#401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing

Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing | Brought to you by ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/ and Ring https://shop.ring.com/pages/ring-tv-rvd2-chime-pro?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=tim. "My life is better when I'm spontaneous after I've done my most important thing. Being spontaneous before that, that's where it becomes a distraction and does me harm." — Gary Keller Gary Keller (@garykeller https://www.facebook.com/garykeller/) is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Keller Williams (KW) https://kw.com/, the world's largest real estate franchise by agent count. In 2019, KW, which also ranks number one in units and sales volume in the US, was named by Fast Company as the "most innovative company" in real estate. In 2015, Gary began driving KW's evolution into a technology company, now focused on building the real estate platform that agents, buyers, and sellers prefer. He is competing with multi-billion-dollar, venture-backed companies using his own money. Gary is the bestselling author of The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results https://www.amazon.com/ONE-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-Results/dp/1885167776/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=The+ONE+Thing:+The+Surprisingly+Simple+Truth+Behind+Extraordinary+Results+by+Gary+Keller+and+Jay+Papasan&qid=1576141634&sr=8-2&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=9c9ca818791172205f2cf668b416ceac&language=en_US, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Real-Estate-Agent-About/dp/0071444041/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=f386a3de4e5318f7b135e33adde8fce6&language=en_US, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Real-Estate-Investor/dp/0071446370/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=9eae18a7c5345fe7a5162289a9a85210&language=en_US, and SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times https://www.amazon.com/Shift-Estate-Agents-Tackle-Tough/dp/0071605266/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=a0506277548bd10c1894b59bda1d9154&language=en_US. You can find Gary's podcast, Think Like a CEO https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1469980054, on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1469980054, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/6MKnmWJ1dEGqosVVASDBOR, or wherever you typically get your podcasts. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/. Do you sell stuff online? Then you know what a pain the shipping process is. ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/ was created to make your life easier — whether you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or over 100 other popular selling channels. ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard, it works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Tim Ferriss Show listeners get to try ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/ free for 60 days by using promo code TIM. There’s no risk and you can start your free trial without even entering your credit card info. Just visit ShipStation.com https://www.shipstation.com/, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in TIM! This episode is also brought to you by Ring https://shop.ring.com/pages/ring-tv-rvd2-chime-pro?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=tim. You might already know about its smart video doorbells and cameras that protect millions of people everywhere. Ring helps you stay connected to your home from anywhere in the world. So if there’s a package delivery or a surprise visitor, you’ll get an alert and be able to see, hear, and speak to whoever is at your door—all from your phone. Ring’s core mission is to make neighborhoods safer. I’ve used Ring https://shop.ring.com/pages/ring-tv-rvd2-chime-pro?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=tim for years now. It catches and records all the regular stuff like deliveries and so on, but it’s also saved my ass a few times, catching weirdos and weird things. Ring is key to my peace of mind, and as a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can get a special rate for your own Ring Welcome Kit — which includes a video doorbell and a Chime Pro — by going to Ring.com/Tim https://shop.ring.com/pages/ring-tv-rvd2-chime-pro?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=tim. (U. S. Only). *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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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 shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. If you've ever sold anything online, or if you sell anything online, then you know what a pain in the ass the shipping process is. It's time consuming, it's expensive, you're always copying and pasting orders from different sites, trying to figure out the best carrier, so on and so forth. It's such a hassle. And in a previous life, I shipped tens of thousands of units overseas, domestically, overnight, ground, every possible carrier. It drove me bonkers. ShipStation was created to make your life easier. I wish I had had it when I was in the biz, so to speak. It has the most five-star reviews of any shipping software.

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  4.9 out of 5 for Magento users, 4.8 out of 5 for Shopify users, 4.5 out of 5 for Big Commerce users. It goes on and on. Whether you're selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or more than 100 other popular selling channels, ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard. ShipStation works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and the major local couriers like USPS. ShipStation will recommend the best carrier for your needs, so that you know that you're always getting the best deal. They even offer discounts on shipping costs that are available to, say, you as a one-person

• 1:46Tim Ferriss?

  shop, that would normally be thought of as reserved for large Fortune 500 companies. So there are a lot of benefits. No other shipping platform makes shipping faster, easier, and more affordable. And right now, Tim Ferriss Show listeners get to try ShipStation free for 60 days when you use promo code TIM. It's risk-free, you can start your free trial without even entering your credit card info. Just visit shipstation.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in TIM. That's shipstation.com, enter promo code TIM. Check it out, shipstation.com, promo code TIM.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Ring. This season can be a whirlwind of deliveries, visitors, and holiday travel. So it's the best time of the year to upgrade your doorbell and keep an eye on home. No matter where the holidays take you, I'm traveling a ton, and this is key for me. Ring helps you stay connected to your home from anywhere. So if there's a package delivery or a surprise visitor, you'll get an alert and be able to see, hear, and speak to them all from your phone. If you're on the go this season, whether it's across town or across the country, you can check in anytime for some much-needed holiday peace of mind. I've personally used Ring for years now. It catches and records all the regular stuff, like deliveries and so on, but it's also saved my ass a few times catching weirdos and weird things. Ring is key to my peace of mind.

• 3:10Tim Ferriss?

  And as a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, that's you, you have a special holiday offer on a Ring Welcome Kit available right now with the Ring Video Doorbell 2 and Chime Pro. The Ring Welcome Kit has everything you need to keep an eye on home no matter what this holiday season brings. With Ring, you're always home. Just go to ring.com/tim. That's ring.com/tim. Check it out. Additional terms may apply, and this offer is for U.S. residents only. That is ring.com/tim.

• 3:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, monks and monkfish. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is your host, I don't think I've ever said that before, Tim Ferriss, and it is my job every episode to attempt, do my best, to deconstruct world-class performers from different fields of all different types, to find out what their routines are, what their self-talk is like, what types of tools they use, and so on and so forth. My guest today is Gary Keller. This is a name that's come up a lot in the last few years. In my friend circles and particularly since moving to Austin. Gary is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Keller Williams, also known as KW,

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  the world's largest real estate franchise by agent count. In 2019, KW, which also ranks number one in units and sales volume in the US, was named by Fast Company the most innovative company in real estate. In 2015, Keller began driving KW's evolution into a technology company, now focused on building the real estate platform that agents, buyers and sellers prefer. He is competing, you may note, head to head with multi-billion dollar venture-backed companies. The difference among many, so I should say one of many differences, is that he's using his own money, which I just love. Keller is also the bestselling author of "The One Thing", subtitle "The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results". We talk about this quite a bit in our conversation.

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  The millionaire real estate agent, the millionaire real estate investor and shift. You can find him on Facebook @GaryKeller. And you can also find his new podcast, which is called "Think Like a CEO", on all of your podcast platforms. "Think Like a CEO", which he hosts with Jay Papazan, is described thusly on Apple Podcasts. "Think Like a CEO weaves a narrative of the business and life lessons, including developing business strategies, hiring the right people, developing a culture that truly puts people first." You can find it, as I mentioned, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you typically find your podcasts.

• 5:52Tim Ferriss?

  Now, without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Gary Keller. Gary, welcome to the show.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Thank you, Tim. Happy to be here.

• 6:04Tim Ferriss?

  I have heard your name dozens, hundreds maybe, of times since moving to Austin and certainly heard the name many times before that. And that relates to much of your work in the written word, and I think we'll get to that. But I wanted to start with something I came across in doing research for this conversation. And feel free to fact-check, because you don't want to believe everything you read on the internet, of course. But...

• 6:37Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about your childhood a little bit and maybe your later childhood. It seems like it was the summer before your junior year that your dad had you shadow appointments with a banker, an attorney, and a realtor.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  And a lawyer.

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  And a lawyer.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, lawyer. No, you said it right. Accountant and a lawyer and a banker and a realtor.

• 6:58Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  There were four of them.

• 7:00Tim Ferriss?

  And so I'd like to talk about that. If you took anything in particular away from that and also a quote from your dad, which was, or in effect, what he passed on to you. He said that anyone he knew who had any money either made it in real estate or put it in real estate. So could you talk about that period of time and what impact that had on you?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I thought, actually, in high school, I thought I was going to be a rock musician. And I gave no thought to college whatsoever. And the summer after I graduated from high school, I came home one night after our band had performed and my mother and dad, who were both educators, were waiting up for me. A little spooky, right, to turn the lights on and there were my parents in the dark, sitting there in the den. But I just plopped down on the couch, Tim, and I said, you know, I don't think it's going to work out. I'm not that good and I'm not motivated to practice enough to overcome that I'm not any good. And my parents just looked at me. I think they knew that, by the way.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  And both being educators, my dad said, well, we actually applied to a college and you were accepted if you'd like to go. And I said, really? Where? And they said, Baylor University. I went, cool. I'd been there once because I had an older sister who had just started going there. So that was kind of it. That's how I got to college. And at the end of my sophomore year, beginning of my junior year, that summer, my dad, he said, you probably should get a major. And I went, okay, I hadn't given any of the thought. And I love to tell the story to the kids when I teach because I said, maybe you can relate to the fact that I was clueless about everything.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  And so Dad said, well, why don't I set you up to spend some time with some guys? So it was an accountant, a banker, a lawyer, and a Realtor. And I liked the Realtor, Tim, and I liked it. I liked it because it was entrepreneurial, it was very people oriented, he didn't have a tie on, he wasn't in a stuffy corporate feeling environment, right? All those sound reasons why you should choose a profession, right? But anyway, that appealed to me. Got back to college thinking, you know, real estate, what that guy did was something that was very appealing to me. And Baylor University had just announced they were launching, that semester of my junior year, first semester, a real estate degree program.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  And it was in real estate and insurance. So that's kind of, so I signed up. And the rest is kind of history. So I got my degree in real estate and came out, interviewed a couple of places, and landed in Austin.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about, and this is maybe one of those places, New York life for a second. Because I would assume, and again, this is a dangerous business, assuming things, but that you are spectacularly good at selling, or at least persuading, conveying ideas. And my understanding is that you're put through some type of assessment. Could you, yeah, what happened?

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was in college. And my senior year, my degree plan was in the marketing department, and it was real estate and insurance. So, you know, the college, they don't teach you much of anything about leaving the college other than teaching you how to interview. So one of the guys that came on campus was with New York Life. And I didn't realize, I later discovered that that guy, I thought I was interviewing with New York Life, the corporation, but I actually was interviewing with the top New York Life salesperson in the area. And so I went to interview and... They gave me a behavioral profile assessment.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  And I got a what felt like a form letter a couple of weeks later that said I didn't match the profile of their successful salespeople. And so I would not be made an offer to join them. And the funny thing is, I was so mad about that, that I chose real estate. I was furious. I mean, you know, I have a degree, right? I have a degree in real estate insurance. I go to interview for my job and they tell me I'm not, I don't have the job match requirements. It's almost like, right, you got a degree in law or whatever, and then when you got out, the law firms all told you, you're really not a good match to be a lawyer. It was kind of a, it was kind of a, you know, freaked me out a little bit, right?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  But I tended to respond pretty strong to that kind of stuff. So I got really mad and I just interviewed real estate companies.

