Angel Investor

Advisor to Uber, Evernote, Shopify, Automattic (WordPress.com), etc. Early investor in Twitter, Facebook, and 20+ others. Longer list here: https://angel.co/tim

Principal

Crown/Harmony (Random House), Amazon Publishing,  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

Author

BrainQUICKEN LLC

I founded this sports nutrition manufacturer and distributor (12+ countries at highest market saturation) in 2001 and sold it to a private equity firm in January of 2009.

Senior Director

TrueSAN Networks

Account Manager

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People.” He is an angel investor/advisor (Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Nextdoor, Alibaba, etc.) and author of five #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek. Find his current antics at www.tim.blog.

2007 - Present -
Host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, the first business-interview podcast to pass 100M downloads and selected for "Best of iTunes" three years running. Author of five #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors. Latest experiments and writing at http://www.tim.blog

2003 - Present - 
Guest Lecturer at Princeton University, High-tech Entrepreneurship (Electrical Engineering)

2001 - Jan. 2009 -
Co-founder and Senior Director of BrainQUICKEN LLC, neurological and sports nutrition development firm with distribution in 15+ countries.  Sold to private equity firm.

Specialties: Business: Consumer product design and marketing, social entrepreneurship and metrics (conversation, cost-per-acquisition, etc.), multivariate testing, infrastructure and manufacturing.



Oliver Sacks wrote: “Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”  I love this quote, and some of the most heart-piercing music in my life comes straight out of Austin, Texas. Hello Willie, Gary Clark Jr., Lucinda Williams, and Shakey Graves — just to name a few.

I’d love for y’all to join us for a special fundraiser in Austin — the “Live Music Capital of the World.”

On April 2nd, two of my favorite Austin musicians, Gina Chavez and Carrie Rodriguez, will join me and “Texas Monthly’s” John Spong for a night of song and storytelling to benefit HAAM — The Health Alliance for Austin Musicians.

HAAM provides access to affordable healthcare for greater Austin’s low-income, working musicians, with a focus on prevention and wellness. Many Austin musicians are self-employed and have no access to health insurance or basic healthcare. They often work multiple jobs and struggle to pay for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, with nothing left for healthcare.

I hope you’ll join us! You can buy tickets at https://lnkd.in/gugs8MeM — all funds go directly to HAAM!

Rock on.

Tim Ferriss

Avoid these 9 mistakes 👇

1. Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake (W4W). 

2. Micromanaging and e-mailing to fill time. Set the responsibilities, problem scenarios and rules, and limits of autonomous decision-making—then stop, for the sanity of everyone involved.

3. Working where you live, sleep, or should relax. Separate your environments—designate a single space for work and solely work—or you will never be able to escape it.

4. Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life. 

5. Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life. Recognize that this is often just another W4W excuse. Most endeavors are like learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20–30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest. Perfection is a good ideal and direction to have, but recognize it for what it is: an impossible destination. 

6. Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work. 

7. Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work. Focus on life outside of your bank accounts, as scary as that void can be in the initial stages. If you cannot find meaning in your life, it is your responsibility as a human being to create it, whether that is fulfilling dreams or finding work that gives you purpose and self-worth—ideally a combination of both. 

8. Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence. Life is too short to waste, but it is also too long to be a pessimist or nihilist. Whatever you’re doing now is just a stepping-stone to the next project or adventure. Any rut you get into is one you can get yourself out of. Doubts are no more than a signal for action of some type. When in doubt or overwhelmed, take a break and 80/20 both business and personal activities and relationships. 

9. Ignoring the social rewards of life. Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work. Happiness shared in the form of friendships and love is happiness multiplied.

Based on everything I’ve seen, a simple recipe can work: focus on what’s in front of you, design great days to create a great life, and try not to make the same mistake twice. That’s it. If you really want extra credit, try not to be a dick, and you’ll be a Voltron-level superstar. 

The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. 

Feeling as though you are trying too hard indicates that your priorities, technique, focus, or mindfulness is off. Take it as a cue to reset, not to double down. And take comfort in the fact that, whenever in doubt, the answer is probably hidden in plain sight. 

What would this look like if it were easy? 

In a world where nobody really knows anything, you have the incredible freedom to continually reinvent yourself and forge new paths, no matter how strange. 

Embrace your weird self. 

There is no one right answer . . . only better questions.

