Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
You’re never as bad as they say you are, but you’re never as good as they say you are either.
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.
The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.
Babe Ruth struck out all the time, but he’s not remembered for that. He’s remembered for what worked.
Time is wasted because there is so much time available.
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and
never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.
Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now
wastes your hard-earned cash.
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
The fishing is best where the fewest go and the
collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home
runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.
Look for flexible principles so that you can then have a toolkit that’s adaptable.
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question.
I believe that life exists to be enjoyed, and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do
need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as
serious as you make them out to be.
To feel more at peace and more successful, you don’t need
genius-level brain power, access to some secret society, or to his a
moving target of “just” and additional X dollars. Those are all
distractions.
If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun. And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.
If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions.
If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear
questions.
Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment.
It can also improve life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the
faces of thousands or millions, I view that as service. If you are a
mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has
been improved.
To dramitically change your life,
you don’t need to run a 100-mile race, get a PhD, or completely
reinvest yourself. It’s the small things, done consistently, that are
the big things.
Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing
anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a
keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?
If we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done.
This is something that is – being true to oneself – I think that most people struggle with. (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
To have an uncommon lifestyle you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
The tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having
the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having
the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking
around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation.
Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment
to staying – and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my
70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side
or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.
For all of the most important things, the timing always
sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never
align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same
time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out
of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect.
If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in
life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive
preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
It’s far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only
possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive
reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to –
as Kurt Vonnegut put it – “fart around”? To do things for the hell of
it? For no damn good reason at all?
You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing,
straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by
calmly putting one foot in front of the other.
For all their bitching about what’s holding them back,
most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams
they’re being held from.
Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
I’m often asked how I define “success.” It’s an overused
term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of
two things – achievement and appreciation.
On the Jar Of Awesome:
There is a mason jar on my kitchen counter with JAR OF AWESOME in
glitter letters on the side. Anything something really cool happens in a
day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to
write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar.
On the Jar Of Awesome: When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t.
On the Jar Of Awesome: Cultivate the habtis of putting
something in every day. Can’t think of anything? “I didn’t die today!”
is a reliable winner.
The key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was
sitting on the floor. I closed my eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath.
Things were about to change. Everything was about to change.
If you don’t regularly appreciate the small wins, you
will never appreciate the big wins. They’ll all fall through your
fingers like sand as you obsess on the next week, the next to-do, the
next thing to fix.
Friction points and single points of failure happen in
any given day potentially, so think in a concise, intelligent way. Out
of five items to do, which one would make you satisfied with your entire
day?
The question no one really seemed to be answering was:
‘Why do it all in the first place? What’s the pot of gold that justifies
spending the best years of you life hoping for happiness in the last?’.
Look for the good, practice finding the good, and you’ll see it more often.
For anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have.
The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.
Marketing can grab customers, but product multiplies them.
Marketing to me means to identify exactly who your ideal
customer is: knowing their behavior, knowing their age, knowing their
gender, knowing their location. And 9 times out of 10, in my opinion,
the easiest way to do that is to just sell to people who are as similar
to you as possible.
Clever marketing and PR stunts can get customers… but
only for so long. It’s the product that will create long-term
word-of-mouth and the groundswell needed for a global phenomenon.
The easiest way to distinguish yourself is to ask yourself how you can be different, and not just better.
Step 1 on the best 3-5 ways to secure first clients: The
best way to quickly build a services business, or any business –
especially since you have income from your full-time job – is to “buy”
your first clients. This means that you offer your services for free, or
at a massively discounted rate (or for a temporary free “trial/test”
period), to clients who would make excellent and impressive
testimonials. The key here is that your cost-to-value-delivered ratio
must be clearly better than anything else they use.
Step 2: Once you have testimonials or referrals from 3-5
marquee clients, you’ll be in great shape to charge others full retail.
I’ve done this in multiple fields, whether teaching accelerated
learning, selling massive data storage systems, angel investing in tech
(i.e. investing a tiny amount, so I own a tiny piece of equity, but
putting in a lot of sweat and labor), or podcast advertising.
The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.
I think there’s always a market for quality.
I’m really excited about the future of content marketing.
But in the same fashion that you have Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon –
who all used to be very cleanly separate – on this collision course
where they are competing on the same verticals, I think you’re going to
end up having television producers, movie producers, writers, song
writers, all competing for the same mental bandwidth.
That 1000 true fans will lead to a cascading effect. The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.
If you only have time to read one article on marketing,
make it 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired
Magazine.
The customer is not always right. “Fire” high-maintenance customers.