• 11:52Tim Ferriss?

  And when did you strike out on your own? How did that, how was that catalyzed?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Well, that was in 83. So when I got out, when I got out of college and interviewed, I interviewed two firms. I chose the one in Austin, Texas. And had been here, I think, maybe once or twice before with my family. But I drove here and interviewed with the firm, liked them, agreed to go to work there. And start, literally, you know, launched, launched my, my career, if you will, through, I guess that would be after the end of the, yeah, the end of the summer, yeah. So did that. And by that, I sold, I sold six houses my first 30 days in a city that I'd only been in a couple of times before. Because I'm, I kind of believe in business by the book a little bit.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  You know, my, my, one of the things that, and I don't know where this came from, Tim, but I had a, well, I had a professor make a profound statement once, and he said, Mr. Keller, he says, people have lived before you. You, you might want to study what they know before you go out and start doing your thing. And that, that, that makes a lot of sense to me, right? So I studied how, while I was still in college, I was reading the books and studying how to be a successful Realtor. So when I hit the ground in a, in a city that I knew, you know, maybe two people in, I just did everything by the book. Sold six houses, closed five of them, got my picture in the paper, woo-hoo.

• 13:21Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by the book, in that case?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Meaning, meaning that.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  That I went to, I went to the books. I went to the books of the best real estate trainers at that time.

• 13:35Tim Ferriss?

  I see. By the book, meaning following the playbook of the people at the time who were well respected.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's exactly what I did. So I outlined all of that, created a plan for myself, and then just executed on the plan. And things went well. The funny thing is, is at the end of my, I guess it was the end of the 11th month of my first full year, calendar year, my manager came in and said, "You're gonna be the Rookie of the Year. You know, you're 22 years old." Yeah, I'm not 23. "This is amazing. It's awesome." And I went, "No, I'm out of here." And she goes, "What do you mean?" And I'm saying, "Well, I hit on my goals. I made the amount of money that I wanted to make, bought a condo, got

• 14:21Speaker 00

  a dog, got a new car, got some Surwin Vega tower speakers that were like four feet tall." And, you know, and so I'm done. I'm gonna go take a month off. So I left. Anyway, came back, and I discovered that I was really kind of a closet trainer, meaning that I was over there helping people. And I've been in the business a year, year and a half, I'm helping people. And I think I just came by that naturally, Tim. So, long story short, I ended up applying for a management position in the largest firm in the city at the time. And the owner said, "I am not gonna hire you."

• 14:56Tim Ferriss?

  Why not?

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Well, once again, I'm getting rejected, right? He said, "No one liked me." And, you know, the truth is, is that's probably correct. But, but here's what I said doing. And I remember it as clear as day. I said, "I understand that, but I come into the office and the receptionist is doing her nails, and I have, I have clients coming in. And silly me, I thought the environment was supposed to, you know, support my goals. So I ask her to put it away, and she gets mad at me. And then I go around the corner, and they're agents, and they've got all their smelly food out, and it's a mess, and it's right by the reception area. And I ask them to clean it up, or, you know, put it away or something, because, silly me, I thought

• 15:40Speaker 00

  the environment was supposed to support me. And they don't like me doing that. But I said, "If you hire me, they'll like me, and we'll all make more money." And he said, "I'm not hiring you." And I don't know where this came from, you know, but somewhere deep inside that was offensive to me. And so I said, well, give me a test. If I pass it, you have to hire me. And I don't think anyone ever talked to this multimillionaire businessman. So he actually got a sheet of paper out. He wrote down the things that I need to accomplish, handed it to me and said, go do it. And I had no training in what he'd asked me to do and I had no support, right? I wasn't getting paid for it.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  I was just entrepreneurially going to go out and achieve this list to get a job. Well, I think he blew me off and forgot about it. I don't know.

• 16:30Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the things on the list?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Well, it was things like, go recruit people to the firm, right? But here I am, a salesperson with no training in that, right? And then the other one was teach and we'll see what your ratings will be like. It was just a series of hurdles that I was told to go do. And I did. My first recruit was actually out of a bookstore. I was in the Beadleton bookstore and I saw a woman looking at the real estate section and I went over and said, can I help you? And she goes, no. And I was taken back, right? I said, I'm so sorry. And I walked away. And a little while later, she came over to me and she said, hey, you know, I want to apologize. I thought you were trying to pick me up or something.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  And I said, well, because I'm a smart aleck, Tim, I said, well, the thought crossed my mind, but I said, no, I said, I actually have a degree in real estate. I sell real estate and I love learning and I've literally read or browsed almost every book on these shelves regarding real estate. So I thought I could just help you. And she said, well, I'm thinking about getting into real estate. And so that was one of the things on my list I had to go accomplish, right? So check that off the box. And it's really cool when we later started our firm, she was one of the first 20 agents to come join us. But so that was it. So that what essentially...

• 17:55Speaker 00

  I then did that for about a year and a half to two years. Well, it was easily two years now that I think about it. And they, they, the company did something that I didn't like and I went in to resign. Because the owner had promised me, when he hired me, he sent me to the goat pastures outside of Austin, they call it Round Rock now, but it was goat pasture. And he didn't give me where all the growth was going, because he'd already hired a manager for that, he said. Well, turns out that he hired three managers and none of them could ever launch that office. And he just had to eat the lease for three years before he could get out of it. Me, on the other hand, went up to Round Rock, Georgetown and built a business that's still

• 18:39Speaker 00

  there today, hugely successful. But he didn't, he then did something that created a problem in my office. So I went in, I went in one morning at like 6:30 and said, I quit. I said, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna build it back after you tore it down and I'm out of here. Now the tables reversed though, Tim, and this owner says, well, what would it take to keep you? And I just thought that was, wow, full circle, if you will, right? No one likes you and I'm not hiring you to, what will it take to keep you? So I wrote a number on a sheet of paper and it, it was the largest sum that he'd ever guaranteed anybody. And he, he agreed. He said, okay.

• 19:19Tim Ferriss?

  How did you come up with the number? Did you already have it in your mind before you walked into the office?

• 19:24Speaker 00

  No, I went to quit. I'd gone to quit. I was, I didn't know, and this is all back to what was the starting of Keller Williams. I had no plans, Tim, I just, you know, I'm not gonna be talked to that way, I'm not gonna be treated this way. I'm not gonna build something and then you, because you're the, you're the boss, that you can just tear it down and do that. And so I was, I was leaving. No, I just wrote a big, I just wrote a big six-figure number that I knew he wouldn't pay, or I thought he wouldn't pay. And, and then of course he paid, right? So I, I went out and, and launched that business for him.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say, and if you can't, I understand, but can you say what he did that was so disruptive or damaging to your office?

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's real simple. And this is all leading up to your question of, so how do we start Keller Williams?

• 20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm in no rush.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what happened was... He had a policy and guideline manual and the policy and guideline manual for all of his offices in three cities had a clause in it that said that if the company changes the policy, you have forty-eight hours to give notice that you don't agree with the policy, otherwise you're now under the policy. And so on Christmas Eve, he went to all his offices and changed a policy about how people got paid. Oh, that is a terrible, terrible move. It was, it was, and in fact, the policy had to do with what happens when people leave, which I thought was really interesting.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Anyway, so I had built this highly successful business with literally no new people. These were all really seasoned vets, great people, and they weren't going to take this. So they left and literally it destroyed, what he did destroyed the office. And so I went to him and said, okay, I quit. I'll go back and put it back the way it was, but when I get it there, I'm out of here. And that's when he said, well, what'll it take to keep you? And I wrote a number down and he said, okay, I'm gonna put you in charge of VP in charge of expanding the company and your first job is to go back and rebuild that business. So I went back and rebuilt it.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  And then I got sent to another location in Austin, down south. And about, I would say maybe a month and a half into that, at most, he called me up out of the blue and wanted to know what I'd done for him. Now, understand that my office was in an office building in South Austin and I was in the broom closet. And I know it was the broom closet because there were brooms in it. And it did have a window, however, and they gave me a folding table for my desk, a folding table for, as a credenza, if you will. And then they gave me two folding chairs and a flip chart and a phone.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  And said, "Go, go, go build another company." Well, I did. And had I stayed, this was in 1983, had I stayed, he owed me a huge bonus. But it was never about the money. So I, you know, in the end, and so I just quit, you know? And I didn't know what I was gonna do. That's the thing. I really didn't know. I just, I just knew that I wasn't gonna work for someone who talked to people that way. And the other thing that was going on in his firm, well, there were, there were men and women who'd been with him a long, long time. And he had promised them, um, you know, compensation in the form of stock or profits interest. And what was happening was now he was taking all that back.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  He was undoing all of that and trying to pull everything back into himself. And I saw the writing on the wall, because I'm looking up going, "Well, what's my future with a guy like that?" And I, you know, in other words, I too could work for 20 years for a guy like that and then have him pull the rug out and not have anything. That's the way I, I internalized that. So I quit. And, um, my wife at the time, I had, I'd been married now for approximately a year and a half, and my wife, uh, became his assistant. And she was already in the firm. And, uh, she'd actually, um, uh, had been an administrative assistant in the firm. And so she, he recruited her to come work directly for him.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  So I, the company, so I, so I, he called me and treated me that way. I went in, I went in the next day and quit. And this time I didn't name a price. I just said, "I'm done." And I gave him all the names of all the people I had recruited and all the info I had on them. And it was a, it was a, I think approximately, it was 14 people. And they were all terrific, terrific, real estate, um, agent prospects. And, um, I just gave him the list. If I, if I'd have just, um, stayed a little longer, he'd owed me a huge bonus check. But I, but I, I didn't care about it. And I, I walked out. And there was a gentleman that was in the commercial area of that company called Joe Williams. And I approached Joe and I said, "Why don't we form two companies?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  I'll form a residential, you form commercial. We'll each own, you know, 50% of each. And we'll go build this." And the commercial company never took off, but, but the residential side, uh, took off immediately and, um, never lost money. We had borrowed $44,000 to launch the business.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  We paid that back in a little over a year. And to this day, we have no operational debt on the company. I've never borrowed or money and I've never taken any outside money to build Keller Williams. We all did it by internal cash flow.

• 24:58Tim Ferriss?

  And aside from having the cash flow to do that, since a lot of people in many industries will leverage and borrow, what were the main reasons, if there were others, aside from just having plentiful cash flow, for not taking on debt to try to grow faster?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Man, that's a wonderful question. You know, I'll cheat and I'll give you a quote from Robert Kiyosaki, which is, "Assets feed me, liabilities eat me." And that mantra kind of plays in my head a little bit, that if you have to borrow money, it means you can't afford what you're fixing to buy. Even though that's, by the way, that's not true, right? It's not true. I definitely have, I use debt to buy real estate when it makes sense. I use debt when it makes sense to buy a business. So, I'm not the no debt guy, but I do come from a position of, I want to be, I want to be smart with money such that money doesn't leave me.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  And that's a way to do that. So, other than that, the reality is, is that it didn't take a lot of money to build a real estate business because real estate's one of the few careers where you can come in as a job and then as you generate more income, you just get rid of, you start shedding the jobs. And it naturally leads to a business with employed people. I don't know if that makes sense, but you can literally leverage your way, all the way from being a salesperson to owning a business. I contrast that to like the people that do the maintenance in this building. There's no natural path from being, you know, being the maintenance crew on a building to owning the building. It's not, it's not a natural path.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  It doesn't lead to that. But in real estate, it actually does. You can literally, you do all the jobs from day one and as you lever up and bring in other people. So, you ultimately get rid of all the jobs. So, maybe that helps explain why I actually didn't need the capital. I didn't need it because I was, I was organically growing and generating more cash flow.

