## Highlights My goal is to learn things once and use them forever. (Location 283) “What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?” (Location 335) Thirty minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling (page 224) could change your life. On (Location 341) “Tool” is defined broadly in this book. It includes routines, books, common self-talk, supplements, favorite questions, and much more. (Location 351) More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice (Location 355) Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Influence, and Man’s Search for Meaning, among others (Location 358) The habit of listening to single songs on repeat for focus (page 507) (Location 359) page 628) or variants thereof Almost every guest has been able to take obvious “weaknesses” and turn them into huge competitive advantages (see Arnold Schwarzenegger, page 176) (Location 362) My goal is for each reader to like 50%, love 25%, and never forget 10%. (Location 373) RULE SKIP, BUT DO SO INTELLIGENTLY. All that said, take a brief mental note of anything you skip. (Location 378) If you decide to flip past something, note it, return to it later at some point, and ask yourself, “Why did I skip this?” Did it offend you? Seem beneath you? Seem too difficult? And did you arrive at that by thinking it through, or is it a reflection of biases inherited from your parents and others? Very often, “our” beliefs are not our own. This type of practice is how you create yourself, instead of seeking to discover yourself. (Location 381) Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. Someone else has done your version of “success” before, and often, many have done something similar. (Location 392) You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them. (Location 398) This book is comprised of three sections: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. (Location 403) “I can think” → Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. “I can wait” → Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. “I can fast” → Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance. (Location 476) ✸ Most-gifted or recommended book House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski: “This is a book that you have to hold, because there are parts of it where you need to turn it upside down to read it. (Location 507) Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 (Location 519) Dr. Patrick has published papers on a mechanism by which vitamin D is able to regulate the production of serotonin in the brain and the various implications this may have for early-life deficiency and relevance for neuropsychiatric disorders. (Location 550) Dom suggests a 5-day fast 2 to 3 times per year. (Location 783) (e.g., you must break your fast with shredded cabbage and beets). I now aim for a 3-day fast once per month and a 5- to 7-day fast once per quarter. (Location 807) Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson: Dom has gifted this to seven or eight people over the last year (Location 948) Wim, surfing king Laird Hamilton (page 92), and Tony Robbins (page 210) all use cold exposure as a tool. It can improve immune function, increase fat loss (partially by increasing levels of the hormone adiponectin), and dramatically elevate mood. In fact, Van Gogh was prescribed cold baths twice daily in a psychiatric ward after severing his own ear. (Location 1070) “That you can trust people. You can trust a lot of people. You don’t have to live in fear of strangers. Strangers are just people you haven’t flown yet. It seems crazy to me that, in many cultures, we teach our children to fear and not talk to strangers. (Location 1172) The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: “I love really condensed, shakti [empowerment]-filled, energy-filled statements—something that you can read in a few minutes or you can read for your whole life.” [TF: This little tome is fewer than 100 pages long. Spend the extra $5 for the version with the author’s illustrations.] Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu: Jason travels with this book. “Oftentimes before meditation, I’ll just open it randomly to a page. I read about something and then just have that be what I steep in as I sit.” (See Rick Rubin, page 502, and Joshua Waitzkin, page 577.) When I asked Jason via text which translation he liked, he joked “Tao de Chinga tu madre” (ah, my friends), and then specified: Stephen Mitchell. (Location 1192) “Go to all the meetings you can, even if you’re not invited to them, and figure out how to be helpful. If people wonder why you’re there, just start taking notes. (Location 2927) 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. (Location 2970) “Weirdness is why we adore our friends. . . . Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.” (Location 2976) Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?” (Location 2998) TF: Where can you create a “red team” in your life to stress-test your most treasured beliefs? (See Samy Kamkar, page 427; Stan McChrystal, page 435; and Jocko Willink, page 412.) (Location 3019) “Forward, like: We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We don’t revisit past decisions. (Location 3032) “STRONG VIEWS, LOOSELY HELD” (Location 3035) everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” (Location 3061) “To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.” (Location 3076) I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier, and why you have to eat more, and why you have to struggle more, and why you have to be more disciplined. . . . (Location 3111) due to pressures he’d never felt before. By sheer coincidence, he met a Transcendental Meditation teacher at the beach. “He says, ‘Oh, Arnold, it is not uncommon. It is very common. A lot of people go through this. (Location 3190) Transcendental Meditation (Location 3191) By that time, I felt that, ‘I think I have mastered this. I think that now I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore.’ “Even today, I still benefit from that because I don’t merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem. I take them one challenge at a time. (Location 3197) he is the author of Anything You Want, a collection of short (Location 3223) Derek has read, reviewed, and rank-ordered 200+ books at sivers.org/books. (Location 3225) Buffett’s business partner, and introduced me to the book Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, by Peter Bevelin. (Location 3227) He read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins (page 210) when he was 18, and it changed his life. (Location 3228) “This is the subject of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. There’s the instant, unconscious, automatic thinking and then there’s the slower, conscious, rational, deliberate thinking. I’m really, really into the slower thinking, breaking my automatic responses to the things in my life and slowly thinking through a more deliberate response instead. Then for the things in life where an automatic response is useful, I can create a new one consciously. (Location 3245) TIM: “What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?” DEREK: “Don’t be a donkey.” TIM: “And what does that mean?” DEREK: “Well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing, because they want to do them all: ‘Why do I have to choose? I don’t know what to choose!’ But the problem is, if you’re thinking short-term, then [you act as though] if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another. (Location 3272) You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.” (Location 3282) “Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then, we let these little, mediocre things fill our lives. . . . The problem is, when that occasional, ‘Oh my God, hell yeah!’ thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should, (Location 3304) ‘Busy,’ to me, seems to imply ‘out of control.’ (Location 3309) I think I would make a billboard that says, ‘It Won’t Make You Happy,’ and I would place it outside any big shopping mall or car dealer. (Location 3315) “We could do the math, [but] whatever, 93-something-percent of my huffing and puffing, and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing. . . . [So,] for life, I think of all of this maximization—getting the maximum dollar out of everything, the maximum out of every second, the maximum out of every minute—you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. (Location 3334) I believe you shouldn’t start a business unless people are asking you to. (Location 3349) The best book about this subject is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. His recommendation is to talk to a few people who are currently where you think you want to be and ask them for the pros and cons. Then trust their opinion since they’re right in it, not just remembering or imagining.” (Location 3356) Meditated twice per day for 20 minutes per session, without fail. That marked the first time I’d been able to meditate consistently. (Location 3452) Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “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-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 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. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do. (Location 3465) Matt wrote the majority of the code for WordPress over a year of “polyphasic” sleep: roughly 4 hours of waking, followed by 20 to 30 minutes of sleep, repeated indefinitely. This is nicknamed the “Uberman” protocol. Why did he stop? “I got a girlfriend.” (Location 3508) Matt recommended I read “The Tail End” by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why blog—if you only read one article this month, make it that one. (Location 3537) “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. (Location 3538) I highly recommend reading “The CEO of Automattic on Holding ‘Auditions’ to Build a Strong Team” (Location 3575) read the book Words That Work, written by Republican political strategist Frank Luntz. (Location 3578) So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether that’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing in on who you’re talking to or who you’re with.” (Location 3582) first read Tony Robbins’s Unlimited Power (Location 3633) Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.” (Location 3643) “If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.” (Location 3655) The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself. (Location 3662) in a lowered emotional state, we only see the problems, not solutions. (Location 3672) “Priming” my state is often as simple as doing 5 to 10 push-ups or getting 20 minutes of sun exposure (Location 3678) Or is it possible I just need to fix my biochemistry?” I’ve wasted a lot of time journaling on “problems” when I just needed to eat breakfast sooner, do 10 push-ups, or get an extra hour of sleep. Sometimes, you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower. (Location 3681) Cold-water plunge (I use a quick cold shower, which could be just 30 to 60 seconds) Tony follows this with breathing exercises. He does 3 sets of 30 reps. His seated technique is similar to the rapid nasal “breath of fire” in yoga, but he adds in rapid overhead extension of the arms on the inhale, with the elbows dropping down the rib cage on the exhale. Alternative: “Breath walking.” This is vintage Tony, but I still use it quite often when traveling. Simply walk for a few minutes, using a breathing cycle of 4 short inhales through the nose, then 4 short exhales through the mouth. (Location 3688) Following something like the above, Tony does 9 to 10 minutes of what some might consider meditation. To him, however, the objective is very different: It’s about cueing and prompting enabling emotions for the rest of the day. (Location 3692) The first 3 minutes: “Feeling totally grateful for three things. I make sure that