it. And the next step, which is part of this exercise for me, and I believe I also got this from the same ex-girlfriend, and yeah, that's a longer story I'm not going to get into right now, but she gave me a lot of good advice. And this next step was thank one person per day. So in this case, I have developed the habit of thinking of, say, teachers who helped me in high school, or friends who helped me when I was a kid, or who were close to me, and then reaching out to them, trying to track them down on Facebook or otherwise. Send them an email. Give them a call.

• 19:15Tim Ferriss?

  Leave a voicemail, just telling them how much you appreciate them, or that you love them, if you really want to go for it. That alone will improve your quality of life dramatically. And what I've found, and I'm not necessarily hardwired for what I would call happiness, or self-reported well-being, is if you don't know how to make yourself happy, make somebody else happy. And guess what? That will generally increase your self-reported level of happiness. Okay? Three more, and then we're out of here. The next one is something I started doing about two weeks ago that I found very helpful. I'd always been told, you know, if you're feeling anxious or you're feeling overwhelmed, just take 10 deep breaths. It sounds ridiculous, but 10 deep breaths is actually a fucking lot.

• 19:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I started treating myself to three breath breaks.

• 20:07Tim Ferriss?

  This sounds so fucking ridiculous until you try it if you're like me and you might find it useful, or you'll just laugh at me and that's okay too. So if I find myself getting wound up in any way, or anxious, or projecting forward into the future about the what ifs, even if it's six hours later, I will take a three breath break. Okay, that's it. You're just gonna take three deep breaths and that's it. And it is a fantastic pattern interrupt and anxiety reducer, at least in my experience. All right, the next one is a Chrome extension, actually. The Momentum Chrome extension. This is something Matt Mullenweg introduced me to, and it is a great way to prevent you from opening a million tabs on your browser and getting lost in the slipstream of noise

• 20:51Tim Ferriss?

  on the internet, or just scattered focus for that matter. This helps you return to the most important thing that you're supposed to do that day, which you define each day when you open this, when you open the browser, or open a new tab. And it will say, "Good morning, Tim." Blah, blah, blah, there's a beautiful photograph, then it asks you to type in your most important task or the thing you should focus on for that day. And you can check it out. Many of you have been a huge fan of that since I mentioned it some time back, or when Matt mentioned it. The last one is a nightly review, and this comes back to the Five Minute Journal, but what you could do is simply another list of things that you're grateful for.

• 21:31Tim Ferriss?

  And this sounds so hokey, and it sounds so cliched, and I am here to tell you, it is very significant. And practicing gratitude, practicing compassion, sounds so woo-woo, California, San Francisco, put a crystal on my forehead, but if you look at neuroimaging studies that have looked at specifically compassion meditation, there's some very, very interesting findings. Some of them correlate to psychedelic use in some ways, which is very cool. I'm going to talk about that in the Rain Wilson interview also. But this is the bookending of the evening. So, so I mentioned the five minute journal. You could just keep it simple and get one of these. Honestly, go online and it'll save you a lot of time. Or you can just do, as I mentioned in the beginning, the, the AM check in and write those things down. And then the PM check in.

• 22:14Tim Ferriss?

  Now, in the five minute journal, it's three amazing things that happened today, dot, dot, dot, one, two, three. And then how could I have made today better? You could just make that a list of two or three or four things that you're grateful for that happened that day, that you saw that day, that you experienced that day, that you had an opportunity to engage with in some way that day. And ladies and gents, those are some of the things that I use to cultivate mindfulness as a practical tactical tool for being more effective, more efficient and more appreciative. And like I mentioned, focusing on developing this present state awareness,

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  which is done with conditioning, with practices, exercise, like I mentioned, the, some of those that I use regularly. And it helps you to complain less, appreciate more, react less, and ultimately do more of the important stuff and enjoy yourself while you're doing it. So I hope that is helpful. The show notes may not exist for this particular episode because I think it was pretty straightforward. But you can find show notes from all the other episodes and so on at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast or just go to fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and click on podcast. And of course, as always, thank you so, so much for listening. It means a lot to me and I love the feedback.

• 23:37Tim Ferriss?

  So please let me know on Twitter or on Facebook, but Twitter is usually better, at T Ferriss. T F E R R I S S.

• 23:52Tim 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've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  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 episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, and this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set it and forget it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple and world famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management.

• 25:16Tim Ferriss?

  In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra wealthy but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations, bloated sales teams, etc. And I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim. Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that

• 25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera, can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first 15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance.

• 26:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account, but just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you.

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free, there's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure. So, check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com/tim.

• 28:07Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. When your business needs a logo, website, business card, thumbnail, or any other design, I recommend checking out 99designs. I use them myself. I've used them for many years. I use them to create book cover prototypes for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one York Times bestseller. I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world. Give your feedback and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So, check out some of my competitions in designs and some of your competitions in designs from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first design.

• 28:51Tim Ferriss?

  So, check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.