Deadlines over details. […] Perfect products delivered
past deadline kill companies. Better to have a good-enough product
delivered on-time.
I want to convert casual listeners into die-hard, fervent
listeners, and I want to convert casual sponsors into die-hard, fervent
sponsors. This requires two things: 1) Playing the long game, and 2)
Strategically leaving some chips on the table. As a mentor once told me,
“You can shear a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once”.
An entrepreneur isn’t someone who owns a business, it’s someone who makes things happen.
All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.
Niche is the new big.
It’s much more interesting to me to sell something like a
small-scale, $10,000-per-seat seminar every 2-3 years, instead of
obsessing over monthly, weekly, or even daily Amazon commissions, for
instance.
Who you portray in your marketing isn’t necessarily the
only demographic who buys your product — it’s often the demographic that
most people aspire to. The target isn’t the market.
“General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to
2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is
that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities
than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2–3K
high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything
and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal
downside. (Tools Of Titans, Eric Weinstein)
Broadly speaking, as good as it feels to have a plan,
it’s even more freeing to realize that nearly no misstep can destroy
you. This gives you the courage to improvise and experiment.
Good stories always beat good spreadsheets. Whether you
are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the
company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the
math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven
human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives.
We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs.
We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your
venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that
means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.
First get the crowd, then sell the product.
There are people I have outsourced to in India who now
outsource portions of their work to the Philippines. It’s the efficient
use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you
want to enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules
by which you play.
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or
statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And
without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want,
which means that I’m fine with the consequences.
What we really need to do, to design, is look at the
extremes. The weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or
the strongest, the fastest person, because if we understand what the
extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.” In other words, the
extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.
I think the ‘soft sell’ is very undervalued.
I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out
there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how
to gain attention very quickly.
Everything that works in sales has been done already.
Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you
buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like
you. It’s really that easy – and that’s what I do.
Famous tech blogger Robert Scoble later described my
intricate marketing plan as “get drunk with bloggers.” It worked
surprisingly well.
People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories.
Enough is enough. Lemmings no more. The blind quest for cash is a fool’s errand.
True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want.
If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3-10 times as much.
The majority of my finances come from early-stage startup investing.
For me, money is not a prime motivator. It’s one
criterion that I can use to filter out opportunities. My high is the
eureka moment when I find, or I am taught, a non-obvious way of solving a
problem.
Where can you trade money for
time? Where can you spend money that creates more time tomorrow or next
week? That is almost always a good investment.
1 000 000$ in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things.
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the
number of W’s you control in your life: what do you, when you do it,
where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the “freedom
multiplier”.
I’m not averse to making a lot of money. But where does
that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that
take you if you’re in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark,
corrupt places.
I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.
Your network is your net worth.
In the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn
money. Once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money
to earn time, as the latter is nonrenewable.
If you find yourself saying, “But I’m making so much
money” about a job or project, pay attention. “But I’m making so much
money,” or “But I’m making good money” is a warning sign that you’re
probably not on the right track or, at least, that you shouldn’t stay
there for long. Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation
cannot.
“If only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone
the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a
life of enjoyment- now and not later. By using money as the scapegoat
and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently
disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise.”
Money doesn’t change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
The more we associate experience with cash value, the
more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we
associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too
poor to buy our freedom.
The goal of “investing” has always been simple: to allocate resources (e.g. money, time, energy) to improve quality of life.
I am willing to accept a mild and temporary 10% decrease
in current quality of life (based on morale in journaling) for a
high-probability 10x return, whether the ROI comes in the form of cash,
time, energy, or otherwise.
People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.
An investment that produces a massive financial ROI but
makes me a complete nervous mess, or causes insomnia and temper tantrums
for a long period of time, is NOT a good investment.
I don’t typically invest in public stocks for this
reason, even when I know I’m leaving cash on the table. My stomach can’t
take the ups and downs, but—like drivers rubbernecking to look at a
wreck—I seem incapable of not looking. I will compulsively check Google
News and Google Finance, despite knowing it’s self-sabotage.
A large guaranteed decrease in present quality of life doesn’t justify a large speculative return.
One could argue that I should work on my reactivity
instead of avoiding stocks. I’d agree on tempering reactivity, but I’d
disagree on fixing weaknesses as a primary investment (or life)
strategy.
I get 50-100 pitches per week. This creates an inbox
problem. […] I’ve had to declare email bankruptcy twice in the last six
months. It’s totally untenable.
From 2008 to 2009, I began to ask myself, “What if I
could only subtract to solve problems?” when advising startups. Instead
of answering, “What should we do?” I tried first to hone in on
answering, “What should we simplify?”
