Pod Insights The Tim Ferriss Show Ep 51: Tim Answers 10 More Popular Questions from Listeners About this episode This is a short episode of around 30 minutes. In it, I answer your 10 most popular questions, determined by 3,000+ votes.
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Hope you enjoy. Pura vida...
Tim
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tim Ferriss? I am drinking coffee and I am very excited because it's getting light out.
0:08 Tim Ferriss? At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:13 Speaker 01 Can I answer your personal question?
0:15 Tim Ferriss? No, this isn't an appropriate time.
0:18 Speaker 01 I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal endoskeleton.
0:30 Tim Ferriss? Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever this finds you on the globe. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between-isode, and that means that it is a shorter format. It is composed of your questions, which you've submitted and then voted up or down. Thousands of you have done this, so I'm going to answer between 10 and 20 questions. If you're looking for the normal, longer format interviews where I dissect excellence and try to extract the tools and tips and so on that you can use from world-class performers, whether they be billionaire investors like Peter Thiel, or chess prodigies, or philosophers,
1:13 Tim Ferriss? or professional athletes, then I suggest you go to iTunes or your podcast player of choice and check out all the other episodes. And you can go to also 4hourworkweek.com/podcast to find all the episodes. All spelled out, 4hourworkweek.com/podcast. And I am in Iceland at the moment. I'm so thrilled. It is about 10:00 in the morning. It is just getting light outside, so I feel like I've been very diligent in getting up at 5:00 a.m. because the sun is rising as I speak. And I'm here with family for the holidays, and we've been very lucky to see the northern lights for two out of three nights now, and it's just brilliant. I find this country fascinating.
1:57 Tim Ferriss? 300,000 or so people in the entire country and very difficult language, but I'm staying at a hotel where they have a very itinerant, rotating staff of international folks from Malta or Poland or other places. So I'm having a, I'm like a kid in a candy store with the language learning. But let me first mention, before we get to the questions, sponsors, very briefly.
2:21 Tim Ferriss? This episode is brought to you by Onnit, O-N-N-I-T dot com forward slash Tim. I've used their gear for many, many years, whether it be their battle robes, their kettlebells, their maces, clubs. I know it sounds like a torture chamber, but it's really the vast majority of my gear that I have in my gym, as well as supplements like chewable melatonin, which I've used on this trip to immediately get lockstep with the circadian rhythm necessary for the few hours of daylight that we have here. And check them out, Onnit dot com, O-N-N-I-T dot com forward slash Tim. You can see all sorts of stuff that I use. The second sponsor is 99designs, 99designs dot com forward slash Tim. You can see some of the contests
3:04 Tim Ferriss? that I've run, including for the four hour body cover, which went on to become number one New York Times bestseller and is still selling like crazy, which is hard to believe sometimes. It is the one stop shop for all of your graphic design needs. If you want to have an original design in a week or less of your money back, check it out, 99designs dot com forward slash Tim. Now, moving on to the questions. The first question is from Scott in Australia. Can you please spec out the first hour of your day as you asked of Tony Robbins? So my Tony Robbins episode is a two parter, and you can certainly check that out if you like. It is one of the more recent episodes, 37 and 38. So we talked about
3:48 Tim Ferriss? morning routines and everything else and how important that is. For me, typically, I go to bed very, very late. I do my best synthesis, my best really composition, if I'm on a book deadline, very late at night. I've tried to fix this without much success. So I typically do my best writing very late at night between, and I'm going to get to the morning, but this impacts it, between 11:00 PM and about 3:00 or 4:00 AM. And I'll have one glass of Malbec ideally with Yerba Mate, throw movie on loop. And that's historically has been anything from Casino Royale to The Bourne Identity. You see the theme there. But then there's stuff like Babe, oddly enough. And I'll put it on mute and just loop those
4:31 Tim Ferriss? movies over and over again, so that I don't feel as lonely as I would sitting in my house in the dark writing. And then I'll play music, typically Pandora in headphones. So that leads to waking up on the later side. Typically, I'll wake up around, let's say, 10 a.m. And as soon as I wake up, I will brush my teeth and then consume supplements or any type of medicine that is best absorbed without food or on an empty stomach or with low insulin levels. And that could range from, say, pre or probiotics. So probiotics, the usual type of lactobacillus stuff. Prebiotics, like Inner Eco, which you can check out, or beet cavass. And I'll oftentimes put just a dollop, or I should say, a tablespoon
