Modeling Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss has been one of my best teachers because he didn’t just teach me new things but also how to think better. Whenever I find someone who excels in some area of life, I try to figure out what makes them tick. The following are some of the best tips I have picked up from his interviews and articles from around the web.
Lives in: San Francisco, CA
Computer: Macbook Air
Phone: iPhone 5

Favorite Tools

B. Goode handmade knife from North Carolina. It works for everything. The ESEE-3 is an easier-to-find alternative.
blue, lint-free surgical huck towels

Apps

Writing: Scrivener (Word alternative)
Note Taking: Evernote
Time: RescueTime
Email: Gmail + The Email Game + Nudgemail
To Dos: Post-its and 3×5 index cards
Habits: Lift
Language Learning: DuoLingo

 

Services

Odd Jobs: Task Rabbit
Taxi: Uber

 

Tools

Coffee Maker: Aero Press
Knife: $12 Rada Cutlery Chef’s Dicer
Tea:yerba mate tea  Cruz de Malta (con palo)

 

How He works

- Standing desk or at a bar
- Headphones on and music playing (Federico Aubele)
-10pm-5am writing marathons on a deadline. His constant late-night companions are Casino Royale and Shawn of the Dead

 

Favorite Quotes:

You are the average of the five people you associate with the most.
Of all the things you can do with your life I think the highest leverage activity is to increase your learning ability.

 

Other Quotes:

1. Technology is a wonderful slave and a terrible master
2. Productivity is input to output ratio
3. An entrepreneur shifts resources from low to high economic value. An entrepreneur is not a business owner. He is a person who makes things happen.
4. Effective>Efficient. Effective is doing important things, Efficient is doing a thing quickly
5. What gets measured gets managed
6. What we fear most is what we most need to do
7. Go for home runs, everyone else is going for base hits. Seize the day and live now.
8. Gratitude is a prescription I give myself as a daily practice
9. Adversity does not build character is reveals character. (I think it gives opportunity to build character)

 

Most Interesting Ideas:

1. 3 Currencies: income, time, location (or attention)
2. Reading a book is not spending time/money/attention but investing it.
3. He values his blog most for his relationship with readers and access to hard to reach people through having the blog
4. Opposite of David Allen, he likes top down approach of be effective first, then be efficient with organizing
5. Real experts aren’t afraid to simplify. Fake experts who want to be “high priests of the bloggosphere” complicate because they lack depth and bredth of knowledge.
6. Simplify
7. To have good thigs happen to you you need to be able to let small bad things happen.

 

Daily Habits:

1.Have an interesting conversation every day
2. Express gratitude for 3 things when he wakes up and 3 before bed
3. He puts on his dog tags when he wakes up and before he goes to sleep he takes them off and puts them on his laptop.

 

A Day In The Life Of Tim Ferriss

• Wake up
• 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking
• Brew pu-erh tea
• Meditate for 4-5 minutes while tea brews
• Drink tea while doing 60 minutes of non-internet-based work
• Small breakfast (eg. eggs, lentils, spinach)
• Work for 60-120 minutes
• Light workout (eg. kettlebell work)
• Lunch (eg. Mexican restaurant – beef, pinto beans, salsa, & guacamole)
• More work
• Light dinner at 6pm
• Train sometime between 7-11pm (for optimal pain tolerance)
• Post-workout meal
• Bedtime
• Rinse and repeat…

 

Tim Ferriss’ 5-minute Meditation Strategy

1. Choose one song (4-5 minutes long)
2. Sit on a cushion with back against the wall
3. Breathe deeply and slowly
4. Inhalation = visualize vibrant green air
5. Exhalation = visualize grey air (stress and anxiety)
6. During inhalation, focus on all of the things you’re grateful for in life (family, friends, significant other, career opportunities, roof over your head, etc)
7. Repeat to yourself… “I have everything I need and I have plenty of time” over and over until it sinks in and anxiety lifts

Weekly/Monthly Habits:

1. 2-3 Long dinners per week (best predictor of happiness [questionable])
2. 80/20 analysis (biweekly) – look at 20% of people and activities that cause 80% of pleasure and 80% of pain/stress. Do the same analysis of people and activities in terms of how they take up your time. Go on diet for 48 hours afterwards where you cut out the painful people, activities, and time wasting people and activities.Write out a to do list and not to do list and circle the  1-2 people and 1-2 activities that if you do more of that it will be a force multiplier for the next 2 weeks.
3. Fear setting (biweekly/as needed)- look at the top thing you didn’t do over the last 2 weeks and identify the fear behind it. Set up a piece of paper with 3 columns. First column describe the worst thing that could happen (the fear plays out in worst way). Second column how you can minimize those problems. Third column how you could recover and get back to where you are now if worst played out.