I don’t want to hire staff for vetting, so I’ve concluded I must ignore all new startup pitches and intros.
I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.
I’m in startups for the long game. In some capacity, I plan to be doing this 20+ years from now.
Most of my best investments were made during the “Dot-com
Depression” of 2008-2009 (e.g. Uber, Shopify, Twitter, etc.), when only
the hardcore remained standing on a battlefield littered with startup
bodies.
To get rich beyond your wildest dreams in startup
investing, it isn’t remotely necessary to bet on a Facebook or Airbnb
every year.
People are least productive in reactive mode.
If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?
Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?
It’s often what you do, not how you do it, that is the
determining factor. This is the difference from being effective; doing
the right things, and being efficient; doing things well whether they
are important.
“Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
Block out at 2-3 hours to focus on one of them for today.
Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will
still be there tomorrow. (For more detail, check out this article by Tim Ferriss)
If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day.
It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear
“successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one
rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and
doing something well does not make it important.
Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing
nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is
the path of the productive.
In the last 12 months, I’ve used deloading outside of
sports to decrease my anxiety at least 50% while simultaneously doubling
my income.
I alternate intense periods of batching similar tasks
(recording podcasts, clearing the inbox, writing blog posts, handling
accounting, etc.) with extended periods of – for lack of poetic
description – unplugging and fucking around.
Great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there.
The idea is not to be idle. That’s not something that I advocate. It is to maximize your per hour output.
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing
something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor
use of resources.
By working only when you are most effective, life is both
more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having
your cake and eating it, too.
Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum —
create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per
week isn’t enough.
There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day
CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3-4 mornings per
week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1pm.
If I’m in reactive mode, maker mode is all but
impossible. Email and texts of “We’re overcommitted but might be able to
squeeze you in for $25K. Closing tomorrow. Interested?” are creative
kryptonite.
I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.
The great “deloading” phase. This is what I’m
experiencing this afternoon, and it makes a Tuesday feel like a lazy
Sunday morning. This is when the muse is most likely to visit. I need to
get back to the slack.
If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger,
better, or truly different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a
conference call in 15 minutes. The aha moments rarely come from the
incremental inbox-clearing mentality of, “Oh, fuck… I forgot to… Please
remind me to… Shouldn’t I?… I must remember to…”
There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.
What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the
next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head? (Inspired by Peter
Thiel)
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance,
is not laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture
tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”
In my mind, when I’m trying to deconstruct, let’s say a
sport, all i’ll ask is to start with: “what rules are people following
that are not required? (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
People, even good people, will unknowingly abuse your
time to the extent that you let them. Set good rules for all involved to
minimize back-and-forth and meaningless communication.
I think time management as a label encourages people to
view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as
possible.
Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory. Enter the world of elimination.
“What if I did the opposite?”: What if I only asked
questions instead of pitching? What if I studied technical material, so I
sounded like an engineer instead of a sales guy? What if I ended my
emails with “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply, and thank
you for reading this far,” instead of the usual “I look forward to your
reply and speaking soon” presumptive BS? The experiments paid off. My
last quarter in that job, I outsold the entire L.A. office of our
biggest competitor, EMC.
What you do is infinitely more important that how you do
it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the
right things.
Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
What 20% of customers/products/regions are producing 80%
of the profit? What factors or shared characteristics might account for
this?” Many such questions later, I began making changes: “firing” my
highest-maintenance customers.
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the
time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all
else. Be ruthless – you can always repurchase things you can’t live
without.
On finding and working on the essentials: The 80/20
principle, also known as Pareto’s law, is the primary tool in this case.
It dictates that 80% (or more) of your desired outcomes are the result
of 20% (or less) of your activities and inputs.
After reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and
The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, I decided that extreme questions
were the forcing function I needed. The question I found most helpful
was, “If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I
do?”
If you had a gun to your head or contracted some horrible
disease, and you had to limit work to 2 hours per week, what would you
do to keep things afloat?
When prioritizing his todo list: Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?
1.
Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten
work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in
perceived importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for
its completion.
I tend to focus on the 80-20 analysis as it applies to
people getting on and off the ground as quickly as possible to say be on
top 5 to 10% of the general population. (Conversation with Josh
Waitzkin)
Invest in duplicating your few strong areas instead of fixing all of your weaknesses.
The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
If we’re talking about just distractions, we’re talking
about prioritization. If you feel like you don’t have time, you don’t
have priorities. Everyone has the same amount of time.
It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all
information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or
unactionable. Most are all three.
In a world of distraction and multitasking, the ability
to single task — to genuinely do one thing without getting distracted by
push notifications, alerts, email, text messages, social media,
whatever it might be — is a super power.