5:16 Tim Ferriss? of apple cider vinegar in there as well, which I find really helps immune function. I'll consume that. It could be something, say, if I'm being supervised by doctors post-surgery, it could be an injection of human growth hormone, for instance, noradrenaline pen or something like that. Never use that without doctor supervision, of course. But there are certain things that are just really best done with low insulin and glucose levels. Then I will meditate. I'll do that on an empty stomach typically, more or less. And that's ideally 20 minutes of transcendental meditation. There are many different types of meditation. For me, that is what has stuck. Then I will get up, turn on Pandora, onto classical music, typically Mozart,
6:00 Tim Ferriss? and I will start boiling water. And as the water is boiling, I think I'm using these days a metal cuisinart electric kettle that can be set to specific temperature, whether it be for black tea, green tea, or anything else. And so you can set the temperature. I usually set it to 185 degrees. And then I'll make my tea as this is boiling. And my tea, almost always without fail in the morning, is composed of, I think it's a reshi ginger and turmeric tea, combined with some pu-erh tea, combined with a very small amount of green tea. Basically, a three-finger pinch for those people who've read The Four Hour Chef. And then I'll make my tea. I'll get a cold glass of water and I'll sit down and I will write
6:45 Tim Ferriss? or work on the podcast or a blog post. This is a creative. Writing session and that will very oftentimes take me to lunch and that's when I'll have in this particular instance when I'm optimizing for writing, I will have my first meal around lunch, first real meal. If I'm in sports training, that changes completely, but for right now, that is the first one to two hours of my day. All right, long answer, but there you have it. Next, we have a related question. This is from, it looks like cinema, oddly enough. How do you limit or moderate your media consumption, TV, radio, Twitter, internet,
7:26 Tim Ferriss? etc.? Well, I would say, like a lot of the world, increasingly poorly would be the short answer, but there are a few things that I've found very helpful. Number one is screen-free Saturdays. I try to go Saturdays without iPhones, laptops, any type of screen. And if I'm with someone else, I try to do the same if possible, for instance, a girlfriend. No screens in the bed or bedroom. I think the bed is for sleeping or fucking and that is it, shouldn't be for checking your email. So no screens in the bed or bedroom. I don't want that, the sanctity of that environment to be associated with work because that will produce insomnia, especially if you're prone to insomnia anyway, as I am. If I'm walking or eating a meal, my phone is on airplane mode for reasons that we've talked about
8:11 Tim Ferriss? in the Four Hour Body. Not keen to microwave my testicles, even if there's some controversy over that point. On my iPhone, I do not have email notifications or social notifications of any type. So there's, there's no number count associated with my Facebook app, my Twitter app, or mail because I don't have mail set up. And another way that I try to minimize email is walking and talking. What does this mean? This means that as I specked out the first part of my day, then I'll have, I will walk to lunch. Now, when I walk to lunch and then after lunch, I will have put together a list of phone calls the day before that I need to make. And so I'll have a list of, say, 10 to 20 people to call and I will
8:56 Tim Ferriss? just walk for anywhere from three to seven miles or even more and make phone calls. And I find this is a great way to get in the zone, improve fitness of all sorts of types, while getting a lot done outside of the inbox. Okay, that is pretty much it. We'll talk about some other email management techniques a little bit later on. The next three questions, basically. Actually, you know what? I'm going to jump around a little bit. So, the next question I'm going to answer is from TK O'Farrell in Seattle. What are some of the best things you can purchase for less than $100 that will have the greatest immediate impact? And I take that to mean impact on
9:40 Tim Ferriss? your life. This is, of course, a variant of a question that I've asked a lot of my guests on the podcast. And offhand, there are just a few things. I'll keep this answer short. The first is using either TaskRabbit, or Zipcar, or just your own car for a Goodwill trip to donate goods. And of course, if you're outside the US, you don't have access to a Goodwill. Decluttering and getting rid of 30 to 50 or more percent of everything that you own. If it has a higher value to someone else on a scale of 1 to 10 than it does to you, give it away. So, for instance, if I'm looking at a jacket, I'm like, what is the value to me? How much have I worn this in the last six months? On a scale of
10:25 Tim Ferriss? 1 to 10, how important and valuable? How much utility does this have? And if it's a 3, and I could ask myself the same question, how much would it have for someone else in need? 7, 8, 9, it goes away. And so, that would be item number 1, which is really an action. Then you have the 5-minute journal. This is often something that I will do during my writing phase, prior to working on a podcast, or a blog post, or a book chapter, is fill out the 5-minute journal. I've talked about this at length before, so I'm not going to go into it. The next is the Reshi, and it might be Rishi, ginger and turmeric tea. So, those are three right offhand. But I think that less is more when it comes to consumerism. All right.