• 27:12Tim Ferriss?

  And my understanding is that, and you can correct me if I'm off on the timeline for this, but two or so years later, KW, right, Keller Williams is the largest office in Austin.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yep, that's right.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  And as you mentioned, you don't necessarily need a lot of cash to get started or to enter the game of real estate. So it's a very competitive, it's a very competitive industry.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yes, it is.

• 27:41Tim Ferriss?

  To what do you attribute your ability to not only become the largest office, and obviously that's expanded to nationwide and so on.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  And worldwide.

• 27:52Tim Ferriss?

  And worldwide. But in that first two years, let's just say, to what do you attribute your ability to stand out and grow so effectively?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Well, I understood value. So what I understood was, is that the real estate agent has the relationship with the client, and the real estate brokerage company has a relationship with the agent. And I understood exactly what the value proposition needed to be to attract and retain really terrific people. So I understood that. And the way I like to say it is Keller Williams was my third business, if you think about it, because I'd already launched two businesses for my former boss.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  So you'd been learning on someone else's dime, so to speak.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. Best way to learn, right? So I was intimate, I had intimate knowledge with the financials and what it cost, and I understood how much revenue I had to generate in order to cross the hurdle into positive cash flow. And so I just knew it. So I set the business up that way. I kind of play a game that I call red light, green light. And meaning that if I'm doing well, then green light, keep, keep, keep going that direction. If something happens, the, I, I don't keep hitting the green light, right? If something happens that should cause me to pause in any way, particularly from a financial

• 29:20Speaker 00

  standpoint, then I'm going to hit red light fast and I'm going to back up and ask the question, um, what do I need to do? What did I do wrong? Whatever, what happened? So the, the, the, the building of a real estate company, you can generate all the cash flow you need to do that. Even in these times right now of, you know, I, I have competitors who have raised over a billion dollars and are just spending the money like crazy in the real estate space. But what I understand is it doesn't take all that money to do that. It takes smart money more than it takes a lot of money.

• 29:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. There's no, uh, certainly no lack of examples of companies that have pissed away hundreds of millions of dollars or more. I, I, I'd love to hear an example, if you could give one of a time when you saw the red light or hit the red light and then how you did a post-game analysis.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Well, um, probably the, the biggest red light that I had to hit early on was the commercial side red light. And it, cause it never made a profit and we would literally just take the money that I was earning from the company I started and hand it to the other company that was being run by my partner. And he's a good guy, he's a great guy, Joe Williams, just the salt of the earth, uh, just a, just a wonderful human being. But it was losing money and I hit the red light immediately and said, I'm not going to give you any more money. And, uh, his response was, well, how am I going to pay the bills? And my response was, exactly, exactly. Right? How are, how are you going to pay your bills?

• 31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  And, and then he voluntarily shut the company down within a few months.

• 31:04Tim Ferriss?

  How did that, how did that conversation, if you don't mind me, I apologize for the interruptions, but I'm very interested. How, how did that? How is that dissolution or separation handled? This is a very common situation among co-founders. It happens all the time. Were there any particular things that you feel that you guys did right or that you did right in handling that? Were there things that you would have done differently in retrospect?

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Actually, between he and I, no. It was a natural thing. We didn't have an agreement that said that we had to take one pot of money and give it to the other pot. And it was amicable. I mean, I would say that I don't think that Joe and I ever had a cross word. I think that it's a testimony to him. He's just a stand-up guy. But, on the other hand, I'm not going to keep putting good money into a bad situation that you can see doesn't have a plan that it can execute successfully on. So it was really that simple. They were separate businesses, and I wasn't obligated to give them money, so I just stopped. I hit the red light and I just stopped.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And so, I would say, if you want to ask the question of, "What have you learned over time?", not, "What did you learn from that?", was that your agreements between you and your partners, I call them disagreements. Because the only time you're going to read it is when you disagree.

• 32:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So true, yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that really informs the way you look at a document when you call it a disagreement. Because it should be there to deal with it when you disagree. Otherwise, if you agree, you never read the document. You never go back to it.

• 32:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's genius. That's a great way to reframe it.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  Well, and the biggest issue, I find the biggest issues are, who has control? Who's the decision-maker? Can that decision-maker be relieved from that if you have to? How are you going to handle cash flow? If there's profit, are you going to distribute it monthly, quarterly, annually, never? What are you going to do? And then the other one is the dissolution. And that is, what happens if this isn't working out? And one of you needs to buy the other one out? One of the things that happened to me was, so we ended up forming this firm. And in eighty, in February of eighty-four, and I'd now been married, uh, less than three years, uh, the company was just a little over one-year-old.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  And, uh, my, my wife of, of that, at that time, said she didn't love me and she'd never loved me. And, uh, we, we headed to divorce. And they, they started out at a million-dollar valuation on a one-year-old company. That if you took me out of it, would be worthless. Uh, and I, I didn't, I ended up negotiating my divorce with my former boss. So, if, if you want to read between the lines and think about that, you're welcome to do so. Uh, right? I turned to my attorney and said, "Why am I taking the deposition of that guy?" And my attorney just looked at me and says, "Well, time will reveal all." And, and it did, by the way. But, the, the agreement to break up, right?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  If someone passes away, or if someone wants to sell, um, to me, that becomes one of the biggest clauses in those agreements. And, and candidly, you'd be really, really, you know, smart at, at this, because this is where people go, "Oh, we're good, we get along, we're good friends," or whatever, "We're gonna found a company together." And they look up later and they realize that they don't have a disagreement. They basically have an agreement.

• 34:52Tim Ferriss?

  This is so important.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, they don't have it. They have no means of reconciliation. They have no means of parting without bankrupting the other business. So what happened to me was, uh, when it got to the divorce, uh, I had a buy-sell agreement, by the way. And it would have meant that I would have, I, I could have gone into my, uh, bank account and written a check for what I owed, under the, under the buy-sell agreement.

• 35:18Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define for people who don't know what that means, a buy-sell agreement?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm, sure. This simply means that, uh, if I'm one of the partners and I want out, uh, what, what happens? Right? Does, does a document address that at all? Can I sell the stock to anybody? Uh, does, does the company have to buy it? Uh, if the company has to buy it, or wants to buy it, what are the terms of that? Or are there no terms, and it's just strictly a cash deal? What happened, does that make sense?

• 35:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Okay, that's, that's basically a buy sell. Uh, it's a, it's a pre-arranged way that, that things are gonna go if you decide to part company for any reason, or you need to part company for any reason. Well, I had one, Tim, but the, the judge in the case says, well, okay, I see you have a buy sell agreement.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Who represented you, Mr. Keller? And I said, my attorney's standing here. He said, who represented her? And I said, my attorney's standing here. And they threw it out.

• 36:21Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Because we had used the same attorney, good attorney, and he hadn't cheated anybody. It was a, it was a fair buy sell agreement, but, um, they, they threw it out.

• 36:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is, I wanna underscore a couple of really, really important things that you're saying. So number one is whether it's, uh, I mean, particularly, I would say in, in personal relationships like a marriage, how critical it is to have separate counsel, right? For, for, for a million and one reasons. And then also, uh, the, a pattern that's come up in a lot of these interviews, which is from the outside looking in, many, uh, many interviewees who are viewed as risk takers are actually experts in capping the downside.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:09Tim Ferriss?

  And are very good at thinking through the worst case scenarios and, uh, setting plans, if then plans, for, for the divorce proceedings or the escape plan, so to speak.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  If those worst come, those worst case scenarios come to pass.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  The, the very first thing I look at in every contract that gets sent to me, especially if, um, uh, there's some type of personal guarantee or I'm involved, I'm involved personally, is the termination clause, not because I want to weasel out of something, not because I want to plan for failure, it's for all the reasons that you just mentioned. If, if you don't have a plan for the disagreement, which it's, it's such a smart reframe, uh, you're dead in the water because the

• 37:58Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 37:59Tim Ferriss?

  When you're going to need that document is when you do not see eye to eye or have a problem.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  So let me tell you a funny story, or I don't know how funny it is, but um so I after that divorce, um you know, I met the love of my life, Mary, and we've been married for thirty-two years and um her father, when he was alive, um her mother had passed away from cancer uh many, many years ago, and and her father was was now getting remarried. And I now, having lived this, Tim, I turned to my father-in-law and said, I'm getting you a lawyer, and your fiancee needs to get a lawyer, and they need to be separate, and there needs to be uh essentially a um a prenuptial contract, which is very closely

• 38:47Speaker 00

  related to the buy-sell, you know, um you know, right, basically, it's a dissolution disillusionment agreement, right? So they did, they each got separate attorneys, and they did this prenuptial. Well, fast forward to um the last year of my father-in-law's life, where he was beginning to get dementia, and uh he then passes away, and within a few days after him passing away, um uh we get a we get a a an envelope that in it is a handwritten, I give all my money to my wife, right? I give all of my my liquid assets to my wife, and it has his signature. Now, at the time, we didn't know that he actually had been diagnosed with dementia,

• 39:32Speaker 00

  we we were unaware of that, um and he had actually said, just a month or so before he died, he said, watch her, she's going to try to take everything. And and it happened, and um she and the weird thing is, is that she um for that little sheet of paper, she took a a gentleman who was suffering from dementia, and she took it to her lawyer, the same one that had drawn up her side of the prenuptial. And of course, we hired a good law firm and that took about five minutes to the law firm had to recuse themselves. And then to to basically explain that that we would drag this out forever because the man had dementia and it was documented.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  We went back and checked and it was documented. But the spouse had never told the kids any of that. So my my little lesson turned around and paid huge dividends for my my father in law and his estate because they could not pierce it.

• 40:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, that's that's a great example. And it's very really important. Very close friend of mine, one of his uncles has dementia, very well documented. And he's suing other members of the family and there are all sorts of headache and heartache as you as you might imagine.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:55Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very

• 40:57Speaker 00

  It's horrible.

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's really important for yourself and and we're going to come back to to your story in a second. But broadly speaking, to determine who will make decisions, who can make decisions for someone else if they are incapacitated or dead

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Or diagnosed with something like dementia.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:21Tim Ferriss?

  And I recently helped a friend who did not have any of this in place to figure out a way. Thankfully, her her parent is lucid, not does not have dementia. They just don't didn't have the cash to set this up beforehand. But to talk to talk about things like power of attorney documents, when things are reasonably stable so that people can make decisions for someone else when the time comes and lawyers say or hospitals say, show us the documents. You want to have those beforehand. So I'd like to come back to

• 42:03Speaker 00

  So one one statement about that.