The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions
to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that
people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t
work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
Indiscriminate action is a form of laziness.
Schedule things in advance, or you might be inclined to
quit. A lot of standup comedians do this, because they may have six or
12 gigs before they do their first set well. Commit beforehand; prepay
if you can.
It’s hip to focus on getting things done, but it’s only possible once we remove the constant static and distraction.
I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
Blaming
idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns
for scaring children – they can’t help it. It’s their nature. Then
again, I had, on occasion, been known to create interruptions out of
thin air. If you’re anything like me, that makes us both occasional
idiots. Learn to recognize and fight the interruption impulse. This is
infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines
to follow.
What bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want? (Conversation with BJ Miller)
My agenda became a list of everyone else’s agendas.
What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?
No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music
is permitted at all times. No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com,
drudgereport.com, msn.com,10 etc.). No television at all, except for one
hour of pleasure viewing each evening. No reading books, except for
this book and one hour of fiction11 pleasure reading prior to bed. No
web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task
for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have. (Four Hour
Work Week Low Information Diet)
The world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. (About the low information diet)
I feel that the big ideas come from these periods [deloading phases]. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.
Create slack, as no one will give it to you. This is the only way to swim forward instead of treading water.
Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending
against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your
default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.
People don’t lose in various aspects of their lives
because they pursue a lot of bad ideas. They lose because they say yes
to too many ‘kinda cool’ things/ideas.
Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?
Doing less is not being lazy. Don’t give in to a culture that values personal sacrifice over personal productivity.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
If I’m “busy,” it is because I’ve made choices that put
me in that position, so I’ve forbidden myself to reply to “How are you?”
with “Busy.” I have no right to complain. Instead, if I’m too busy,
it’s a cue to reexamine my systems and rules.
I was once refused for a lunch date with a very famous
tech investor and he said, ‘Sorry, I’m on a no-meeting diet for the next
month and I have a policy of saying no to all meetings’. So I started
using a ‘no conference call diet’ and people just rolled with it. It was
incredible. There was no feedback, no push-back.
Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills.
To develop your edge initially, you learn to set
priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the
priorities of others.
Once you reach a decent level of professional success,
lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in 7-out-of-10 “cool”
commitments that will sink the ship.
I hope you find the strength to say no when it matters
most. I’m striving for the same, and only time will tell if I pull it
off.
Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to
survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all
wax and wane. Plan accordingly.
Do not answer calls from unrecognize
d phone numbers. […]
It just results in unwanted interruption and poor negotiating position.
Let it go to voicemail and relax.
Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at
night. The former scrambles your priorities and plans for the day, and
the latter just gives you insomnia. E-mail can wait until 10am, after
you’ve completed at least one of your critical to-do items.
Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.
Do not let people ramble. Forget “how’s it going?” when
someone calls you. Stick with “what’s up?” or “I’m in the middle of
getting something out, but what’s going on?” A big part of GTD is GTP —
Getting To the Point.
Do not check e-mail constantly — “batch” and check at set
times only. I belabor this point enough. Get off the cocaine pellet
dispenser and focus on execution of your top to-do’s instead of
responding to manufactured emergencies.
Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance
customers. There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to
failure is trying to please everyone. Do an 80/20 analysis of your
customer base in two ways–which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and
which 20% are consuming 80%+ of my time? Then put the loudest and least
productive on autopilot by citing a change in company policies.
Do
not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize. If you don’t prioritize,
everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most
important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.
Do not carry a cellphone. Take at least one day off of
digital leashes per week. Turn them off or, better still, leave them in
the garage or in the car. I do this on at least Saturday, and I
recommend you leave the phone at home if you go out for dinner.
Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work
relationships and activities should. Work is not all of life. Your
co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it
just as you would an important business meeting.
I meditate almost every morning for 20 minutes.
More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice. (Tools Of Titans)
For me, it’s been getting over that resistance to what I
perceived as sort of a “woo-woo new agey” type of thing and the ability
to sort of view it as sort of a warm bath for the mind where I’m taking a
mini vacation from my own brain in a way. (Conversation with Josh
Waitzkin)
I started meditating and gave up meditating many many
times because I had the response that you mentioned about type A
personalities. (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.