one of them is very, very simple: (Location 3695) let gratitude fill my soul, because when you’re grateful, we all know there’s no anger. (Location 3696) The second 3 minutes: “Total focus on feeling the presence of God, if you will, however you want to language that for yourself. But this inner presence coming in, and feeling it heal everything in my body, in my mind, my emotions, my relationships, my finances. I see it as solving anything that needs to be solved. (Location 3698) If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life.” (Location 3703) you don’t have 20 minutes to delve into yourself through meditation, then that means you really need 2 hours.” (Location 3705) TF: Branson also tested with little or no risk. In Losing My Virginity, (Location 3715) Favorite documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly by Werner Herzog is Casey’s favorite documentary, made in 1997. This is about a U.S. fighter pilot in Vietnam who gets shot down in his very first mission, and is trapped as a POW for a number of years. This documentary will bring you to your knees. Any time you are having a bad day (or you think you have it hard), watch this movie and you will understand what it means to survive. (Location 3770) TF: How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.” (Location 3795) “You realize that you will never be the best-looking person in the room. You’ll never be the smartest person in the room. You’ll never be the most educated, the most well-versed. You can never compete on those levels. But what you can always compete on, the true egalitarian aspect to success, is hard work. You can always work harder than the next guy.” (Location 3801) “What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. (Location 3817) “You can sacrifice quality for a great story. . . . I’ll watch shaky camera footage now . . . so long as it’s a great story and I’m engaged.” (Location 3847) “Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.” (Location 3884) Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull. Could bitching and moaning on paper for 5 minutes each morning change your life? As crazy as it seems, I believe the answer is yes. (Location 3911) Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford. (Location 3935) GIVE THE MIND AN OVERNIGHT TASK On a daily basis, Reid jots down problems in a notebook that he wants his mind to work on overnight. Bolding below is mine, as I think the wording is important. (Location 3947) Josh Waitzkin (page 577) has a near-identical habit, but he’s particular about when he writes things down—right after dinner and not before bed. (Location 3955) Ideally, Reid budgets 60 minutes for the following: “The very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to sit down and work on that problem [I’ve set the day before] because that’s when I’m freshest. (Location 3958) usually do it before I shower, because frequently, if I go into the shower, I’ll continue to think about it.” (Location 3961) “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison (Location 3962) ‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’ (Location 3977) His answers are worth reading a few times each, asking yourself afterward, “If I believed this, how would it affect my decisions in the next week? Over the next 6 to 12 months?” (Location 3990) So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? (Location 3994) The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” (Location 4014) There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people all get tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers. (Location 4022) “If you’re a competitive chess player, you might get very good at chess but neglect to develop other things because you’re focused on beating your competitors, rather than on doing something that’s important or valuable. So I’ve become, I think, much more self-aware over the years about the problematic nature of a lot of the competition. (Location 4043) 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?’ (Location 4046) We always need to ask: Is this true? And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: ‘Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.’ (Location 4052) The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market? The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? (Location 4058) Keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better? “Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep track of the other stuff? To keep track of all the times it worked? All the times we took a risk? All the times we were able to brighten someone else’s day? When we start doing that, we can redefine ourselves as people who are able to make an impact on the world. It took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me. (Location 4094) Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule, How to Stay Motivated, and Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar: (Location 4169) The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander: “. . . . which is very hard to find on audio and is totally worth seeking out.” (Location 4174) TF: If you can’t get 10 good ideas, get 20 ideas. (Location 4246) 10 old ideas I can make new 10 ridiculous things I would invent (e.g., the smart toilet) 10 books I can write (The Choose Yourself Guide to an Alternative Education, etc). 10 business ideas for Google/Amazon/Twitter/etc. 10 people I can send ideas to 10 podcast ideas or videos I can shoot (e.g., Lunch with James, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat) 10 industries where I can remove the middleman 10 things I disagree with that everyone else assumes is religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors, etc.) 10 ways to take old posts of mine and make books out of them 10 people I want to be friends with (then figure out the first step to contact them) 10 things I learned yesterday 10 things I can do differently today 10 ways I can save time 10 things I learned from X, where X is someone I’ve recently spoken with or read a book by or about. I’ve written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs, Charles Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc. 10 things I’m interested in getting better at (and then 10 ways I can get better at each one) 10 things I was interested in as a kid that might be fun to explore now (Like, maybe I can write that “Son of Dr. Strange” comic I’ve always been planning. And now I need 10 plot ideas.) 