11:09 Tim Ferriss? The next set of questions, this is very interesting. You all voted these up or down and submitted them. And three questions ended up in sequence that are very, very, very similar. So the first is, "You read a lot of books. How are you able to retain all of that knowledge?" This is from Jadz, J-A-D-Z, in London. Then the next one is, "When you read books, how do you take notes?" That was Mike in Newcastle, England. And then the next one is, "How do you approach the learning process to internalize long-term ideas, arguments, et cetera, from a book such that it becomes part of the toolbox in your life?" And that is from Phil in Oklahoma.
11:50 Tim Ferriss? And actually, there's a fourth one, which is from Kale, I guess, in Norway. "You read a lot of books, but you're also a very productive guy. How fast do you read and when do you fit reading into your day?" So let me start in reverse order. How fast do I read? I'd say most people read between, most Americans read between 150 and 250 words per minute. That's just an estimate. I used to be much more on top of all these stats. I probably read at 500 to 700 words per minute, which is, you know, two to two and a half pages a minute, let's just say. I used to be much, much faster. And with training, you can consistently get to the point that you are reading at five, six, seven pages per minute without too much trouble.
12:35 Tim Ferriss? And you can triple your reading speed in about 20 minutes. If you want proof of that, just search, I think it's "How to triple your reading speed" and my name, Ferris, and it'll pop right up. Just go to the blog and you can find it. Or just search on Google and it should be the first thing that pops up. So that's the speed, but the speed is not the most important thing here. Where do I fit it in? Sometimes in the morning, when I'm doing my writing session, I'll do, say, 10 minutes of reading something that is not pragmatically oriented. So I might read some Walt Whitman, or I might read some poetry, or something to basically just diffuse any sense of feeling rushed to get things done, which ironically, or maybe
13:14 Tim Ferriss? paradoxically, allows me to get more done, once I diffuse that feeling of being reactive or in any way rushed. Okay, then there's bedtime. That's when I'll usually reserve things for fiction, but I'd say in transit. So if I am reading on my iPhone on the subway, in line for anything, if I happen to be in line for anything, on airplanes, usually in transit is when I do the vast majority of my reading. And I should point out that you don't find time for anything. If you're a type A-driven personality, you make time for it. So you have to prioritize it and block out time, or just simply have it associated with a certain cue, like I do with transit. Okay. Now, the note-taking question, because these are all related to
13:59 Tim Ferriss? taking notes. How do I retain all of that knowledge? I don't. I don't retain all of that knowledge. And there's some great anecdotes, or they might be apocryphal stories, of Henry Ford, who is ridiculed by someone at one point, some type of high-flut and muckety-muck guest, for not being able to recall certain facts and figures off the top of his head. And he said, "That's why I have a library," in short. And when I read books that I intend to have as references, I'd say there are a couple of things. Number one, and this is borrowed from Kathy Sierra, who's a very fascinating, smart woman, "I try to focus on just-in-time information, not just-in-case information." So the further away the time
14:41 Tim Ferriss? horizon of acting on that information in the book, the more likely you are just to forget everything and have to reread it. Okay? So I really focus on either reading for pleasure, or just-in-time information, whenever possible. But there are going to be cases where you're seduced into reading something that is intended for far-future use. I try to create, basically, a map of things or people I might need quickly by composing an index at the beginning of every book that I read, assuming that it's, say, paperback or hardcover. With Kindle, I'm going to be putting in highlights that I can then export as a text file. And I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this, because
15:21 Tim Ferriss? I geeked out at length in two places. The first is my interview, or conversation, really, with Maria Popova, who runs Brain Pickings, who puts me to shame, by the way, with this type of note-taking. That's episode 39 of the podcast. Definitely check it out. If you want to nerd out on note-taking and just distillation of information, that's where you want to go. There's another place, I think it's called "How to Take Notes Like an Alpha Nerd" or something like that, on the blog. So if you do a search, you can see scans of some of these indices that I've created in the past, and you might have some fun with that. Okay, next question is from Gerard, or Jared. I apologize for mispronouncing that. "In Vancouver, do you waste time?