I’d be sitting there and I thought that the objective was
to quiet my mind. And so when I failed at quieting my mind because I’d
be ticking off the todo list or be like “ah that f*cker who said A, B
and C to me the other day” and I would just like harp on these
ridiculous things and then I’d get pissed and then I’d get pissed that I
was pissed… and I would get up and have a cup of coffee and then storm
out of the house which didn’t seem like a productive meditative
sessions. (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
I actually started doing it consistently when I kept it
really short and a friend of mine recommended this where I would #1 be
comfortable so I would sit down but to avoid back pain, I would lean
against the wall, which is very commonly thought of as a big no no. So I
was leaning against the wall to keep my back straight and I would
listen to one music track, one song every morning, the same song as a
cue and I would just pay attention to my breath. I would focus on being
an observer of my thoughts but not trying to control them at all.
(Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
All I did was think about my todo list the entire time,
that’s fine, as long as I’m paying attention to my breath. (Conversation
with Josh Waitzkin)
That non-attachment to an outcome, i.e. controlling my thoughts, was very helpful. (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
What I found was that by allowing the thoughts to occur
and not judging myself because let’s say I’m thinking about email, or
the grocery shopping and the todo or whatever, just letting that happen
but getting good at observing it, I was able to then have more emotional
awareness which would prevent cognitive biases and bad judgments.
(Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
After meditating consistently for even a week or so, when
that anger would start I was better at observing “Tim” as a 3rd person
“Oh look at that, Tim is getting angry at something really small and
stupid” as opposed to simply becoming angry and then causing problems
for myself whether it was just internal or interacting with people.
(Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
I’ve had this aversion to meditation. But when it’s very
non-dogmatic, when you’re not trying to control anything, just think of a
candle flame, just observe your thoughts and be okay with them. Sit
with good posture for this period of time, that’s it. (Conversation with
Chase Jarvis)
The physiological or psychological effects are so
fascinating, like you said, because you’ll do it for a couple of days
and you’re like, whatever. Then you hit this sort of inflection point
where you just drop from 200 RPMs to 150. You’re like, “Whoa. Okay. This
is different”. The whole week, you’re kind of zenned out. (Conversation
with Chase Jarvis)
It’s like this extended period of calm and ease in
decision-making. Uncluttered, like you closed every browser on your
computer and shut off the anti-virus, and rebooted the whole thing.
(Conversation with Chase Jarvis)
Even if it’s for ten minutes a day so that your not in a
reactive mode. It’s really a game changer. Physiologically, it had a lot
of effects for me as well. When my cortisol level dropped, I was able
to lose body fat more easily in my abdomen, for instance. (Conversation
with Chase Jarvis)
Observe your thoughts, instead of being constantly the victim of your thoughts.
The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to
lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house
that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
Now, it’s literally #1 (health). What does this mean? If I
sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting
last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout
and have a con-call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday
party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning.
Ours
is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep
as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or
some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of
priorities and of self-respect.
In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social
and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I must be fine
paying, or I could lose weeks or months to sickness or fatigue.
I would emphasize that by improving your physical
machine, which includes the brain, you improve all of your performance,
and the transfer is incredible to business.
Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.
As long as you are keeping your blood-sugars in check,
and your insulin levels in check, I think that the demonization of fat –
including saturated fat – is completely unwarranted.
Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing that person
who’s struggling to lose weight who thinks that they need to run 20
miles a week. They have no desire to do it, their knees hurt, they hate
it, and they’re not losing weight. And I’d like to say, ‘Well, I’ve got
great news for you. You don’t ever need to run another step a day in
your life, because there’s no value in that.’ “There is value in
exercise, though, and I think that the most important type of exercise,
especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really
high-intensity, heavy strength training. Strength training aids
everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial
density and orthopedic stability. That last one might not mean much when
you’re a 30-something young buck, but when you’re in your 70s, that’s
the difference between a broken hip and a walk in the park.
Hot baths can also significantly increase GH (growth
hormones) over baseline, and both sauna and hot baths have been shown to
cause a massive release in prolactin, which plays a role in wound
healing.
I now take ~20-minute saune sessions post-workout or
post-stretching at least four times per week, typically at roughly 160
to 170F. If nothing else, it seems to dramatically decrease DOMS
(delayed-onset muscle soreness).
Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s
absolute — all or nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise
precisely when it’s most important.
AcroYoga
is something that I’m currently really delving into. It’s a combination
of, in effect, yoga, acrobatics, and Cirque Du Soleil-type
performances.
On seeking ways to sleep better: That’s how I started
reading fiction again. It really was to consume something that would
actually push me away from problem solving and more into kind of fantasy
dream mode. I was like alright, I’m not really a fiction reader but to
fix my insomnia I’ll do it.
The advice I give for sustainable behavioral change, including diet, is that you make one change at a time.
Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.
The Slow-Carb Diet
succeeds where other diets fail for many reasons, but the biggest is
this: It accepts default human behaviors versus trying to fix them.