• 42:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Just one, one of the lessons that I've learned, Tim, is that money won't change you, but it will reveal you. And when people have an opportunity to have a financial windfall, their character is getting ready to be revealed.

• 42:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, completely consistent with my observations as well.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  And having a document, whether it be with helping loved ones protect themselves or in business, it actually is, it's really important. People have asked me over the years about Keller Williamson and what's important about it. And I always give the same answer, and that is our most important asset is our franchise document, which is a massive disagreement.

• 42:53Tim Ferriss?

  So let's actually, I'm gonna veto my earlier pivot and talk about that for a second because I want to spend a good amount of time talking about focus because you are famous for your ability to focus. But before we get to that, you're talking about this franchise document, and I know very little about real estate, but a friend of mine, when I was doing prep for this, said that you redefine franchising through regional ownerships. And then he went on to say how the company's made more money year on year since they started in 85. I think at one point it was like 40% per year for a decade or something. I mean, really incredible growth.

• 43:37Tim Ferriss?

  But could you talk about, so you have the franchise document. You also innovated in terms of model, as I understand it. What does redefine franchising through regional ownerships mean? If that's accurate, yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you actually asked a couple of questions.

• 43:56Tim Ferriss?

  I did, it's my tendency.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  No, no, no, I just wanted, so let's talk about that regional. So when we, as a company, were ready to go out of state, if you will. We began to study how others had done it. And we discovered that in the real estate industry and other industries as well, that at the time, they did what's called master franchises. So franchising, remember, is just another vehicle, a financial vehicle, right? If you don't have the money, franchise and ask other people to come in and front the cost that it would have been had you employed them. So that's one of the ways you keep from having to borrow money, understand is, is you could

• 44:42Speaker 00

  use franchising and essentially use other people's money. I had actually expanded into four cities and all of them did great as long as I showed up. And then, and then when I didn't show up, they all started failing. So I took a year off in eighty-nine. And one of the things, and began to document the business. And because the, there's an incredible story about the McDonald's brothers and behind the golden arches that really just changed my world. And one of them was around franchising and the other one was about building a successful model. And the franchising part was that we looked into it and we discovered that the way that

• 45:26Speaker 00

  franchising had been done was flawed. And that was called the master franchise approach. So Dairy Queen was a perfect example. So Dairy Queen at one time was like, you know, the kick butt, take name, fast food place in America. And what they had done is they had sold the rights for the franchises, what you would call the regional franchises, to then be the franchisor of the franchisees. So the parent company wasn't, all it was franchising was, you know, these regional

• 46:03Speaker 00

  businesses to then go and they would sell franchises and they would support the franchises.

• 46:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, just to restate, so I understand, so you might have, like arbitrarily, let's just say you cut the country into four quadrants, you have four regional people, those are your only kind of direct reports who pay you, and then they have a down line of sorts where they then go out, but you're only interacting with those, you only have agreements with those four regional franchisees who then become franchisors, meaning they're granting these licenses to other people?

• 46:34Speaker 00

  That's right, and it's called sub-franchising. And, and I, so I read the Dairy Queen story because when McDonald's came out with their playground, that was actually an amazing value hack, right? I mean, they, they, they, they realized that if they could get the kids wanting to come to McDonald's, the parents, you know, would take them, right? And there's a playground. So there was a famous meeting where the, these master franchisors, if you will, the sub franchisor, met, and I don't know how many there were in it, but they met and they decided that they didn't want to do the playgrounds.

• 47:14Tim Ferriss?

  This is for Dairy, for Dairy Queen or for McDonald's?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Uh huh. For Dairy Queen. So McDonald's was doing it and, and, and really, you know, making inroads fast. And so Dairy Queen calls a meeting and says, hey, we need to, our franchisees need to be putting in playgrounds. And the sub franchisors, the regional people, said, no, not gonna do it. And by the way, that was the beginning of Dairy Queen sliding into a, a, a much smaller company than they could have been. And they never, they never really recovered from that. So I read that and I, my, my, um, my plan then was, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna repeat that.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  So we did, we did what's called a regional representative agreement. So the financial opportunity is the same. So we have 31 regions in the US and Canada, and those are owned by individuals and, but they're not sub franchisors. They are simply representatives. So they have the, the same job description of a sub franchise. They have the same financial opportunity of a sub franchise. They don't have the authority.

• 48:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I would imagine the franchise document that you have prevents the type of logjam if you were to say, we want to install playgrounds at the, in your offices, metaphorically speaking, in those 31, the home office has the ability to insist, let's, let's say, on certain types of things that they wouldn't run into the same type of Dairy Queen problem.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  We, we, we have, that's, that's, that's right. Without having to go into the weeds on documents, you, you said that very well. The, the document lays out the rights of the franchisor. And the reason is because... If there is, if a right isn't acknowledged in that document, the judge will automatically give it to the franchisee.

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  If it's, if it's an unstated right, uh, then the, the courts will, will take it away. So you.

• 49:20Tim Ferriss?

  If it's not, if it's not explicitly assigned to you, KW, the franchisor, it will be, uh, in a, in a vacuum of mention in the document, automatically assigned to the franchisee.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Every time, every time. So when people read a franchise document, if they don't say, heck no, I'm not signing this, it's an intelligence test. They, that should be your first reaction. What I explain to them is that this is a disagreement and that the, the odds are pretty strong that anything we don't address here as my rights become your rights by default. So this is gonna, this is gonna read like the most one-sided agreement you, you've ever seen. But I just want you to realize that anything that isn't covered in this document automatically goes to you and you are the decider. So, so that was, that's that, that was the, the,

• 50:16Speaker 00

  the, the regional side of that story. The, the other side of the McDonald's behind the golden arches that just really profoundly impacted me was the story of the french fries. Do, do you know that story?

• 50:27Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if I know the story. I watched, I watched the movie with, uh, Birdman, I'm blanking on the, uh, on, on the actor's name, Beetlejuice, somebody will, uh, Michael Keaton. But, uh, I, I haven't, I don't have any background beyond that.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  So this is a great story. And it, it hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it. And I'm just gonna paraphrase and tell it to you as if it's a bedtime story, but.

• 50:53Tim Ferriss?

  Please do.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this guy, Ray Kroc, this is, this is Keller all the way, right? So Ray Kroc, um, he hears about these McDonald's brothers and, uh, they, people line up, uh, you know, around the block, uh, to, to get their food. Uh, and he's a salesman. And so he wants to go down and meet with them and understand their secrets. So he can go back and take it to his, to his customers. So then they could order more Dixie cups and whatever he was selling them. He got down there and was enamored with them and, and asked, could he franchise?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  And it was a tough, it was a tough negotiation. They ultimately allowed him. He goes back to Illinois. He builds out the stuff that he needs to build out in order to be able to, you know, deliver stores that sell food exactly like the McDonald's brothers. And the challenge was the french fries didn't taste right. So he calls the McDonald's brothers and, uh, uh, and, and says, you know, tell me what we did wrong or whatever. And nobody could figure it out. So, um, what McDonald's did, and I love this phrase, they suspended their need to understand.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  And they, and they went, and they went all the way back to where they bought the potato. And they documented, they tracked and documented all the steps from the, from the field to the table. And, and they discovered, yeah, and they discovered one, they discovered something. And that is the McDonald brothers had not invented a way to cook a french fry. They had stumbled on a way to cure a potato. What was happening, the step that the McDonald's brothers never told Ray Kroc was that when they got the potatoes, uh, they put them in, uh, open air burlap sacks and, and the climate where the McDonald's, uh, operated, when you put potatoes in an open air burlap sack in that temperature, the potato cures.

• 52:52Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  And then, oh, by the way, you can cook it any way you want and it tastes great. And so that, so by the way, so just end of the story. So Ray Kroc went back to, to Illinois. He duplicated the curing process and the rest is history.

• 53:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. So this then brings us back to the year off in 89. I have a bunch of questions about that. So 89, uh, paint a picture for how the business is doing because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking to themselves, man, I'd love to take a year off. My business is hectic. How in the hell did Gary take a year off in 89? How, how did you?

• 53:34Tim Ferriss?

  Decide to do that? Was there a straw that broke the camel's back? And then practically speaking, yeah, how to do it?

• 53:40Speaker 00

  So let's keep me on track here, but I want to go, I want to go back. And I want to, I want to build to that, to the moment of 89. So you'll understand what happened. So in, so we launch in, in 80, in the last quarter of 83. I end up in February of 84, becoming, you know, going through a divorce. And now I am in debt because I, I, I had to, I didn't have the cash. I had to sign a note and then I had to take an insurance policy in case I died. My, my former spouse got paid. And then within a year, Joe Williams came in and said, he has to sell his shares. And the residential company, we'd already shut the other one down, commercial down.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  But he needed to sell his shares because he bought a lot of real estate. The markets, this is now 87, right? This is 88, the markets are, are crashing. And he doesn't want to go bankrupt and he didn't, to his credit, he did not. He's just a stand up guy, but he came to me and said, hey, I need to sell the shares. So all of a sudden, I didn't have the cash. So I had to sign a note to the banks, take out another insurance policy. So essentially, whether I live or die, everyone's going to get their money. Does that make sense?

• 54:53Tim Ferriss?

  It makes sense.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the way I kind of describe it, particularly when I'm talking to kids is that. It was like I'd been going through life, hopping, you know, seven feet. And fell in a 10 foot hole. And the, this is, this, that, that right there has become the central theme of my life. Since that happened, because I'd been going through life and competing as a business person in a sort of organic, progressive way. In other words, it's the next thing I should do. So I do there, I go there, but I wasn't on an exponential path. In other words, I wasn't running my business out of a business plan that would deliver exponential

• 55:38Speaker 00

  growth. I was living off of an organic plan. And I looked down and I realized, oh my gosh, it's gonna take me 10 years under this current, you know, earnings path I'm on, maybe sooner, but not much, before I'm debt-free. And that depressed the heck out of me. And so I got really creative. Then, then one last thing happened. Then one of my competitors with a RE/MAX office set up shop down the street, and they were a lot less expensive than what we did. And I had five of my top 10 producers leave the firm. And, and I had, I had grown to over 70 associates. The, the economy going down took me to 38 associates. We were still

• 56:23Speaker 00

  profitable, nicely profitable. And then I lost five of the top, of the top 10. And so now I'm at 33 associates. And then they came back and they got my bookkeeper, my receptionist, and my relocation coordinator.

• 56:35Tim Ferriss?

  Man, that sounds like a really hard 12 to 18 about the period.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so absolutely. So what, so now, I just wanna set the stage for 89. So now what's happened is, I'm in debt at my eyeballs. The market is crashing, right? And my competitors are taking my people. So I'm literally sitting at the desk with no one, no one to run the business other than me. And I'm in desperate need of a plan that would actually help me hop higher. And so I created that plan. And one year later, we were the largest real estate company in Austin. And one, the next year, we sold more real estate than anyone. And the next year after that, I paid everybody off in cash. And I was, I was, I was, I was

• 57:22Speaker 00

  31 years old. I was, towards the end of 31, by the way. I paid everyone off in cash. I was debt-free. And I was the number one real estate company in my city.

• 57:35Tim Ferriss?