10 ways I might try to solve a problem I have This has saved me with the IRS countless times. Unfortunately, the Department of Motor Vehicles is impervious to my superpowers. (Location 4256) Haven’t Found Your Overarching, Single Purpose? Maybe You Don’t Have To. “Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.” (Location 4283) MBA—$30K per year Commit to spending $2,500 per month on testing different “muses” intended to be sources of automated income. See The 4-Hour Workweek or Google “muse examples Ferriss” as a starting point. (Location 4438) Commit, within financial reason, to action instead of theory. Learn to confront the challenges of the real world, rather than resort to the protective womb of academia. (Location 4441) Scott believes there are six elements of humor: naughty, clever, cute, bizarre, mean, and recognizable. You have to have at least two dimensions to succeed. (Location 4467) In other words, you choose options that allow you to inevitably “succeed” over time, as you build assets that carry over to subsequent projects. (Location 4486) How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. (Location 4490) “All you do is you pick a goal and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form, like ‘I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut,’ for example. And you do that every day. (Location 4520) I think what matters is the degree of focus and the commitment you have to that focus. Because the last affirmation I mentioned was primarily done in my head while driving, but continuously for years, about 3 years. (Location 4532) “But you can use these affirmations, presumably—this is just a hypothesis—to focus your mind and your memory on a very specific thing. (Location 4541) “There’s a process where once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. You may use different words for this, but I know you do it. So you empty it, and then you flood it with new input that’s not the old input. (Location 4575) I would consider myself a world champion at avoiding stress at this point in dozens of different ways. A lot of it is just how you look at the world, but most of it is really the process of diversification. (Location 4589) Diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.” (Location 4593) But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first (Location 4598) always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill. (Location 4606) ✸ What’s your self-talk just before dropping into an Olympic run? “I say, ‘At the end of the day, who cares? What’s the big deal? (Location 4629) FIFTY SHADES OF CHICKEN That’s the title of Shaun’s “most-gifted” book. (Location 4700) I constantly recommend that entrepreneurs read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, whether they are first-time founders or serial home-run hitters launching a new product. (Location 4706) If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in. (Location 4726) In other words, what category is this new product first in? (Location 4735) “CREATIVITY IS AN INFINITE RESOURCE. THE MORE YOU SPEND,THE MORE YOU HAVE.” This was Chase paraphrasing a quote from Maya Angelou and discussing how creativity and meditation are similar. (Location 4775) Both Chase and Derek Sivers (page 184) are big fans of the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. (Location 4825) don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do.” (Location 4837) ‘Don’t stress about it, it’s all going to work out in the end.’ (Location 4865) Ramit convinced me to send plain-text email for my 5-Bullet Friday newsletter, which became one of the most powerful parts of my business within 6 months. (Location 4896) Ramit studies behavioral psychology and the elements of persuasion that appear hardwired. One of his most-gifted books is Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, and his favorite copywriting book is an oldie: The Robert Collier Letter Book, originally published in 1931. (Location 4903) “I GIVE AWAY 98% OF MY MATERIAL FOR FREE AND, THEN, MANY OF MY FLAGSHIP COURSES ARE EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE. IN FACT, 10 TO 100 TIMES WHAT MY COMPETITORS CHARGE.” (Location 4918) I write on topics that A) I enjoy and want to learn more about, and that B) I think will attract intelligent, driven, and accomplished people. This is what allows ultra-premium. Ultra-premium means: Once in a blue moon, I offer a high-priced and very limited product or opportunity, such as an event with 200 seats at $7.5K to $10K per seat. I can sell out a scarce, ultra-premium opportunity within 48 hours with a single blog post, as I did with my “Opening the Kimono” (OTK) event in Napa. Of course, then you have to overdeliver. My measurement of customer satisfaction? The Facebook group established for attendees is still active . . . 