Rather than say “don’t cheat” or “you can no longer eat X,” we plan
weekly “cheat days” (usually Saturdays) in advance.
People on diets will cheat regardless, so we mitigate the damage by pre-scheduling it and limiting it to 24 hours.
Outside of cheat days, slow carbers keep “domino foods”
out of their homes. What are domino foods? Foods that could be
acceptable if humans had strict portion control, but that are disallowed
because practically none of us do. Common domino foods include:
Chickpeas, Peanut butter, Salted cashews, Alcohol
For me, startups are a domino food. In theory, “I’ll only
do one deal a month” or “I’ll only do two deals a quarter” sound great,
but I’ve literally NEVER seen it work for myself or any of my VC or
angel friends.
I believed for a very long time as an athlete that
low-fat, high-carbohydrate was an optimal diet. And I think there’s a
decent amount of evidence, circumstantial or direct, to suggest that
low-fat diets create a host of issues ranging from joint problems to
amenorrhea, like the cessation of menstruation. I mean, I think entirely
unnatural for sedentary people or for athletes.
Optimal meal, I would say, would be grass-fed steak with vegetables, maybe some lentils for fiber.
On fasting: There is also evidence to suggest – skipping
the scientific detail – that fasting of 3 days or longer can effectively
‘reboot’ your immune system via stem cell-based regeneration.
On fasting: Fasting doesn’t need to make you miserable and weak. In fact, it can have quite the opposive effect.
On fasting: I will regularly, three continuous days per
month minimum, practice fasting. I will do that from early Thursday
dinner to an early Sunday dinner to simply expose myself to the rather,
often unfamiliar, sensation of real hunger.
I travel with boxes of sardines, oysters, and bulk macadamia nuts.
On fasting: I now aim for a 3-day fast once per month and a 5 to 7-day fast once per quarter.
On fasting: I allowed trace amounts of BCAAs and 300 to 500 calories of pure fat per day on my “fast”.
The more you schedule and practice discomfort
deliberately, the less unplanned discomfort will throw off your life and
control your life.
Stoicism can help you to become a better, kinder person.
In helping you to become less emotionally reactive (e.g., reflexively
angry or annoyed), it helps you to better resolve conflict, and teach
others to do the same.
Most losses or mistakes are really survivable.
The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.
Don’t get angry, don’t get even – focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.
I’ve heard it said before, I certainly didn’t come up
with the expression, “Everything you want is just outside your comfort
zone.” Why don’t you proactively develop an ability to widen that
comfort zone?
To do anything remotely interesting you need to train
yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying
criticism.
Both Stoicism and Buddhism focus quite extensively on awareness of impermanence, so the practices are often complementary.
I view Stoicism not only as a means for greater
effectiveness—which it certainly is — but also as a tool for creating a
better, less divisive world. To quote Sam Harris, PhD, “No society in
human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”
It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with
your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher.
Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs
anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want
to be tougher, be tougher.
Even if you only care about service to others, altruism,
or being an instrument for good, to have the desired impact, you cannot
be ruled by knee-jerk emotions, crying over spilt milk, and so on.
Practicing poverty or practicing rehearsing your worst
case scenario in real life, not just journaling, not just in your head, I
find very, very important.
I expose myself to a lot of duress and pain in say, the
form of ice baths and cold exposure simply to develop my tolerance for
the then unavoidable pain and disruption that comes to all of us.
Simply reading Stoic passages in preparation for the day
helps me to ideally, ignore, and when I cannot ignore, not respond to,
certainly not engage with critics who have unfounded attacks.
Getting a dog has made me a better person and a better
Stoic. My pup Molly has no bad intentions when she does most “bad”
things, for instance. As a puppy, she did what puppies do, of course:
peed in the wrong places, chewed things up, disobeyed or ignored
commands (mostly because I was unclear), etc.. She trained me to not
overreact and get mad, which was pointless and actually made things
worse for both of us. (Question asked was “How has getting a dog changed
your life?”)
On practising Stoicism: You can go into various places
like a Starbucks, and practice doing the lay down challenge. This is
laying down on the floor without saying anything to anyone, not telling
them you’re doing an exercise, lay down on the floor for 10 seconds. If
they ask if you’re all right, you say “yes I’m totally fine.” And then
you get back up like nothing happened and continue on with waiting in
line or whatever you were doing.
On practising Stoicism: Another option would be doing
what my friend Noah Kagan calls the coffee challenge. Going into any
type of coffee shop, if you don’t like coffee it could be tea, it could
be water, it doesn’t matter. When you get to the end of the line and
you’re placing your order, you ask for 10 percent off.