  So that plan was the plan that you drafted during your year off? Is that right?

• 57:40Speaker 00

  No, no, that's, no, it's a separate issue.

• 57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's a separate issue, okay.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  It's a separate issue. So the, so the, the plan is what ultimately created a model that I could go teach other people. And I could franchise that model. So let's, so then, let's go to. Eighty, eighty-eight, eighty-seven, eighty-eight. So I go around the state of Texas and I'm showing how I'm doing business and people are buying, at that time, license agreements because I wasn't franchising at the time. So they bought license agreements and the agreement said if I ever franchise, you have to become a franchisee or have the right to buy your business.

• 58:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is, Nick, could you clarify what the difference is? Licensing, they're paying a percentage just to use your name?

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 58:21Tim Ferriss?

  And that's it?

• 58:22Speaker 00

  And you're licensing to use your name in systems, but you don't really have any control or influence.

• 58:27Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  With the license versus franchising. So I was using a simple license agreement. Well, I was literally traveling four days a week, right? If it was Monday, I'm in San Antonio. If I'm in Houston, it's Tuesday. I mean, I was living my life that way and all the businesses that we launched were successful and profitable. And me, I'm thinking I'm a genius, so I come home and then they all fail. And so what I did was, I did two things. Number one is, I hired an individual and that individual, this is now, now we're getting to eighty-nine, okay? So I then, I then take that year off, if you will. I'm

• 59:10Speaker 00

  not franchising, I'm not licensing, I'm not doing anything. I hired a manager to run my Austin operation. So I have the freedom and I hired a gentleman and gave him a video recorder, an audio recorder, notebook and pen and a camera. And I said, I want you to follow me around and I'm going to go launch another office and I want you to document every little thing that I do.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  That is brilliant.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  No, that's the french fry story.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  That was, yeah. So I read the french fry story about that time. And then I said, okay, so the number one thing I'm going to do is I'm not going to do that. The second thing I'm going to do is, so I'm going to create an operating set of manuals that absolutely show how to launch it, how to run it, right? And the second thing I did was, I discovered a list of the top ten franchise attorneys in the country and I started interviewing. And I ended up hiring this amazing individual out of Dallas and she was the one, it was her who said, you do not want to master a franchise. You want to use a regional representative approach.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Now, just to clarify, at the time, were you interviewing them to potentially be your attorney? Or are you interviewing them and paying them for their time as part of your research?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  I actually hired them to help me build a franchise document, the lawyer. And then she came back and said, "You don't want to do what the others do." So, the way we built our document was we went and got our hands on our competitors' documents, and we got our hands on McDonald's document. And then we took them by sections. So, we created, I think it was like 19 manuals. And each manual had how each of these franchisors dealt with issue number one. The next manual was how they dealt with issue number two. The third manual was how they all dealt.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  So, I now can pick up manual one, and I can see how all these franchisors have dealt with that issue in their document. And with Joyce's guidance, we went through and made decisions, chapter by chapter, if you will, on how we wanted to build our franchise, if that makes sense.

• 1:01:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this makes sense.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we came out, so by the way, so at the end of 89, by the way, I did spend all my money. I just want to be clear that hiring that attorney said that she gave me a bid to build that document. At $100,000, she quit billing me.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  That's how expensive the document was. It was, it is a serious document. And, yeah, absolutely. So, then I take this document and I take now-

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, pause for one second. So, you're saying $100,000, how much money do you think that document has saved you? Excluding the headache and heartache and-

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  I will assure you, it is the most valuable asset of the company. Hands down, it's the most valuable asset. There's no, there's not even a close second. It is the, it is the key asset. So, I went back, so now I take all, I take these manuals and I take the- Franchise document, I go back to Houston. I meet this lovely individual who sadly just passed away last year. But this is 1989. And so I go back, sign her up. I give her a two-week training program and then I leave. And I hold my breath and go, "Come on, sevens." Right? I mean, it's, it's, I'm holding my breath because I'm not coming back. Right?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  I can't scale this thing if I have to go do it. I can only scale it if others can follow the model. And she did real well. And that is a hugely successful business today. In fact, it's funny that her, she had told her son that, that, that I had basically saved her life. And when my, when my son was real little, Mary, my wife, and, and our, our son were in a grocery store here in Austin. And this franchisee happened to be here visiting her sister. And they ran into her at a grocery store. And my wife tells me that she got down on her knees to stare at my little boy and proceed to tell him,

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  though he couldn't comprehend a word she was saying, how, what I did had, had changed her life. So anyway, so that's the story of 89. The story of 89 was, I took a year off and I reinvented how I did business. And I basically created the platform, if you want to call it that, for building a nationwide real estate franchise.

• 1:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  What a story.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for telling that. I, I want to talk about the flip chart that you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, when you were in the, in the broom closet. So you, KW is very heavily investing in technology. It's, it's in many respects, becoming a technology company. Yet, my understanding is you still use a paper month at a glance calendar and a pencil. What, what is the story behind that?

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  You know, the, I believe that, and I didn't always believe this, right? It's, it's, you learn as, as you go. And if you learn, you grow, right? And I, I'm...

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  I'm having trouble visualizing my life. And I get this month at a glance. And instantaneously, I can see where all my energy this month is going. I can see how I'm investing my life. And so, I begin this practice back in my twenties of using this month at a glance. And I can see everything at one time. Right? And I use an eraser because if you erase, you must replace. So, I go through the month and I kind of mark, you know, what I think I should be doing on these days in order to hit my personal and professional and financial goals.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  And I'm happy to erase if I need to, but by doing it this way, if it was important to do it, I can't, it can't disappear. I have to move it someplace else in my calendar. So, it's really a simple, this simple idea that I don't, I don't, I really struggle with the idea of doing planning off of a technology-based day timer. For that reason only. I'll tell you a funny story. There's a guy by the name of Larry Bragg, and he was the, a lead singer for Tower Power.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  And I didn't know him personally, but I was coming back from Vegas on a trip, and I'd gotten to the Southwest Airlines, you know, gate early. And there was only one guy in front of me. And I recognized him as the lead singer of Tower Power. And then I looked down and he had a briefcase, and it had a tag that said Tower Power on it. Right? And I went, "Okay, I'm pretty sure this is Larry, right?" So, I say, "Excuse me, you know, I just introduced myself." And we had a great talk, because I'd just seen them perform a year earlier in Austin. And so, we had a great conversation. Somehow, we turned to, Kenny Loggins was coming to Austin to a concert, and in a venue

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  that we love and support. And...

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  And Larry, and somehow I came out, and Larry Eustace had sung with Kenny Loggins, and loved him, and he said, "Man, I'd like to catch that show. My family's still there." And I said, "Well, I can, I can, I can get you in." He said, "Well, what date is that?" And I knew the date off the top of my head, and I said it, and then he pulls out his electronic calendar and starts going through it. And I went, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it. You, you've gone to the dark side?" And he's laughing, he's going, "What do you mean?" I said, "Okay, let's have, let's have a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. You put your phone back down, and I'll lay my calendar

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  out here. And when, when I say go, and I'll go, one, two, three, go. When I say go, we both reach for our guns and see who's the first one who can shoot." He just looked at me, and I said, "Let's do it. Let's see what happens." So, he says, "Okay." So I go, "One, two, three, go." I just pick up my calendar, pull it open and go, "There it is." And he's still trying to get into his phone, right? And then I said, "And oh, by the way, I can tell you what I'm doing tomorrow at 3 o'clock, and tell you what I'm doing, um, two weeks from now. I can tell you what I did, everything I did last week." And I'm just, I'm just peppering him with my vision for my life.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  And he's still fumbling, trying to get to the, to, to see if he could even go to the concert, which he did, by the way, and it was awesome. And he and Kenny hung out afterwards.

• 1:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  Where does your, uh, month at a glance calendar live? Is it something that's...

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  It's right in front of me.

• 1:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  Is it in your, on your wall in your office? Is it's...

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  No, no, I carry, no, I carry it with me.

• 1:08:44Tim Ferriss?

  You carry it with you?

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  I carry it with me at all times, everywhere. It never leaves my side, actually. It's in my backpack.

• 1:08:49Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  But I create a day, I create a kind of a daily worksheet. So as the day is going on, I don't actually need my calendar per se, right? Because I'm working off of that. But the second that I need to do planning, I gotta get back to a month, I have to see the month. And I can flip easily and look at the other months, right? And for me, when I'm planning out time off and vacations and other things, it really helps for me to see the spacing of my life, to see the things that I'm doing that give me energy, to see the things that take energy away from me, so that I can always, I can always be fine tuning, uh, my life, uh, quick, quickly, at a glance.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  So anyway, it's just a, it's a really good, it's a good way to do it. It does fly in the face of, um, you know, the way that other people look at time and, and using electronics or digital time management systems. But I, I just can't get rid of it because it makes me, it makes me so aware of my life.

• 1:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I think that's, I think that's really important to underscore, right? It's not just about the, the efficiency and speed. It's about the awareness that it cultivates.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  Well, it's actually all, that's, the speed was just a funny joke that happened. But the, it really is more about my ability to see everything at a glance. And it's easy for me then to see how many times, uh, in, you know, in the last 30 days or looking forward to the next 30 days, I have planned, uh, right to, to, back in the day to go to lunch with my son, right? I can, I can actually see it. I can add it up and show you quickly at a glance. I can say, well, we did that three times last month. Uh, this month looks like we have it planned for five, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So give, for me personally, it gives me great vision, if you will. Uh, and so I can, I can manage my energy and I can always make sure that I have enough

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  time set aside for the things that really matter. And I can see that better at a glance when I'm looking at a bigger picture. And that's the only, that's the value. That's the only value.

• 1:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's talk a little bit about spacing. Two things you mentioned, spacing and energy. Uh, I, I don't know if you still think about, uh, treating your time like going to the movies. Uh, this is something I came across, which I thought was, uh, very helpful as a, as a comparison. Could you, could you speak to what you mean by that?

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Oh, well, that one is about time blocking. So the, yeah. So the, it.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  I'll just speak for myself.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  It is very hard to have a perfect day every day. And as the research will tell you that willpower is on will call, right? It's not, you don't have a steady stream of willpower. When you wake up in the morning, and it doesn't matter what time. And if you got up at six, if you got up at noon. When you wake up, these are your power hours. And I used to tell people, look, the goal is to have a great day by noon. In other words, get everything that matters, that is important to you, get it done. Don't put it off, get it done. And then let the events of the morning drive your afternoon.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  And so time blocking is just this idea of you pre-planning your time. Because if you needed to exercise, and that's what you want to do, you're going to have to find the time to do it, and then you're going to have to block that out. The movie analogy was this idea that you don't really need to time block more than two or three hours a day around your core activity for your business, whatever that is. You're not equally effective all day long. So what you want to do is you want to find, you want to make sure that the world doesn't

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  infringe on the time that you know you need to give for whatever it is, is the key that makes your professional life run. And so I just time block. And I encourage it. Go ahead.

• 1:13:11Tim Ferriss?