16:06 Tim Ferriss? If so, what do you waste the most time on?" Of course I waste time. I'm absolutely a fallible human being, and it's part of the reason that I don't typically want journalists to follow me for a typical day. It's a common request that I get, and I think they'd look at 90% of the time that I spend, and they'd ask themselves, "What the fuck is this guy doing? He is the most disorganized, unproductive son of a bitch I've ever seen." Now, that's a separate conversation, perhaps. I think that if you focus on being effective, i.e. doing the right things, instead of being efficient, doing things well. If you just view things through the lens of picking the right things, you can futz away
16:49 Tim Ferriss? a lot of time and still sort of outpace the vast majority of the population. If you're competitive with someone who's equally effective, of course, the more efficient person is going to win. But there are a few things I'd say about wasting time. Number one is, if you're having fun, and that's your goal, you're not wasting time. So if you're playing Playstation or watching a movie, and the objective is to have fun, you're not wasting time. You don't have, there's, ah, God, I'm forgetting who said this, but "There's more to life than increasing its speed." I think that might be Thoreau, could have been Gandhi, who knows? But you don't have to spend every waking moment trying to just build bigger castles in the sky.
17:34 Tim Ferriss? There's a lot more to life than just that component. However, when you waste time, I think, from a definition standpoint, is when you want to do one thing, or you plan to do one thing, and then you end up doing another. So you're trying to be productive. To get X done, say, record a podcast. And instead, you're getting pulled into the rat hole of Facebook notifications, or amusing videos on YouTube, etc. When your intention is one thing and you end up diverted into another, I view that as wasting time, because you're not purely having fun, you're not purely being productive. You're in the limbo in between that gives you neither of those things. But if I had to point to something very specific, I would say that with email,
18:19 Tim Ferriss? specifically replying to things I should ignore, is where I waste a lot of time. Where I end up creating work that is not high priority. And there are a number of tools. That's specifically true when you have VIPs, VIP-type people, from a relationship standpoint, reaching out to you for things that could be best answered in blog posts I've already written, or podcast episodes I've already recorded. I feel conflicted about protecting those relationships so they don't feel miffed or dismissed, while still protecting my own time, because I've already covered the goddamn topic. This is very... This can be a very dicey situation. In my particular experience,
19:04 Tim Ferriss? what I use for that, there are a couple of things that can be very helpful. So the auto-response is helpful. I provide, for instance, book marketing advice and links to very comprehensive articles. How to Write a Bestseller this Year is just a monster post that you can check out, related to that. That covers everything I have to say about book marketing and launching and writing. Then I combine that with Boomerang. So what Boomerang allows me to do is send email responses in the future. So I can not send the response now, but send it in a week or seven days. And what this does is it minimizes the likelihood of catalyzing an instant messenger-like exchange. So what I don't want to do is reply right away, especially if I know this person wants to talk.
19:50 Tim Ferriss? And I might put them on the phone call list if I think this is going to be a big problem. But if I think it's going to engage, if I think, for instance, I'm going to reply back and say, "Hey, check out this article. This is what I wrote. Here are a couple of more tips." And then they'd respond back with, "Oh, cool. How was your weekend?" "Oh, great. How was your family?" "Oh, how are things?" I don't want it to digress into a 20-e-mail small talk back and forth. So by delaying your response time, Boomerang, using Boomerang or something like it, I find it to be very, very effective in cutting down on the volume of email in the inbox. All right. Next question. This is from Alex in London. "Now that you have 50 episodes under your belt, have you noticed anything common across the interviewees?"