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”​
― Robert Frost

1. Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? 

2. Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?

The most important actions are never comfortable. Fortunately, it is possible to condition yourself to discomfort and overcome it. I’ve trained myself to propose solutions instead of ask for them, to elicit desired responses instead of react, and to be assertive without burning bridges. To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

"What would this look like if it were easy?" is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question. It’s easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you’re not redlining, you’re not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the process. But what happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain? Sometimes, we find incredible results with ease instead of stress. Sometimes, we “solve” the problem by completely reframing it.

Author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, early-stage investor, host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (1B+ downloads), and collector of the strange.

How can we reframe problems to find solutions with ease?

What are some examples of elegance in problem-solving?

What are some best practices for elegant problem-solving?

Excellence is the next five minutes, improvement is the next five minutes, happiness is the next five minutes. 

This doesn’t mean you ignore planning. 

I encourage you to make huge, ambitious plans. Just remember that the big-beyond-belief things are accomplished when you deconstruct them into the smallest possible pieces and focus on each “moment of impact,” one step at a time. 

I’ve had a life full of doubts . . . mostly for no good reason. 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. 

As Patton Oswalt put it, “My favorite failure is every time I ever ate it onstage as a comedian. Because I woke up the next day and the world hadn’t ended.” 

And if it seems like the world has ended, perhaps it’s just the world forcing you to look through a different, better door. As Brandon Stanton put it, “Sometimes you need to allow life to save you from what you want.” 

Keep your eye on the ball, feel what you need to feel, and adapt as you go. Then the game of life will take care of itself.

Jamie Foxx is incredibly confident. As one of his close friends described to me: “Even when things go a little south, he ALWAYS makes you feel like he has everything under control. I see a lot of people in his circle gravitate toward him for that confidence, myself included.” 

In my interview with him, I asked Jamie how he teaches confidence to his children, and he said that he asks his daughters to explore their fears with the question, “What’s on the other side of fear?” 

His answer is always, “Nothing.” 

He elaborates: “People are nervous for no reason, because no one’s gonna come out and slap you or beat you up. . . . When we talk about fear or a lack of being aggressive [holding someone back], it’s in your head. Not everybody is going to be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person’s fears. If you start early, if they are a shy person, they won’t be as shy if you keep instilling those things.” 

Look at whatever you’re afraid of and ask, “What is on the other side of fear, if I push through this?” The answer is generally nothing. There are few or no negative consequences, or they’re temporary.

Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has said that “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” Substitute “master learner” for “novel,” and you have my philosophy of life. Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.

"And then one day
One magic day he passed my way
While we spoke of many things
Fools and Kings
This he said to me:
'The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.'" 
— “Nature Boy” by eden ahbez, first performed by Nat King Cole

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard Feynman

This quote was featured in 5-Bullet Friday, my free email newsletter. Each week, I share one carefully selected quote in addition to four short bullets about other interesting things I’ve discovered. You can sign up here for free:

Open article:  by instagram.com • 1 min read

If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time.

“If we can forgive what’s been done to us… If we can forgive what we’ve done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.” — Chuck Palahniuk


I’m asked “How do I find a mentor?” all the time.

I’ve never had a good answer. The sad fact is this: people you want as mentors don’t want to view themselves as pro-bono life coaches. So what to do?

First, change the question. Perhaps it’s a cliche to say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, but it’s a prescription in disguise. Here, the better question is “How do I become an ideal apprentice?”

The below blog post explores examples of world-class apprentices and how you can emulate them. Once you do that, growth is a foregone conclusion.

https://lnkd.in/gbs3DP7 


tim.blog • 10 min read

The Magic of Apprenticeship - A How-To Guide - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

There is much to be said for the power of money as currency (I’m a fan myself), but adding more of it just isn’t the answer as often as we’d like to think. 

In part, it’s laziness. “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: “John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant e-mail to reply to before calling the prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!” 

Busy yourself with the routine of the money wheel, pretend it’s the fix-all, and you artfully create a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing just how pointless it is. 

Deep down, you know it’s all an illusion, but with everyone participating in the same game of make-believe, it’s easy to forget. 

The problem is more than money.

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”
​— Roger Ebert

Why is contributing joy to the world important?

Why is it important to make ourselves and others happy?

How does making others less happy relate to crime?

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