  No, I was just going to say, and those two to three hours are like a film, right? I mean, if that is, if you go to see a movie, you're there exclusively to see a movie. So you turn off your cellphone, you get snacks in case you're hungry. You might make a pit stop in the bathroom beforehand. You do all of that so it can be, you can have an uninterrupted two to three hours.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  That's it. You said it perfectly. That's exactly what it is.

• 1:13:36Tim Ferriss?

  And it's kind of wild to think how much, if I look back at periods when I've been able to time block that way successfully, consistently, and by consistently, I mean even for two weeks.

• 1:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  How much can get done if you set aside the equivalent of one movie to single task on one important thing? It's really remarkable. And I think that's a perhaps a good segue to the focusing question. And this is in your book, The One Thing, which has come up over and over and over again with interviewees on this podcast, particularly those who are in the sort of growth phase and citing it as extremely important in the first. It's always important, I mean, this question, but the particularly important in the kind

• 1:14:38Tim Ferriss?

  of make or break at years in the first handful of years for entrepreneurs that I've interviewed on this podcast. Could you tell us about the focusing question, but perhaps how you got to the focusing question?

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  You know, so if we just talk for a second about the focusing question, right? Which is, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else is either easier or unnecessary? It's an understanding that you can't do two important things at the same time. You could definitely multitask, but the second that something really matters to you a lot, you don't multitask. You hone in on that and you do that thing. So the idea of the focusing question is, are you present in the moment? Now, you don't do this every day, minute by minute, where you say, well, what's the most important thing I can do right now? What's the one thing I can do right now?

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  What's the one thing I can do right now? But it is kind of a way of life, meaning that if you make your moments matter, right? Matter as in you're appropriate in the right moment, everything falls into place for you. So the whole idea behind the focusing question was to keep when it matters, when it's important to you. Making sure that that you're doing the priority right now that will lever your life, grow your life, expand your life. Right? And and it's the it's the idea that if you, you know, if two people are standing in the same spot and one has a clear focus and understands the thing they need to be doing right now

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  in order to get where they want to go, their their next step is an appropriate step. For the individual who doesn't know what they should do, they're they're most likely going to take the wrong step and then another wrong step and another wrong step. And over time, they're they're worlds apart. So that everything that we talk about, from calendars to setting goals to creating plans, all of that is is to is so that you get one thing. And that is, in the moment, right now, you're doing the thing that matters most, such that by doing it, what you're fixing to do next will either be easier or could turn out to be unnecessary.

• 1:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  And so I want to I want to comment on a few things here. First is, for people who are maybe in the in Portugal listening to this, fixing to do something is getting ready to do it. And the the second is, how powerful this question is and how important the phrasing is. What's the one thing I could do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary? Because and I'd I'd love to just hear you kind of riff on this, but a lot of people listening to this, and I'll plead guilty myself also, very often end up with a to-do list, which is this spontaneously generated

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Non-hierarchical brain splatter of tasks. And you may then just proceed in a given day, if you don't give any thought to it, to start knocking those off in order, top to bottom, even though they're not ordered in terms of importance. And such that it makes everything else easier or unnecessary is the key, right? Because you're finding that lead domino that kind of knocks everything else over. And I'd love to hear maybe some of the results or effects that you've seen in your life

• 1:18:32Tim Ferriss?

  as a result of using this, or for your company for that matter. How do you suggest people use this? Do they think about it for the week and then set something to remind them on a daily basis? Do you do it the night before and then write it down? What's the protocol for actually implementing this?

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Well, remember, and we said it in the title of the book, and that is the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results. So this is, in my mind, the concept of the one thing is like adult Plato. This is a nuclear idea. It is an extraordinary idea in order to get extraordinary results. If you're inappropriate in the moment, the next moment, you have not set up to succeed. So you're behind, right? And so we have to be appropriate in our moments.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  And I think I understand, I have always understood that naturally, to be honest. But I think at some point, and I couldn't pinpoint it, I grabbed it as an idea and began to aim my life around that. And so, simple ways to think about it is, I come home, I pull in the garage, what's the one thing I could do with my wife when I walk in the door such that by doing it, everything else for the rest of the night will be easier or unnecessary? And the answer is, go find her and kiss her.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  That's the answer, and it's actually that simple. On a weekend, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary? So the one thing is, is I wake up in the morning and make a quick list of things I need to do around the house. And I do that because I know that my wife

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  is going to make a list for me.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  And so the one thing I can do such that by doing it, my weekend is, is better, is to make that list and go knock it out. That's the right thing, right? The, uh, my dog, what's the one thing I can do with my dog in the morning such that by doing it, everything else is easier or unnecessary? By the way, the answer with our dog, Millie, is always the same. Get on the floor and hug her, right? That's what she wants. And as long as I do that, life is great. If I don't do that, well, everything else is, is irrelevant to the dog. She wants, she just wants me to love her. So I'm, I'm just giving you a variety of different ways, right? What's the one thing I could do with my diet such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or necessary? What's the one thing I can do?

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  That affects my cholesterol, affects my heart, affects everything about me, right? And for me, is the one thing is eat vegetarian.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  So that becomes the one thing for me. So I'm just giving you a variety of different, of different ways of thinking about this.

• 1:21:26Tim Ferriss?

  And just to comment on the last one too. As, uh, you know, eat vegetarian and part of that, I would imagine, is setting up your environments that you require less willpower, right? So you just get rid of anything that is not compliant with that, that is in your house. Whether you decide on vegetarian or something else. That makes everything else easier or unnecessary, like self-control in looking at a box of whatever it is you're not supposed to eat that's staring you in the face when you open your refrigerator.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  So in business, it would go like, a good example of using this would be, in my business, who's the one person I could hire? Such that by hiring them, hiring other people would be unnecessary or easier.

• 1:22:08Tim Ferriss?

  How have you, how might you have answered that for yourself in the past?

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Well, in 1994, I answered it by firing myself and hiring a CEO. So I'm asking the question, what's the one thing I could do right now such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary in growing the company? And the answer was fire myself and hire somebody better suited right now at that moment in history to do that. And then I asked the question, okay, so I understand hiring now is my one thing. Then the question becomes, who's the one person I can hire, such as by hiring them, everything else becomes easier and necessary? So then I go on a hunt for that person who, when I hire them, I believe they can fulfill what I just said. It becomes the one hire, if that makes sense.

• 1:22:55Tim Ferriss?

  It does.

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  And, and one, go ahead.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Same with technology, right? In, in moving the, in moving the organization from being a company that buys technology to a company that builds its technology, which is the distinction between being a tech company and not, right? You can't be a, we're a tech company, we buy all our tech. You're not a tech company. Tech company builds tech, right? So then the question becomes, what's the one tech product you can build such that by building it, everything else is easier or necessary? And we played the game.

• 1:23:28Tim Ferriss?

  Is, so there's a, there's a line in The One Thing that, that I really like, and I'd love to hear how you think about it, or how you suggest people, how you could elaborate on it perhaps. "A clear path to a lesser goal is the problem." Is, is one of the lines that I have jotted down here. And, I mean, the way that I sort of interpret that is,

• 1:23:58Tim Ferriss?

  at least for myself personally, is that it's, it's not the sort of terrible ideas. It's not the... Awful propositions and opportunities that are the problem past a certain point, and it comes pretty early for a lot of folks and a lot of people listening. It's these sort of kind of cool, easy to commit to opportunities that are actually more threats and temptations than opportunities. They're the biggest threat to the one thing that you might decide if you ask that question that we've been talking about. Is that the right way to think about a clear path to a lesser goal being the problem?

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  I think so. I think that the, one of the things that I, I think it surprises people when they find out that I'm not focused all day long. That, in other words, my goal is to have a really great day by noon. And then if I, if I want to be distracted, or can be distracted, that's fine, it doesn't really matter. I've already done everything that mattered. I've done the thing that mattered the most, which is gonna drive, right? Which is really, really is that, it's kind of the cousin of the 80/20 rule, right?

• 1:25:10Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  So, that's all it is. And the, and the way Jay and I described it in, in our book, we're just saying that, that the one thing is the 80/20 principle on steroids, right? It's on, it's, it's on, it's a nuclear way of looking at prioritizing. And just distilling it in. And, and the other side of that is, is that it all comes down to the fact that you have to live in the moment. So, the question is, are you living appropriately or not? And then the other issue is, do you always have to do that? Do you always have to fight off distraction? And my response to that is, heck no. What, what you need to do is protect yourself.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  So, you know, you need, I put forth this idea that the morning is the best time for you to deal with your energy. So, I just recommend that people get up and have pretty much a set routine when they get up in the morning, to ensure that they get the key things in their personal life nailed. That you then go to work and you, you just do that work. What is the thing that's most important today? And do that. And in the afternoon, if you still want to pursue lesser goals or other things, who cares? It's not going to impact your success. So you don't have to be this hundred percent always on focus.

• 1:26:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a huge relief in respect, right? It's not like you have to maximize every minute of every day from Monday to Friday.

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  That'd be horrible, wouldn't it?

• 1:26:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it would be.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  It would be horrible. I mean, that would be, I don't even know how anybody would do that. I mean, it would be a horrible life. So the point is, is that we don't want to be, this is just me talking for me. But my life is better when I'm spontaneous after I've done my most important thing. That, that being spontaneous before that, that's where it becomes a distraction and does me harm. So I'm free to pursue all kinds of trivial pursuits after I've done what matters most. Because it just doesn't matter, right? If you like it and you want to do it, do it. It's not going to harm you because tomorrow morning you're going to wake back up and you're going to be focused again

• 1:27:25Speaker 00

  from the time you get up until about noon or whatever it is, whatever, whatever time you get up, that six hours, that, that five and a half hours, wherever that is. That's, that's your power time. That's where, that's where you take over the world. Be great for that length of time and you're good to go.

• 1:27:42Tim Ferriss?

  One of the most popular highlights, this is from Goodreads, from the one thing, is, quote, "Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls, family, health, friends, integrity, are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered."

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:28:03Tim Ferriss?

  And that alludes to the fact that there are categories of activities or, or different, I wouldn't say silos because they, they certainly interact so much, but areas in your life where you can ask the focusing question, how do you think about ordering them if there is an order?