20:35 Tim Ferriss? And I'm paraphrasing this question, but characteristics, habits, or methods? There are a few things that I've noticed. So the first is, even more than I anticipated,
20:47 Tim Ferriss? even good friends I didn't know this about, the vast majority, I mean, literally, I'd say 80% of the people I've interviewed in very diverse fields, from FBI futurists to athletes to chess prodigies to professional investors or traders, they all meditate. And meditate, I think, is a malign term, rightly so. It's associated with woo-woo-type, oming people. And I think it turns a lot of people off who are secular and don't want to kind of bow down to some type of deity or guru with a long beard. And there is a way to separate the two.
21:30 Tim Ferriss? I think "Waking Up" by Sam Harris is a good example of that. I think "Tik Not Han",
21:38 Tim Ferriss? mindfulness, mindfulness step. God, he has so many damn books. That guy's prolific.
21:46 Tim Ferriss? "Mindfulness is the first step," something like that. Look for his oldest book that was intended as a guide for his monks in Vietnam. I believe it was in Vietnam originally. It might have been in Paris afterwards.
22:00 Tim Ferriss? You can divorce the two, you can divorce the so-called spirituality, which I think is a very nebulous term, from the pragmatic mindfulness practice, and that's what you want. So that's number one. Most of these people either meditate or are making a deliberate attempt to meditate, which surprisingly is kind of the point when it comes to mindfulness practice, or developing a present state awareness where you're able to, if not turn off, at least observe the incessant chatter, which is the self-talk that can steer you dramatically one way or the other during your day. That's number one. Number two, I would say that a lot of these folks, for instance, Peter Thiel, who was
22:42 Tim Ferriss? a co-founder of PayPal, and then first money into Facebook, co-founder of Palantir, which now does, I don't know, one to two billion dollars in revenue a year, that he is looking for differences, not in degree, but of kind. And what I mean by that is, he's looking for some type of exponential change or improvement, not an incremental change or improvement. And of course, we talked about this in our interview, that's the zero to one interview, if you just search Peter Thiel, T-H-I-E-L, interview, and then Tim Ferriss, it'll pop right up. But you could also look at, say, Josh Waitzkin.
23:24 Tim Ferriss? So Josh Waitzkin was the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, and he has a framework that he used to master chess that he can apply to anything, and he's also the first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, who's considered the Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, plus whatever, Mike Tyson of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he's, I think, six-time world champion. And Josh Waitzkin, that's episode two of the podcast, tends to not look for the brand-new, shiny creation, you'll see where I'm going with this, but to look at something that everyone has seen and see something different. I think that people want to look at a problem that many, many, many people have seen and either attempted to
24:10 Tim Ferriss? ...solve the wrong way, or not attempted to solve at all. And there are many examples of this. For instance, like, how long did it take to get wheels on fucking luggage? I mean, are you kidding me? I mean luggage has been around for thousands of years, hundreds of years at the very least, as we know it, in modern suitcases and whatnot. And it took fucking forever to get omnidirectional wheels, just like shopping carts, where you could push them in any given direction without having it flip over. And I think a lot of them are looking at common problems that are just not being addressed properly, and they're not looking for an incremental change, they're looking for a complete different species of solution. That's something that I've also seen in common.
24:51 Tim Ferriss? But they're not looking for a problem necessarily that no one has identified, if that makes sense. All right. Let's see, other methods and habits. I would just say, characteristically, these people also do not try to fix all of their weaknesses. They know what they suck at, so they have the self-awareness, and I think the meditation often goes hand in hand here. They have the self-awareness to know what they suck at, and if something destroys most of their relationships with other people, whether it's personal or business, they will try to mitigate those. But they really spend most of their time trying to pair their unique abilities, their strengths, their superpowers, with these problems, right, that they can address, and
25:35 Tim Ferriss? the breakthrough solutions that they can find. So they spend most of their time trying to leverage their unique abilities, not fix all of the dozens of things that they're shitty at. Okay. Next question. This is from Jasky in Perth, WA. I'm going to guess that is West Australia, not Washington. And I'm paraphrasing the question here, "But the four-hour mind. Do you have any tips or tricks for decreasing stress, increasing confidence, clarity of thinking, creativity, etc.?" In other words, a four-hour book for the mind. So this is a big question. It's actually a combination of many, many different questions.
