10 years ago, Tim Ferriss walked into Google & revealed exactly how to cage the monkey mind that is destroying your life every passing day:
1. The real training is in the small embarrassments. We do not rise to the level of our hopes. We fall to the level of our training. If you cannot handle small moments of public embarrassment you will not have the backbone to make big decisions under real pressure.
2. Seneca practiced poverty once a month. He would wear rough clothing, eat the simplest food, and ask himself is this the condition I so feared. Tim does one three day water fast every month and one seven to ten day fast every quarter for the same reason. Once you know the worst case is survivable you stop fearing it.
3. The monkey mind is not a dialogue. It is a stern and irritating roommate in your head that never shuts up. The morning journal is not about producing writing. It is about giving that roommate a two dimensional prison so it stops playing on repeat for the rest of the day.
4. The Five Minute Journal takes two and a half minutes in the morning and two and a half at night. The morning portion is a gratitude and planning exercise. The evening portion is a performance review. The ROI on those five minutes is higher than almost anything else Tim does.
5. Depression is an obsession with the past. Anxiety is an obsession with the future. High achievers almost always skew toward anxious future focus. Without a deliberate gratitude practice they hit goal after goal and feel nothing because they are already racing toward the next one.
6. The single biggest difference between the top quartile of performers and the top one percent is the degree to which they can identify their goals and maintain focus on them. Everything else is secondary to that one thing.
7. Humility does not require willpower. It requires designing the right environment. Every day Tim tries to be the weakest person in the room at something. At 15 in Japan he thought he was a judo star until a guy forty pounds lighter destroyed him in seven seconds. Then he trained at a school that produced Olympic gold medalists and got demolished by twelve year olds for months. He came out the other end completely transformed.
8. More than eighty percent of the world class performers Tim has interviewed across every field have a daily meditation practice. Some do not call it meditation but they all have something that functions the same way. Amelia Boone, the greatest female obstacle racer alive, sings the same song to herself on loop for hours. Arnold Schwarzenegger did transcendental meditation for a year and said the benefits persisted for decades after he stopped.
9. A high percentage of the successful men Tim has interviewed over fifty skip breakfast entirely. Pavel Tsatsouline, the man who brought kettlebells to America, answered what did you have for breakfast with a single word. Coffee.
10. What matters is not having a specific routine. It is having a routine. Whatever it is. The goal is to preserve your decision making and creativity for the things that actually require them. Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day. That was not a fashion choice. It was an energy allocation strategy.
11. Tim treats his entire life as two week experiments and six month projects. A reliable five year plan almost by definition requires you to set goals below your current capabilities. He is unwilling to do that so he does not plan that way.
12. The most successful people he has interviewed are not naive optimists. They budget for the downside. Richard Branson's real skill is figuring out the maximum he can lose and the maximum time he can lose before committing to anything. Once you realize the worst case is reversible the risk disappears.
13. The podcast succeeded because Tim knew he had a guaranteed audience of one. He was building something he could not find anywhere else. Every book came from the same place. When designing for a market things fail. When solving his own problem things work.
14. He committed to doing six podcast episodes before deciding whether to continue. If you only do one you will quit. The learning curve does not hockey stick until at least six. The survival of the project depended entirely on that pre-commitment.
15. Email is not a priority system it is other people's priority system for your time. Tim batches email offline so he is not doing whack-a-mole where sending two emails generates five back. He also uses if-then lines in every email he sends. It takes thirty extra seconds and eliminates twenty rounds of back and forth.
16. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence or busyness. Holding a grudge about someone not replying means you are carrying imaginary shrapnel like acid in a vessel. You are the only one harmed by it.
17. For longevity Tim does regular extended fasting to purge precancerous cells combined with hyperbaric oxygen at two and a half atmospheres three times a week. By forty almost everyone has precancerous cells. The goal is not uncontrolled growth and fasting addresses the metabolic conditions that allow that.
18. For insomnia the two things that helped him most were morning meditation to quiet the machinery before the day starts and reading fiction before bed to shift from problem solving mode into story consuming mode. The monkey mind cannot solve problems it does not know it is supposed to be solving.
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