 

Identity:

Teacher (he thought he would teach 9 or 10 grade), investor, but experimenter at heart
He gets excited by the hard work of deconstructing skills and then making others better at those skills than he is himself

 

Book Recommendations:

Writing

On Writing- Stephen King
On Writing Well – William Zinsser
Bird By Bird
Letters to a Fiction Writer
John McFee – Author/Writing Teacher at Princeton, model for writing

Poe Bronson – advice: when you get writers block, write about what pisses you off

Life Changing Books For Tim

1. How to Make Millions with Your Ideas – Dan Kennedy – creative and out of the box thinking to be successful in biz, how to be daring and unconventional in biz. Standout concept – informational marketing – taking expertise and turning it into a product. (read at age 16).

2. Vagabonding – Rolf Potts

Marketing
1,000 True Fans
22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The Truth About Social Media Marketing – Tim Orielly


Public Relations
101 Book Series – Rick Frishman (find real title)


Negotiation
Getting Past No
Secrets of Power Negotiation – get audio version bc you learn alot from the voice intonation, ect
Venture Deals- great book for learning how to structure deals


Other Books:
Guerilla Financing
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice by Dennis Kimbro

 

Strategies

Life Strategies


1. Follow Your Fears
2. Ponder what you will regret not doing on your deathbed
3. Only implement one new habit at a time
4. The good life is a balance between achievement and appreciation (I don’t recc modeling this belief, but its good stepping stone if you are just focused on achievement right now)
5. Framework for ultimate success in life: Ben Franklin’s Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
6. Retirement will not solve your problems, money will not solve your problems. You simply trade up for a different set of problems. If you expect this and view them as challenges that will cause you to grow then you will ultimately be more effective at achieving your goals (he calls this practical pessimism).
7. He reads letters from a stoic when he is feeling overwhelmed.


Teaching Strategies
1. Figure out why and when people fail (failure points) and prevent them
2. Wants to make himself obsolete as quickly as possible and make the reader an independent thinker/learner


Marketing Strategies
1. Marketing is finding 1k customers (evangelist early adopters) and then creating the ideal product for them
2. Copywriting is a valuable skill (one to many leverage)
3. 2 Main Methods: Paid Aquisition and Public Relations
4. Use Direct Response Mail ad techniques to measure results from all marketing and split test


Publishing Books Strategies
1. See His interview with ramit sethi on self publishing
2. Traditional publishing better for getting on NYT best sellers list
3. “Carpet Bomb (not his words)” the internet (blogs/news media) for a book launch
4. He ran the 4 hour chef like a startup. He had 20-40 people working on it and split it into silos. 4 hc site, launch, editing, sidebars, ect. All in basecamp.
5. Used skitch for editing and screen flow instead of typing out emails.
6. You need to have a recipe or operational manual so that 5 outsourcers can get you lots of interviews.
7. His goal is to make a book that redefines a genre and is a category killer that stays on the best seller list for 5 years.
8. He is ok with not being 100% in all categories of his life. His book is his main thing so he goes the extra mile, that last 5% (working until hes “bleeding out his eyeballs) to make an excellent book. This is how he gets leverage in the world, so it is important to go all in. Have this approach to one thing and be able to say no to other opportunities.