26:15 Tim Ferriss? The first thing I would say is for clarity of thinking and creativity, I think The 4-Hour Chef is actually a good place to start. The meta-learning section in particular delves into a lot of this because before you can solve something, you have to ask the right question. I think most people waste months, even years or decades of their lives because they're attempting to, they're asking the wrong question. How can I be successful? How can I be happy? Nebulous words, imprecise definitions, leading to a lot of tail chasing, for instance. And I think The 4-Hour Chef helps you to frame and deconstruct something like learning to speak Spanish. I
26:59 Tim Ferriss? want to be fluent in Spanish is actually not a very good goal. You want to get much more precise and break it down into a subset of questions that you can pair with different toolkits, right? So I'd say that is a good place to start. But otherwise, Stoicism is really what I view as the operating, an ideal operating system for people who want to be high performers in high-stress environments. And ultimately, that's where a lot of the rewards are and in these hotly contested waters or areas. And there are a number of different places to start. So you could read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which is really basically a wartime journal, never intended for publication, which I think makes
27:43 Tim Ferriss? it very, very interesting. And reflecting each morning on how you're going to encounter ungrateful, rude, insolent bastards all day long and basically preparing yourself for that so you don't negatively overreact would be one of many different tips. But Moral Letters from Seneca to Lucilius, also very good. But I'll save you guys some time. So the first is for a good summary of a lot of this, I would listen to the episode four of this podcast. Episode four of this podcast with Ryan Holiday, he wrote a book about Stoicism. He has a very broad spectrum of knowledge related to the different Stoic thinking.
28:24 Tim Ferriss? And we delve into how both of us use Stoicism and have used different tenants of it in practical scenarios in our professional and personal lives. So I would just check out episode four with Ryan Holiday. And lastly, I am putting together, currently it's 90-plus percent done, a massive collection of Stoic thinking that has been sort of parsed and produced to my specs. So I have an awesome collection of Stoic stuff coming for all of you guys if you're interested. That's going to take probably another few weeks and then we'll be good to go. Okay, next question. Do you have one favorite food supplement?
29:08 Tim Ferriss? Or I think the question was, if you had to choose one favorite food supplement, what would it be? This is from Manuel, or Manuel in Vienna, Austria. And there are a few things I would say. The first is, I am leaning more so every day away from supplementation. And I think you should cycle off of any type of supplementation, because we are, we really, 50% of what we know is probably wrong. We just don't know which 50% it is. And the body is a very sensitive instrument, whether it be what people perceive as their body or their brain. By the way, they're the same thing. They're a very tightly integrated
29:49 Tim Ferriss? unit. And you have negative feedback loops. So for instance, if you're like, well, I would never inject testosterone, but I'm going to take all of these testosterone boosting powders. And you view that as having no cost or side effect. You're wrong, because there's something called the effect-side effect curve. Basically, if you have a high amplitude of effect, in other words, if you, if those powders produce a huge jump in testosterone, if you can't find the side effect, it just means that you don't know what the side effect is. And the most likely, this is the negative feedback loop, is that through your, for instance, your HPTA, the hypothalamus pituitary testosterone, or it might be testes axis, that
30:30 Tim Ferriss? Your brain will be able to identify that you have heightened levels of testosterone from exogenous, i.e. external sources, and it will shut down your internal production because the body does not like to waste resources. Okay? And similarly, if you're taking in a ton of, whatever, vitamin B12, or I don't care what it is, vitamin A, vitamin D, the fat soluble vitamins particularly problematic, or can be, it will fuck up your body, and your body will shut down endogenous production of certain things to try to compensate. And so for me, the short answer is, I try to minimize supplementation.