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  That's a great question. Um, I kinda order it this way. Uh, I lump in there spiritual, physical, right, mental. I lump those into this category and my personal relationships. And I lump all of that into one category and my goal in the morning is to make sure that that works. In other words, that I get those things done. That's what matters most to me. Because if, you know, if you don't take care of your health, that's like a glass ball that shatters. It's hard to recover from that. Ignore your family too long and

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  you'll lose your family. So, right. And so I kinda see spiritual, mental, physical, and key relationships as the most important things that matter to me in the morning. So that I, you know, I live by kind of a mantra that says, "I don't want to die of regret", right. I wanna say on my deathbed, if I'm even coherent, that I'm glad I did, not I wish I had. Right. Right. Does that make sense? Makes perfect sense. So by the way, I played that game with my mom. She was a pistol after dad died. And I kinda became the man in her life. And she was a pistol. She was difficult at times.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  Mom, if you're hearing this, you were difficult. And, but I loved her dearly. But she was difficult. And so I had to play the game. I had to say, "What's the one thing I can do with my mom such that by doing it, everything else is your necessary?" Because my mom would, would, I don't wanna go into the details of all that, but she, you know, she could go off on tangents. And do things and say things that could be hurtful and harmful. So I asked that question and the one thing was play dominoes with my mother. So for the rest of her life, with few exception, I was, I would go, I would go to lunch or early dinner one day a week and I would play dominoes with my mom.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  And you'd be surprised because what I, number one, she loved it. Number two, it kept her preoccupied. She had to stay focused on trying to beat me instead of talking, instead of, instead of verbally beating me up. Right? Yeah. And then, and then, and then after I did that, that went so well, I said, okay, now what's the one thing I could do? Right? What's the next domino? And mother loved basketball. So I bought her the NBA channel every year and made sure that she had the printed laminated copy of the, of the game schedule. You know, with her, right there by her easy chair. And, and then we made basketball the thing that we talked about because if we didn't talk about basketball, Tim,

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  we were talking about my sisters or my spouse, her sisters in a negative derogatory, gossipy way. Just very destructive. And I just, I just kept away from that with mom because I just played the game. What's the one thing I can do? What's the thing, what's the one activity? It's dominoes. What's the one thing we could talk about? Basketball. Right? So that's kind of, that's, and to me, that's the, the, the, that's just a, another way of thinking about the one thing. I think that.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I'm embarrassed to admit I've, it's so sensible and I've never applied this question exactly as you're describing it to individual people. It makes perfect sense and relationships with those people, but I've never applied it. That's.

• 1:32:06Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's really, that'll be really powerful for a lot of people listening. Certainly, I'm gonna do it probably today or tomorrow, sit down with the journal.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  Yep, so the thing is like, after I exercise, I ask the question, what's the one thing I could eat or drink such that by doing it, right, everything else is easier unnecessary? And I play that game.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  When do you exercise? What, what time of day? How many times of week?

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  So I, so I exercise five days a week. I exercise in the morning. So I get up and by 6:30 at the latest, my goal is to be in the gym. And so I do, I do my cardio, right? In my 20 to 30 minutes in my target heart rate zone. But I, but I do, you know, four minutes on and one minute slow, four minutes on, one minute slow. Right? And I do that because the, if, if you, if you exercise at a steady pace, instead of doing the high intensity interval training, HIIT, right? H I I T. That the, the, the arteries, if you go at the same speed, you're, you're training your artery to be more, more brittle and rigid.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  But if you train your artery through high intensity interval training with cardio and weights, you're, you're going fast, then slow, fast and slow. And your, and your artery is contracting, expanding, contracting, expanding. So when I, when I get up, I go right in there and I do my 20 to 30 minutes in my target heart rate zone. And then I move to weights. And so we have a very specific schedule. Clarence Bass is, is kind of like my, my physical hero. Do you know Clarence?

• 1:33:46Tim Ferriss?

  I, you know, I know Clarence, not personally, but only because I saw his black and white photographs in old.

• 1:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  You know, muscle and fitness magazines and so on.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I would always think to myself, how on earth? Because he had this shiny bald, bulbous head, kind of like I now have. And I would think to myself, how on earth is that old guy so ripped? I mean, just incredibly defined. So that's, that's all I know of Clarence Bass.

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's his one thing, by the way. Right? He was, he was a health and fitness, he still is health and fitness journalist. But he used his body as proof that what he was writing and talking about actually worked. But I only use it as an example that I believe that we have the opportunity in life to choose our prophets. And most people-

• 1:34:34Tim Ferriss?

  Prophets with a P H.

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And most people tend to think of that as religion only. But you could have a prophet, or you can call that a mentor or role model. I just call it a prophet, right? But you can have, you can, everyone should have the individual that is kind of their guru for those things, right? Who's your health guru? Who do you listen to? Who's lived before you? Right? And Jack LaLanne, just as an example, Jack LaLanne and Clarence Bass are two perfect examples. Gentlemen that started bodybuilding or taking care, just taking care of their body at a very young age, when the thinking was one way. And as the thinking has changed over time, both of those men changed the way they thought, right?

• 1:35:18Tim Ferriss?

  And Jack LaLanne was incredibly prescient. I mean, he was so ahead of the curve on many things that then became mainstream and scientifically supported. It's, it's wild. Also quite a character, right? He where he would wear that kind of crazy onesie jumpsuit. And he would say, sure, you don't have to exercise, but on the days you don't exercise, you're not allowed to eat. I mean, very uncompromising, which I appreciate.

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  He was awesome. Yeah, so he, so, so then let's ask that question. So who's the one person that you could follow for your health, such that by doing that, following anyone else would be easier or unnecessary?

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

• 1:35:56Speaker 00

  So if you don't ask the focusing question around the people in your life, you'll end up following too many people. So again, how many, how many prophets do you need around health? Right? If you, if you just followed Jack LaLanne, right? Whose goal was to live to a hundred, what a loser, he died at 96, right? But Clarence Bass has the same goal. So if you, if you, if you wanted to live to a hundred, just let's just pick that as a target. I want to live to at least a hundred. Then what's the one thing you could do that would make that easier or everything else easier or not necessary? In my mind, it would be go follow, go find the person that exemplifies

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  that better than anyone else and make that one person your true north. What's fun, you can, you can even go, you could then go dive into the Jack LaLanne approach, or the Clarence Bass approach, or whoever is your prophet for health. And you would, you could then distill down what they do right into one thing, believe it or not.

• 1:36:57Tim Ferriss?

  And you could also, this is something that I do in a few areas, just ask yourself, for instance, my friend Matt Mullenweg is one of the calmest people under fire I've ever witnessed in any capacity of any age. He's a young guy, but incredibly calm when making high stakes decisions or facing tough circumstances. And I tend not to be that. I mean, I think I'm reasonably calm, but I also, as my mom would say, patience has never been your strong suit. And so I will ask, when I feel myself getting spun up sometimes, upset against, upset about something that I know in many cases is trivial, I'll just

• 1:37:42Tim Ferriss?

  ask myself, what would Matt do?

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:37:45Tim Ferriss?

  And you can do that for Jack LaLanne or whoever you choose. And it's, if you have seven people as your true north, you don't have a true north, right?

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:37:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's scattered. And it's, you really need, at least I do, that specific person, that image. And guess what? If it doesn't cover 100% of all decisions, who cares? As long as you have one who helps you to navigate the majority of decisions, you're far better off.

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  Yes, that's it. I couldn't have said it better. That is exactly right. And people tend to not understand that that actually is, is life affirming, it's life expanding. It's, it's, it's really the, if you want to live the biggest life possible. Then ask big questions of yourself, right? And go, and go find individuals who in fact have, have, they're doing that thing that matters to you. Not that, not that I know what Jacqueline's morals were or anything like that. I don't need to know because I'm not saying he's my prophet in morals. I'm simply saying he's my prophet around health.

• 1:38:45Tim Ferriss?

  And we've been discussing up to this point primarily how to say yes to the right things. And it's, it's not necessarily a long list, but how to hone in and say yes to the right things. Do you say no categorically to anything across the board? Are there any decisions that you've made along the lines of I'm not going to do X? And I'll give you a personal example, just because I find it incredible how stressed removing these things, these types of categorical decisions have been for me.

• 1:39:26Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I used to stress about, this is probably 2008, 2009, speaking engagements. I didn't particularly enjoy speaking engagements generally, sometimes I did. And I found myself traveling all over the place. It was similar to your travel schedule, right? The four days a week, like one day in Houston, one day in San Antonio, et cetera. And furthermore, because I didn't have any strict policies, because I never expected to be invited to speak before the first book, I found myself and my assistants constantly negotiating one-off deals. And then one of my friends said to me, who is, who does next to no public appearances. He said, yeah, I have a simple rule.

• 1:40:07Tim Ferriss?

  I either do, do full retail, I never negotiate, they pay my list price, or it's a, a no-go, or I do unpaid for groups and causes I care about. He said, I do nothing in between. I never negotiate. And if, and he said, if someone pays me an absurdly high rate, that becomes my new high-water mark. Right? Like that becomes the new result price. And I remember coming away from the call thinking, that is so simple and so profound. And I implemented that and it just removed this gigantic energy suck for me. And so I've started to make more rules like that, right? And I'm curious if you have anything you categorically just decline.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  Pretty much everything.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  No, I know, I know it sounds a little weird to say that, but if the people around me would probably confirm that.

• 1:41:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  That essentially, uh, anything that's a distraction or anything that interferes with, with what I, what I deem is, is, uh, my path or my relationships or whatever, I just say no. I mean, I literally, I'm, I'm, am a definite no person. Right? Uh, time is a big issue for me and we have a limited amount of it. And so saying no to talking to people is, right? I have this saying in my head that says that people that work with me are more important than people that don't. And so I, the fact that you and I are talking right now, my team will tell you that you must really love Tim.

• 1:41:50Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I appreciate you making the time.

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  Because I would, I say no to everyone. This is, this is the only one I've done. And I just say no to everybody, categorically no. And the reason is because when I woke up this morning, uh, talking to that individual was not on my game plan. So at the end of the day, if talking to that person, if I have a spare moment and it's a kindness I can do, love to do that, love to do that. But given my life and how big it is, there aren't many, there aren't many of those moments. You know, cause I look up and I go, hold, I have a spare minute. I need to go hug my wife again. I mean, that's the way I think about it. I need to, I need to go hang with my dog more. Right? I need to go do whatever that is within my, my list, or at least within my focus categories of the things that matter most to me.

• 1:42:36Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm a very much a no man. I just say it over and over and over and over and over again.

• 1:42:42Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any preferred or default language that you, that you like to use or that you tend to use? How do you convey that to people? And let's, let's assume it's not, you know, Joe Blow from Muckety Muck Incorporated, who is just a random inbound because I'm imagining you have filters for that type of thing. And even if you didn't, you would just ignore it. Uh, but let's say, uh, an old friend you've kind of drifted away from manages to somehow get ahold of you and invites you to be on the such and such board of some type. And you're like, ah, you know, and you listen to.

• 1:43:18Tim Ferriss?

  A, it's on your list. B, you don't really want to do it. Doesn't feel good. What do you say?

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  Well, I'm fairly direct about it, but I believe in the love, tough love, sandwich approach, right? So, you know, I say, "Hey, Tim," typically this is in a text or an email, right? Because I don't allow people to talk to me, get to me via a phone or standing in front of me, because that then becomes awkward. And now I have to deal with it on their time schedule instead of mine, which throws my schedule off, throws my focus off, or, right? So, my standard line is, you know, "Hey, Tim," this is me typing it, something. And it says, "Hey, Tim, I really appreciate you thinking about me. To be honest with you, I would love to say yes, but the problem is," and I have several scripts after this,

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  "problem is if I say yes to you, I have to say yes to other people. And because I don't have time to say yes to everybody, I have to say no to everybody. And I'm so sorry, but I just can't do this. Good luck." I mean, or, "Have you tried Tim Ferriss?"

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  Right? I'll definitely, you know, if there's someone else, but that's kind of a standard line for me. My line is, you were looking for a script, and the underlying script would be, "I can't say yes to everybody, so I'm gonna have to say no."