Studying dog training, and really dedicating myself to
good books and teachers (like “Don’t Shoot The Dog!” and “Command
Performance” (Whole Dog Journal), or Susan Garrett) taught me a ton
about training any mammal, including humans and myself. It’s been a
great way to learn more about how we all respond to rewards, punishment,
and feedback. This awareness has helped me to become a less stressed
and more effective person.
In my
experience, particularly when combined with Buddhist “metta” or
loving-kindness meditation, Stoicism can foster greater compassion and
empathy.
I’ve found that while Stoicism helps me to be very non-reactive, and to accomplish and achieve more with less wasted energy.
I’ve certainly stumbled a lot, but that’s how you figure things out.
The first book (4 Hour Work Week) was turned down by 26 publishers.
Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.
When everything and everyone is failing, what is the cost of a little experiment outside of the norm? Most often, nothing.
Greatness is setting ambitious goals that your former
self would have thought impossible, and trying to get a little better
every day.
I absolutely think podcasts are a great way to “surround”
yourself with people who can help you average up. I use podcasts this
way, and I listen to Dan Carlin (Hardcore History), Jocko, Sam, and Tony
regularly myself.
Regarding getting out
of funks and dips in your life, you might find this article of mine
helpful, titled “Productivity Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive,
and Crazy (Like Me)“.
When — despite your best efforts — you feel like you’re
losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best feel
this way sometimes.
Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.
Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.
When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic
writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like
an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical
training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere
of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is
healthful and the stimulus for growth.
With routines, you don’t want your threshold for
“success” to be checking 100% of the boxes. Look for 3/5 wins or 2/5
wins. Otherwise, the human inclination is self-sabotage with “Well, I
miss A or B, so I failed today,” or “Now today is going to be harder”
and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On how to get over analysis paralysis: set deadlines for
decisions (put them in your calendar or they aren’t real) and break
large intimidating actions/projects into tiny mini-experiments that
allow you to overcome fear of failure.
Sometimes it pays to model the outliers, not flatten them into averages. This isn’t limited to business.
Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.
I encourage active skepticism – when people are being
skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action.
They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.
I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair
variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting
their theories or themselves to real field testing.
My perfect storm was nothing permanent. But of course
it’s far from the last storm I’ll face. There will be many more. The key
is building fires where you can. Warm yourself up as you wait for the
tempest to pass. These fires, the routines, habits, relationships, and
coping mechanisms you built, help you to look at the rain and see
fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life and
you do, the grey is part of the natural cycle. You are not flawed. You’re a human. You
have gifts to share with the world and when the darkness comes, when
you’re fighting the demons, just remember. I’m right there fighting with
you. You’re not alone. The gems I found were forged in the struggle.
Rehearsing the worst case scenarios or negative
visualization is a very powerful tool, which paradoxically allows you to
become more relaxed and therefore, more response-able, i.e., able to
chose your response if you get thrown a curveball question or if you
flub and make a mistake in the middle of a live broadcast.
Anyone you have in your mind as an icon is an imperfect, flawed creature, just like all humans on the planet.
My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.
Information without emotion isn’t retained.
Much like you would train your body, you can train your mind.
To learn is to live. I see no other option. Once the learning curve flattens out, I get bored.
Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, traveling
and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much
faster.
Learning is such an addiction and compulsion of mine that
I rarely travel somewhere without deciding first how I’ll obsess on a
specific skill.
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
Thinking is mostly just asking yourself questions and answering them.
I know nothing. I am a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions.
BrainQuicken was a real learning on the job MBA.
Language learning deserves special mention. It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.
Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to
understand a foreign culture without understanding its language,
acquiring a new language transforms the human experience and makes you
aware your own language: your own thoughts.
Information is useless if it is not applied to something
important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
Here are a few books that have affected me or made me
think differently in the last few years. None of them are directly
related to business: Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach — this is an
important book, originally recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who
benefited from it. The Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda. The
Body Keeps The Score by Van Der Kolk.
The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons,
titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve
maximized 1 or 2 strengths.
Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are
unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools
are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of
soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know?
I’ve been there.
If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.
If the challenge we face doesn’t scare us, then it’s probably not that important.
For overcoming fear, I think that an exercise called “fear-setting” is extremely helpful.
Fear-setting
has produced my biggest business and personal successes, as well as
repeatedly helped me to avoid catastrophic mistakes.
Overanalysis has been my life story. It can be far worse
than laziness, as overanalysis leads to the same lack of action but also
self-loathing.
For years, I set goals, made resolutions to change
direction, and nothing came of either. I was just as insecure and scared
as the rest of the world.
Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to
do. That phone call, that conversation, whatever the action might be –
it is fear of unknown outcomes that prevents us from doing what we need
to do.
What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this
without resorting to the previously rejected concept of good timing, the
answer is simple: You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world.
Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood
and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit
of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.
Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got
into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous
businesspeople for advice.
I don’t think people are fearless. If you’re fearless, you’re nuts. But you can learn to fear less.
To do or not to do? To try or not to try? Most people will vote no, whether they consider themselves brave or not.
Fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes is
shows you what you shouldn’t do, but more often than not it shows you
exactly what you should do.
Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows.
The best people in almost any field are almost always the people who get the most criticism.
Fear itself is quite fear-inducing. Most intelligent people in the world dress it up as something else: optimistic denial.
What are you putting off out of fear?
There are some secrets we don’t share because they’re embarrassing.
In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it
seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording
like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the
time, not objective reality.
I saw my classmates competing, because that’s what they
were good at! I mean, you take kids who go to a school like Princeton,
they’re used to competing, and they are used to being number one, so if
something seems coveted, they will compete for it, whether or not they
really want that thing.
One afternoon, as I’m wandering through a Barnes and Noble with no goal in particular, I chance upon a book about suicide.
The decision was obvious to me. I’d somehow failed,
painted myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on a school
that didn’t care about me, and what would be the point of doing
otherwise? To repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless
burden to myself and my family and friends?
It’s important to mention that, by this point, I was past
deciding. The decision was obvious to me. I’d somehow failed, painted
myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on a school that
didn’t care about me, so what would be the point of doing otherwise? To
repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless burden to
myself and my family and friends? The world was better off… What would I
ever contribute? Nothing. So the decision was made, and I was in
full-on planning mode.
It was only then that I realized something: my death
wasn’t just about me. It would completely destroy the lives of those I
cared most about. I imagined my mom, who had no part in creating my
thesis mess, suffering until her dying day, blaming herself.
The very next week, I decided to take the rest of my
“year off” truly off (to hell with the thesis) and focus on physical and
mental health. That’s how the entire “sumo” story of the 1999 Chinese
Kickboxing (Sanshou) Championships came to be, if you’ve read The 4-Hour
Workweek.
Months later, after focusing on my body instead of being
trapped in my head, things were much clearer. Everything seemed more
manageable. The “hopeless” situation seemed like shitty luck but nothing
permanent.
Given the purported jump in “suicidal gestures” at
Princeton and its close cousins (Harvard appears to have 2x the national
average for undergrad suicides), I hope the administration is taking
things seriously.
Perhaps regularly reach out to the entire student body to
catch people before they fall? It could be as simple as email.If you’re
in a dangerous place, call this number : 1 (800) 273-8255. I didn’t
have it, and I wish I had. It’s the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
(website and live chat here). It’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week, in both English and Spanish.
Sometimes, it just takes one conversation with one rational person to stop a horrible irrational decision.
If you’re too embarrassed to admit that, as I was, then
you can ping them “just to chat for a few minutes.” Pretend you’re
killing time or testing different suicide hotlines for a directory
you’re compiling. Whatever works.
Speaking from personal experience, believe me: this too shall pass, whatever it is.
I realized it would destroy other people’s lives. Killing yourself can spiritually kill other people.
Your death is not perfectly isolated. It can destroy a
lot, whether your family (who will blame themselves), other loved ones,
or simply the law enforcement officers or coroners who have to haul your
death mask-wearing carcass out of an apartment or the woods.
A friend once told me that killing yourself is like
taking your pain, multiplying it 10x, and giving it to the ones who love
you.
If think about killing yourself, imagine yourself wearing
a suicide bomber’s vest of explosives and walking into a crowd of
innocents. That’s effectively what it is.
Even if you “feel” like no one loves you or cares about
you, you are most likely loved – and most definitely lovable and worthy
of love.
There’s no guarantee that killing yourself improves
things! […] The “afterlife” could be 1,000x worse than life, even at its
worst.
I personally believe that consciousness persists after
physical death, and it dawned on me that I literally had zero evidence
that my death would improve things.
It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost
in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life
hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5 or 10 years later. That
seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into
college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or a bunch of
hecklers on the Internet.
Go to the gym and move for at least 30 minutes. For me, this is 80% of the battle.
If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little
things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick.
Focus on others instead of yourself. Buy coffee for the person behind
you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a
soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of
drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc.
The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess
what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front
lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical.
If you don’t care about yourself, make it about other people.
If we let the storms pass and choose to reflect, we come out better than ever.
You have gifts to share with the world. You are not alone. You are not flawed. You are human.