31:12 Tim Ferriss? But if I had to choose one supplement as general insurance, it would be the one that I recommended in The 4-Hour Body. I have no financial stake in it, and it would be Athletic Greens. It's expensive as hell, but ultimately, with this type of product, you know, I know the people who produce it, and it's exceptionally high quality. And you're basically getting whole food derived greens of many different types that I think cover a lot of your bases, but in general, always cycle off. Take a couple of weeks off every two months or so. Do not consume a ton of fat soluble vitamins. They will accrue in the body. That's why if you end up, well, in Greenland, for instance, instead of Iceland, and you
31:54 Tim Ferriss? kill a polar bear, and you're starving, and you eat the polar bear's liver, you can end up with all sorts of, I think it's hyperretinosis, that's not the right word, but overdose of vitamin A, and then you're in big, big trouble. Okay. I'm gonna answer a couple additional questions. Let's see here. Next question is from the Bic Boy in Australia, and this question is, "If tomorrow you woke up and found out you're stuck in the body of a 21-year-old female with no business connections blog and following on social media, and you only have $35 in your pocket," I'm kinda curious how that number was chosen, "but $35 in your pocket to start a business, how would you go about it?" Okay.
32:37 Tim Ferriss? Let me try to answer this. The first thing I would say is that if I were suddenly stuck in the body of a 21-year-old female, I think that would keep me preoccupied for a while. I wouldn't even get to the business part for quite some time. But that aside, this is a variant of a question that I get all the time. And very often, this will come from a place, and I'm not saying this to pick on the person who submitted this question, because I used to ask questions like this myself a long time ago. And it's typically coming from a place of, "I'm in a rush. I don't have a lot of time. I don't want to read a 300-page book. Just give me the Cliff Notes and I'll execute on the index card."
33:22 Tim Ferriss? 99 times out of 100, that never works. And you can see it in diet. I've talked about this in The 4-Hour Body with very high-net-worth, busy friends of mine who've asked for the index card for, say, decreasing abdominal fat. The answer I won't give you, however, is that there's no magic bullet. So people will often say, "There's no magic bullet, so you need to just hunker down and grind away at it." I disagree with that. So I would say there are magic bullets, and I'll give you a couple of tips. I mean, you've given me a good constraint, which is $35. So I would say there are magic bullets. In other words, there are tried-and-true formulas, formule, and recipes that work. They're
34:07 Tim Ferriss? repeatable. They're typically related to testing. But the bullet, or the bullets, these magic bullets do you no good if you don't research how to use the gun, rehearse or practice with dry firing, get the stance down, etc. So a lot of people, without any context, want me to say something like, "If you were starting again today with no resources and no money and had to make $100,000 in the next year, what would you do?" And they want me to give them a cookie-cutter answer like, "I believe that the next big trend is mobile plus Bitcoin payments. Therefore, I suggest that anyone in that position should start business Y."
34:51 Tim Ferriss? And I don't think that's the right way to tackle that question or problem. The answer that I would give you is choose your market first and then design your product around that or products around that. If you understand a market, in my case, let's just say, and this has generally been true, you know, 20 to 40 year old or 20 to 35 year old, right? I'm 37 now, so I'm trying to push it forward. But let's just say it's 20 to 35 year old tech savvy males in New York City and San Francisco. That's it. Okay, once you dig into the psychographics, the behaviors, the purchasing patterns of that demo, and it's particularly easy if you belong to that demo, by the way, so you
35:36 Tim Ferriss? can sort of skip a lot of hardship by doing that, then I know exactly the pains and the desires, the wants, the budgets of those people, and I can test different types of products or services at different price points. Okay? The, the wrong way to go about that, or I would say the high risk way to go about that, is to say, okay, here are these, these two or three converging trends that I know nothing about, I'm going to now, from a ground zero, try to develop expertise in mobile payments and Bitcoin and create a product to compete. You're going to get crushed. I mean, that's like, you know, deciding that golf is the next big thing, and so you want to be a professional golf player and walking out onto the green with Tiger Woods. You're going to get slaughtered.