• 1:44:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I get those requests. I get them every day. They just fly at me. Same with you. I mean, we get it, absolutely.

• 1:44:52Tim Ferriss?

  So, I'm asking partially because I want to borrow.

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  Well, the other line that I give, and it's totally true, by the way, and that is, "I plan my time months, even years in advance." Now, understand, I can always erase. So, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a rigid person at all about that. But one of my standard scripts is, "I'm so sorry, I can't do that. I plan my time, you know, years, a year in advance, years in advance." And unfortunately, I'm booked then. Oh, yeah, remember, I'm the guy that when they recognized me as the second person ever recognized from my high school, I didn't go to the awards. When I graduated from college, I just drove out of town. I didn't even go to the graduation.

• 1:45:41Speaker 00

  When they named me the most influential person of the year, two years ago, I didn't go to the convention to get my award. When Austin recognized me as the entrepreneur of the year, I didn't go to the ceremony.

• 1:45:59Tim Ferriss?

  So, I have to pause. These are great. What is the line? I'm sorry, I plan years and months out in advance. Do you remember specifically what you conveyed to these folks or had your assistants convey?

• 1:46:16Speaker 00

  On which one?

• 1:46:16Tim Ferriss?

  Any of them.

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  Oh, that's exactly right. That's the line. So, sorry, his schedule conflicts with your date, so he will not be able to attend. Now, we then offer up somebody else if they want to go. So, for entrepreneur of the year, one of my partners went. And it was so funny because I think that was the same year that John Mackey of Whole Foods was recognized. He and I were co-recognized. So, she got up and she spoke about me, right? It's really hard for, you know, if you win an award to go in and say, "I'm awesome, I'm great, I'm terrific, I'm all these things." Because that would look stupid, right?

• 1:47:00Speaker 00

  But if you sent a proxy, the proxy stands up and says, "I want to tell you about my dear friend Gary Keller. He's the most amazing guy I've ever met. I want to tell you a story that exemplifies just a wonderful guy he is, right?" And apparently, yeah.

• 1:47:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  So, I've heard this more than once where they'll come off the stage and the person, whoever they were with, goes, "I'm going to get a proxy next time. That was awesome."

• 1:47:24Tim Ferriss?

  That is one of the most genius workarounds, I think, I've heard in a very, very, very long time.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  Just put that down as one of your time hacks, man.

• 1:47:33Tim Ferriss?

  I will, I will.

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  That's how you do it. And it works really well, man.

• 1:47:37Tim Ferriss?

  That is genius. So genius. Well, I know we only have just a handful of minutes left. And then I want to let you get back to hugging your wife and wrestling with your dog and doing all the other things that you know that have to do today on a business level.

• 1:47:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to ask a question that I ask pretty often, and that is the billboard question. So if you could put a quote, a message, a question, anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message of some type out to billions of people, let's say, something non-commercial, what might you put on the billboard?

• 1:48:21Speaker 00

  Think big, aim high.

• 1:48:23Tim Ferriss?

  Think big, aim high. Why is thinking big important to you? It's a theme that runs through a lot of your writing.

• 1:48:29Speaker 00

  Warren Buffett said it really well when he said that the habits of our life are like chains that are too loose to be noticed until they're too tight to break. And when you think about our life being built upon habits, you realize that most people accrue habits instead of form good ones. And so when you think big and you aim high and you start running towards that, you have to develop big habits, scalable habits, in order to implement that plan. So if you didn't say think big and aim high, what would you say? Think small? Would you think low? Would you say think average?

• 1:49:14Speaker 00

  Well, if you didn't say think big, what are the other choices? And most people, by default, because they don't think big, they don't aim high, they end up developing very average or below-average habits. They end up developing, right? Your thinking leads to action, action over time becomes a habit. So if I'm thinking small, then I'm forming small habits. And here's the problem, like Warren Buffett said, now I'm a person of small habits. And all of a sudden, I look up and I go, wow, I really do want more out of my life. And then you have to go break these habits. And that's really hard to do, whether they're eating habits, or exercising habits, or you name it, work habits, or relationship habits.

• 1:49:58Speaker 00

  It doesn't really matter that, you know, at the end of the day, if you have a choice, think big. If you have a choice, aim high. And then ask yourself, what do I need to do to do that? And what are the habits, or what's the one habit I need to develop such that by doing it, everything else is easier and necessary? And go get that habit. But if you don't think big... What's your choice? Right? Yeah, I mean, it's kinda like the joke I tell the kids, I say, so think of it this way. So you you fall in love with someone and you wanna ask them to marry you. And you go, uh, will you marry me? I I've dreamed of our life together and it's gonna be average. We're going to live an average life and live in an average home, drive an average car, eat average food,

• 1:50:42Speaker 00

  uh, take average vacations, read average books, go to average movies, we'll have average friends, we'll have average parties, uh, and if we have kids, we'll have average kids and we'll teach them, you know, the virtues of being average. Right? Let's get married, it's gonna be awesome.

• 1:50:59Speaker 00

  I don't think anybody does that, do they? Not purposely.

• 1:51:03Tim Ferriss?

  Not purposely.

• 1:51:04Speaker 00

  But you, but what you and I both know is that if you don't choose your life, if you don't choose the direction of your life, you'll you'll go in any direction, you'll end up in places that you didn't wanna be at because you didn't choose where you wanted to be. So, think big, aim high, I'd put that on the billboard.

• 1:51:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and and I wanna also note that you made a very deliberate decision to look at and change your habits long ago, when when you noticed that you're on this linear incremental path that maybe was in some ways just kinda reacting to whatever was in front of you or whatever was expected to be the next step. You you were able to redirect that crucial handful of degrees that over the long term is not a few feet, it's not a hundred feet, it's, you know, thousands of miles in terms of, uh, the difference between where you could have ended up and where you did end up. Right, so it's, uh, it's a very inspiring story.

• 1:52:09Speaker 00

  You know, one of the things that I ultimately developed was that the habit of being able to develop a habit. Because in the end, uh, that that singular skill uh, becomes like your superpower. Like, the ability to to, just call it the the habit hack, if you will. But it's the ability to form a habit. And it's hard, it's not easy, it's really hard, I'm sixty-two years old, it takes time to develop the ability to say, I want that. And I now see the singular habit that will get me there. I'm now going to develop that habit.

• 1:52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Aside from deciding on the habit, as you just mentioned, have you found anything in particular to help you to develop or stick with new habits?

• 1:52:59Speaker 00

  Other people. Go, right, your support system. It's the phrase that I used earlier, and that is, your environment has to support your goal. So your environment has to support your habit, too. So you, literally, if you want to form a new habit, you're going to have to have your environment support that. You're going to have to have the people around you cheering for you and supporting you to do that. Right? I had, Mary had an aunt who passed away a few years ago. She's a wonderful, wonderful woman. And, but she was the size of, of, I don't know how to say it. She was massive. And, she was massive. And, and her husband, by the way, was Jack Spratt.

• 1:53:41Speaker 00

  And in getting to know that family, when I came to understand-

• 1:53:45Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know who that is. Who's that?

• 1:53:47Speaker 00

  Oh, the skinny guy. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Jack Spratt, new no fat, right? The, yeah, he, this is, there's a skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny man. And his thing was, you know, dear, you can go pursue anything you want around health, as long as the kids and I have three square meals and ready for us, and they have to be different meals. And again, she, she, she, she cooked, she cooked for them. And she couldn't help herself. She had to taste it, and then she had to eat it. And given her body type and the way she was, for him, it didn't affect him. For her, it completely blew her up.

• 1:54:28Speaker 00

  And it was, and, and, you know, once you realize that, you go, my gosh, your environment has to support your goal. That, so to me, that, that, the habit hack is, go find somebody or a group of people that will support you. And then build that support mechanism. Right?

• 1:54:46Speaker 00

  Make sure that your spouse or significant other, or best friend, or whoever, make sure that they're in alignment, right? Tell them what your goal is. Don't hide it. I want to do this. I need your help. Give me permission. I give you permission to help support me to do that. It's the secret.

• 1:55:03Tim Ferriss?

  Good advice.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's so critical. Yeah. Don't rely on being the best captain in rough seas that you manufacture yourself.

• 1:55:11Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 1:55:13Tim Ferriss?

  Set your conditions. I've just perhaps two or three questions left. One, I have to ask because I don't know the answer. Why do this interview? I know you're a busy guy, and you just mentioned you do very little media. So why do the podcast?

• 1:55:32Speaker 00

  You know, because I really like and respect you, to be honest with you. And you do a lot of good. You know, when your first book came out, I'll be honest with you, I looked at the title and went, that guy's full of it. And I read the book, and then went, oh, my gosh. This is a significant book. This is not a trivial book. He has a cool title, but to be honest with you, what you wrote, everyone should read. And I firmly believe that. And so, to be honest with you, I'm just here to honor you.

• 1:56:04Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, Gary.

• 1:56:05Speaker 00

  It's an honor that you would ask me, but more importantly, just the ability for you and I just to talk for a couple of hours is a thrill for me. And I just want to be supportive.

• 1:56:16Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate that. And I want to give you, I want to give us time for me to disappoint. So hopefully, we'll be able to grab a cup of coffee or break some bread back in Austin. And this has been really fun. I really appreciate it. And valuable. I took tons of notes. I have four pieces of paper in front of me with notes scribbled all over them that I'm going to clean up afterwards. Good notes. And is there anything else you'd like to say, or suggest, mention, websites, social, anything like that? Of course, I'll link to all of that in the show notes, so people will have that on the website and via email either way. But is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap up?

• 1:57:01Speaker 00

  You know, if you mentioned sending people to some places. So I just started, Jay and I started our new podcast called Think Like a CEO. And so, yeah, telling people to come and check us out and see if that's a cool place to go learn would be awesome.

• 1:57:19Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. We'll send some traffic. So we will put Think Like a CEO, the link to the podcast, and we will put links to the books and certainly the company and many other resources in the show notes. Everybody listening, those will be available as always at tim.blog/podcast. And Gary, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  You're welcome, Tim. It was a blast, my friend. Thank you.

• 1:57:47Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody out there with earphones in or otherwise, thank you for listening. 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

• 1:58:28Tim Ferriss?

  include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. 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 episode is brought to you by Ring. This season can be a whirlwind of deliveries, visitors, and holiday travel, so it's the best time of the year to upgrade your doorbell and keep an eye on home. No matter where the holidays take you, I'm traveling a ton, and this is key for me. Ring helps you stay connected to your home from anywhere. So

• 1:59:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:53Tim Ferriss?

  what this holiday season brings. With Ring, you're always home. Just go to ring.com/tim. That's ring.com/tim. Check it out. Additional terms may apply, and this offer is for US residents only. That is ring.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. If you've ever sold anything online, or if you sell anything online, then you know what a pain in the ass the shipping process is. It's time consuming, it's expensive, you're always copying and pasting orders from different sites, trying to figure out the best carrier, so on and so forth. It's such a hassle. And in a previous life, I shipped tens of thousands of units overseas, domestically, overnight,

• 2:00:38Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:02:04Tim Ferriss?

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