Timothy Ferriss Quotes

I tend to split my activities into fun, income and legacy. The number of things in that finance bucket is pretty few and far between and doesn't consume much time at all.

Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren't lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

Lazy: A Manifesto

When you're the first in a new category, promote the category. In essence, you have no competition. DEC told its prospects why they ought to buy a minicomputer, not a DEC minicomputer. In

As far as income goes, there are three currencies in the world; most people ignore two. The three currencies are time, income and mobility, in descending order of importance. Most people focus exclusively on income.

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. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.

What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn't matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn't matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.

Hard feelings pass. Don't suffer fools or you'll become one.

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger

We should remember the warning of the wise Grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "You must choose, but choose wisely, for as the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you."
Choose the highest-yield material and you can be an idiot and enjoy stunning success. Choose poorly and, as the Grail knight implied, you're screwed no matter what. You'll chase your own tail for years.

I use [Palumbo's] protein powder, by Species Nutrition. Every morning, I roll downstairs and: 2 scoops of whey protein [Isolyze], ice, a bunch of powdered Starbucks coffee, some macadamia nut oil, and I make a shake. That's the start.

The first is the result of a decision to act - to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it's impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth - to not do something - wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.

Miller, BJ: "'Don't believe everything you think.

the most important thing was that they have an answer. A) It shows the courage to be able to address it, and B) it shows self-awareness that 'I might be top peer-rated and have this great career, but there's somebody out there, and here's what they'd probably say. . . .' They'd say I was self-serving at one time, or I appear too good on paper, or I'm lazy on these types of physical training, or whatever the case may be. Show me that, if you identify it, you're working on it. I don't care what you think about it. I just want to know that you're aware of how other people view you.

I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.

Oh, that wasn't a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct. I really can.

By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves 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 email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!

The Standard Pace is for chumps.

A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.

Options - the ability to choose - is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money - a lot more money - by doing half of what you are doing now.

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.

Neil Gaiman's "Make Good Art" commencement speech, which he gave at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. I've watched the video dozens of times on YouTube during rough periods. Our mutual favorite portion is "The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right." And, yes,

What would this look like if it were easy?

One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.

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.

I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.

But the truth is, you can't really earn trust over time with people without being somewhat vulnerable [first].

I didn't survive, I prepared." Nelson Mandela's answer when Tony asked him, "Sir, how did you survive all those years in prison?

The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded ... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.

As author P. J. O'Rourke puts it: Veal is a very young beef and, like a very young girlfriend, it's cute but boring and expensive.

I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. - DAVE BARRY

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.

Success" need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This

The worst that could happen wasn't crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.

What are the top-three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I've been productive?

Career specialists can't externalize what they've internalized. Second nature is hard to teach.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.

Stay humble or get humbled.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

Pricing low is shortsighted, because someone else is always willing to sacrifice more profit margin and drive you both bankrupt.

Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.

The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'

Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.

I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.

If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. - WARREN G. BENNIS,

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them. - BILL COSBY

Accept reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem, and turn it into something good. Go forward. And, if you are part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.

Lifestyle Design is thus not interested in creating an excess of idle time, which is poisonous, but the positive use of free time, defined simply as doing what you want as opposed to what you feel obligated to do.

Love, be loved, and never stop learning -

CREATIVITY IS AN INFINITE RESOURCE. THE MORE YOU SPEND, THE MORE YOU HAVE." This

Having a size 9 foot is fantastic because almost all of the shoe companies do their prototyping in size 9, so if you visit a place like Nike headquarters, you can try every sort of wacky, out-there model.

The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who've maximized 1 or 2 strengths.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

At the individual level Swaraj is vitally connected with the capacity for dispassionate self-assessment, ceaseless self-purification and growing self-reliance. ... It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.

I really feel like knife skills - not just in the kitchen, but in life - are really critical.

So I think, every day, it's something to reflect on and think about 'How do I become less competitive in order that I can become more successful?

For podcasting: In the first 3 to 9 months, you should be honing your craft and putting out increasingly better work. "Good content is the best SEO," as Robert Scoble originally told me. You

We are simultaneously gods and worms." - Abraham Maslow

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.

People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.

take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don't need to know where it's all going.

My first job. Ah, the memories. I'm hired for minimum wage as the cleaner at an ice cream parlor and quickly realize that the big boss's methods duplicate effort. I do it my way, finish in one hour instead of eight, and spend the rest of the time reading kung-fu magazines and practicing karate kicks outside. I am fired in a record three days, left with the parting comment, "Maybe someday you'll understand the value of hard work." It seems I still don't.

You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.

Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.

Many a false step was made by standing still.

What gets measured gets managed. - PETER DRUCKER, management theorist, author

Note to the ladies, for whom peanut butter seems to be like crack: the tablespoon scoop should be no more than a small mound, not half the jar balanced on a spoon.

Law 11: "No" simply means begin again at one level higher.

No one owes you anything.

if we move beyond the education bubble that we're living in today, the future will be one in which people can speak about these things more clearly.

BLAMING IDIOTS FOR interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children - they can't help it. It's their nature. Then again, I had (who am I kidding - and have), 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.

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.

Never, ever give up.

I started using Twitter about year after its very early adoption and ended up investing in it around that same time. I'm involved with the Tech scene and companies ranging from Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.

There were three reasons why we survived: We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully.

The top 1% often succeed despite how they train, not because of it. Superior genetics, or a luxurious full-time schedule, make up for a lot.

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.

As chef Mehdi Chellaoui says, "I use lemon like I use salt." Mario Batali would agree: if something is missing, it's probably acid.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. - PAULA POUNDSTONE

The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It's just like building muscles.

As a builder, as an entrepreneur, how can you create something for someone else if you don't have even enough glancing familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

How has being "realistic" or "responsible" kept you from the life you want? How has doing what you "should" resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?

What are some of the choices you've made that made you who you are?

People really do think they have to choose between high stress and high reward jobs, and low stress and low reward jobs.

If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.

Being busy is not the same as being productive.

One evening, intending to ask my host mother to wake me the next morning (okosu), I ask her to violently rape me (okasu). She is very confused.

It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter - nothing can justify that sacrifice.

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.