36:20 Tim Ferriss? And I think that's what a lot of people do in the stock market, coincidentally, when you have, you're a guppy and you jump in with great white sharks who've been doing this for decades and just get your ass handed to you. So, $35, what would I do? Get the four hour work week, get a journal, like the five minute journal, and then last, I would buy a membership to a, a, the highest end nonprofit that is business focused. Okay, so in Silicon Valley, that might be, and again, I'm a bit out of the game, it's been a while, but this is how I built my network, from nothing. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, driving a used minivan with the seats that had been
37:01 Tim Ferriss? Stolen out of the back. It was really hilarious. I did it with a group called S-Face. I'm not sure if they exist anymore, S-V-A-S-E. You could look at TIE, the Indus Entrepreneur. You could look at, maybe there's a YPO, Young Presidents' Organization Chapter, or Entrepreneurs' Organization EO Chapter in your city where you could volunteer, and maybe there's a nominal fee you could pay to not be an official member who participates in, say, forums and whatnot, but someone who's simply pouring coffee. Those are the three things that I would do. Four Hour Work Week, which will cover a lot of the testing, and you could look at the pieces that Noah Kagan, K-A-G-A-N, has written on my blog,
37:45 Tim Ferriss? as well as, actually, my interview with Ramit Sethi, S-E-T-H-I. It's at least a one-part, might be a two-part interview. It's a two-part interview. So, Episodes 33 and 34 of this podcast, Ramit Sethi also goes really deep into this type of testing. That's it. Okay? So, Four Hour Work Week, volunteer membership of some type with a business organization where you have an excuse therefor, even as a peon or a gopher, which is exactly what I was when I started out, to interact with people way above your pay grade. And then a journal so that you can remain, or either remain focused or become focused on a daily basis, doing a planning in the morning, first thing. It takes a few minutes, and then
38:29 Tim Ferriss? a review right before bed. Okay. And I think that is probably enough for questions in this one episode, but I will certainly cover a lot more if you would like. And let me know what you think. Please tell me on Twitter what you think of this format, @Tferris, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. And I think that now that it is daylight here in Iceland, I'm going to go try to find some Icelandic horses to run around on, because they are really weird. They've got like five gears. They're very unusual speed where they basically maintain...
39:11 Tim Ferriss? ...their backs equidistant from the ground even at what appears to be a fast trot or a gallop. It's the weirdest looking thing. So I want to jump on one of these furry animals and race around for a little bit today, but we only have a few hours of daylight. So I'm going to get going. Happy holidays, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this. This was fun for me. I like doing this, so let me know what you think and I'll definitely collect new questions soon. So happy holidays to you and yours and thanks for listening. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs and Exoficio. 99designs is the world's largest online marketplace of graphic designers and I have
39:56 Tim Ferriss? used 99designs for years, including to get cover concepts for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. It was a huge hit. And here's how it works and you can check everything out, including some of my competitions. You can see these book covers and so on at 99designs.com/tim. Whether you need a logo, a car wrap, a web design, an app, a thumbnail, a t-shirt, whatever, you go to 99designs.com, you describe your project and then within a week or less, you have tons of designers around the world who compete for your business and submit different ideas and designs and drafts. You have an original design that you love or you pay nothing. It is fantastic. I have used it.
40:40 Tim Ferriss? I have mentioned it before, including in The 4-Hour Workweek as a resource. Check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And if you use that link, you'll be able to see what I've done on the platform. You will also get $99 as an upgrade for free, which will get you more designs, more submissions. So check it out. Exoficio, boy, where do I begin? I have a long history with Exoficio. Exoficio makes clothing and as far back as 2007, 2008, I had a hit video that went viral called "How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less" and I talked about Exoficio underwear. Exoficio underwear is lightweight, ultra lightweight, quick drying and antimicrobial.
41:21 Tim Ferriss? Is this important? Well, I've gone through 20-plus countries with two pairs of underwear before, both from Ex officio. And I'm not alone in this. This might sound crazy, but a lot of executives, for instance, will take this underwear, they'll wash it in the sink or somewhere else, roll it up in a towel like a burrito, step on it, and a few hours later, they are completely dry, completely clean. You don't have to just have two, and yes, they have to be comfortable for all day wear. But check out their clothing, as well as their underwear. You can go to exofficio.com/tim. That's X-E-X-O-F-F-I-C-I-O dot com forward slash tim. And you can see this video, which has a bunch of other packing tips. But this underwear, this clothing, is not just for the gents. Ladies, you have choices too.
42:04 Tim Ferriss? And they really have an incredible collection of high-quality products that I've used for almost 10 years now. So check them out, exofficio.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.
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