Networking Strategies
1. Meet thought leaders and bloggers with 100k+ readers
2. Meet in person (lowest traffic channel for meeting bloggers/important people)
3. Go to conferences to meet bloggers (Do your homework/lots of gruntwork in the beginning)
4. Sit in on sessions, approach moderator at end of session and tell them about his book (4hww) and ask who he should meet
5. Ask lots of questions and wait for blogger to ask what he is doing
6. Explain book and then offered to send free book with 10 pages/1 or 2 chapters post it noted for them to read. Only offered if they seemed interested.
7. People have to trust the messenger before they trust the message
8. He looked for smaller thought leader blogs which were on the blog rolls of the bigger blogs
9. When you get advice from a potential mentor/blogger the best way to grow the relationship is to put their advice into action and share the results with them
10. Crash a conference by hanging out at a lounge/bar that doesn’t require a badge to get it but is close to the action
11. Asking Advice Email Script
Keep it short, no hard sell
Hi X,
Establish common ground, acknowledge out of left field, I read your piece on Y.
I would love to have your advice on this one question: Q
I totally  understand if you don’t have time to respond but even 1 sentence would mean the world to me.
Sincerely,
Tim
12. Nudgemail – add 2days@nudgemail.com to the bcc field of an email you send someone and you will get a reminder to follow up with them in 2 days. You can use any timer period before the @ and it will work. It is a totally free service.


Investing Strategies

1. Role Models:
Peter Theil and Mike Maples, “Micro-Cap” Strategy
2. Set the right terms with a lawyer – “You can set the price if I can set the terms” Henry Ford
3. dont be a vc unless you have an info advantage over other vcs
4. the best investors invest in founders more than businesses. (if the first biz the founder starts fails, you get first dibs on his next project)


Negotiation Strategies
1. He likes live negotiation
2. Do dry runs beforehand. know all your decision trees.
3. You dont get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. In all relationships.
4. You must get good at empathetic thinking and creative deal making


Identifying All Star Founder Talent to Invest In Startup
1. they should be experienced in high stress environments where they experienced constant failure (sports [helped Tim], previous startup or sales)
2. Do a Beer Test/Mall Test a. do you want to get a beer with him? If no, don’t invest. b. In the mall which do you do? 1. excitedly walk over and say hi and want to talk/chat 2. Wave  and say hi 3. Avoid eye contact and pretend you don’t see them. Only invest in the first one.
3. They have a keen understanding of the competitive landscape, a fairly clearly defined problem, a very clearly defined customer and a basic understanding of the economics of the biz


Customer Service
37 Signals Approach or Satisfaction Approach


Startup Strategies
1. Margin Manifesto – get to profit asap
2. Get profit first, then scale revenue
3. Focus on 1 metrics: Cost per aquisition and lifetime customer value
4. Profile customers with 80/20 analysis
5. You must know how to bootstrap, negotiate, and sell (get something from someone).
6. The same things that makes a great bootstrap founder makes a great vc backed founder.
7. Deal making, sales, and negotiation are all important and related.
8. Work your ass off on the few critical things that matter.


Assistant Strategies
His assistant is a woman who lives off an island in Vancouver Canada
She filters his emails using a set of rules he created and put in a word doc
She filters the emails down to 10 action items and gives them to him over phone
He batches his phone calls for a single afternoon and spends 2+ hours on the phone while going on a long walk. He gets very good at voicemails and emails. He leaves next steps in the email so that he can cut down email by half by pre-empting both sets of options in advance.


Outsourcing Strategies
He uses eLance
He used AskSunday (outdated?)


Email Strategies
He trains himself to only check email at certain times
Get out of email when collaborating, use slide rocket, concept share or a spreadsheet

Favorite Polymaths and his thoughts on them

this is the era of polymaths. people specialize like insects and then they stop exploring.

Richard Feynman – interested in bongos and safe cracking
Ben Franklin – example of the power of the amateur

Jim Khana

Ken block

Ray Curzweil

 

Friends:

Noah Kagan – Likes his market validation idea, was on creativelive class interview

Matt Mullenway – created wordpress, is a coder, good profile on him in Inc

Ed Packard – Author of choose your own adventure book series

 

Uncatagorized Ideas:

1. In the west we don’t have enough appreciation for what we already have. Don’t speed read poetry. Balance efficiency and joy (in present/process).

2. Internet prediction – it will become like cable TV with 500 oprahs in 500 different verticals

3. The internet is a full contact sport.

4. Fear – watching his parents die

5. In pit of despair he takes out his dog tags, which say “Never, ever, ever give up” Winston Churchill

6. He has a sign in his house that says “simplify.”