5 years later. (Location 4922) love a book by Atul Gawande titled The Checklist Manifesto. (Location 4935) Google “entrepreneurial bus count” for a good article on why checklists can save your startup. (Location 4938) author of Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, (Location 4947) suggest first reading my friend A.J. Jacobs’s Esquire piece titled “I Think You’re Fat.” (Location 4951) Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” (Location 4953) A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.” (Location 4964) If you have roughly 1,000 fans like this (also known as superfans), you can make a living—if you are content to make a living, but not a fortune. (Location 4970) First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. (Location 4972) Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percentage of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. (Location 4974) for every single true fan, you might have 2 or 3 regular fans. (Location 4987) True fans are not only the direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans. (Location 4990) the most obscure, under-selling book, song, or idea is only one click away from the best-selling book, song, or idea. (Location 5002) satisfaction is only one click away. Whatever your interests as a creator are, your 1,000 true fans are one click from you. (Location 5013) Follow-Up Questions When Something Interesting Comes Up, Perhaps in Passing “How did that make you feel?” “What do you make of that?” TF: I will often say, “Explain that a bit more . . .” or “What did you learn from that?” (Location 5158) “If the old you could see the new you, what would the new you say?” “You seem very confident now. Was that always the case?” “If you had to describe the debate in your head about [X decision or event], how would you describe it?” TF: I often adapt the last to something like “When you do X [or “When Y happened to you”], what does your internal self-talk sound like? What do you say to yourself?” (Location 5162) “WHEN YOU COMPLAIN, NOBODY WANTS TO HELP YOU” (Location 5281) If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people. (Location 5288) PICK THE RIGHT AUDIENCE TO SUCK IN FRONT OF (Location 5296) “the rule of 3 and 10.” “[This effectively means] that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size. (Location 5330) “His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. (Location 5336) the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. (Location 5376) TIM: “But how do you manage the fine line between insisting on high standards and simply being an overbearing asshole?” [Chris now manages a company of 50+ employees.] CHRIS: “The first thing is, on a good day, I will try to step back and say, ‘What context does this person even have, and have I provided appropriate context?’ . . . (Location 5418) Am I basically being unfair because I’m operating from a greater set of information?’” (Location 5423) Think and Grow Rich, Who Moved My Cheese?, Blue Ocean Strategy, Invisible Selling Machine, The Richest Man in Babylon, and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. (Location 5457) For would-be entrepreneurs (he calls them “wantrapreneurs”), or entrepreneurs who’ve grown a little too comfortable, Noah has a recommendation—ask for 10% off of your next few coffees. (Location 5468) “That you should prioritize growing your social following (Instagram, FB, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube). Grow things that you can fully control that directly affect sales, like your email list. ‘Likes’ don’t pay the bills. Sales do.” (Location 5499) Noah is known for his copywriting skills, and he recommends two resources: The Gary Halbert Letter (also The Boron Letters) and Ogilvy on Advertising. (Location 5508) Just blend, drink, and rinse out. (Location 5511) “Imagine you have a large glass jar. Next to it, you have a few large rocks, a small pile of marble-sized pebbles, and a pile of sand. If you put in the sand or pebbles first, what happens? You can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks, then the medium-sized pebbles, and only then the sand, it all fits.” In other words, the minutiae fit around the big things, but the big things don’t fit around the minutiae. (Location 5544) REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE (Location 5548) This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things, and I think that’s something I have not forgotten.” TF: This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s mention of his father on page 573.) (Location 5588) Holiday has written four books, most recently Ego Is the Enemy and The Obstacle Is the Way, which has developed a cult following among NFL coaches, world-class (Location 5613) Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself. (Location 5645) When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong. There’s one fabulous way to work all of that out of your system: Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful, subsume your identity into theirs, and move both forward simultaneously. (Location 5646) It reduces your ego at a critical time in your career, letting you absorb everything you can without the obstructions that block others’ vision and progress. (Location 5651) Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you? The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road. That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others. (Location 5679) The iterations are endless. Maybe it’s coming up with ideas to hand over to your boss. Find people, thinkers, up-and-comers to introduce to each other. Cross wires to create new sparks. Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiencies and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away. In other words, discover opportunities to promote their creativity, find outlets and people for collaboration, and eliminate distractions that hinder their progress and focus. (Location 5689) “Do you really want to engage with people who have infinite time on their hands?” (Yes.) (Location 5732) This process starts with exploring the idea emotionally. Should it pass that hurdle, I then do traditional due diligence, using objective data to validate the entrepreneurs’ assumptions around the quantifiable aspects of the business. So, how does one explore an idea emotionally? (Location 5755) So, how does one explore an idea emotionally? When evaluating a new product, I take the novel features (not every feature) and exhaustively play out how they might impact the emotions of the consumers who use them. After that, I take the same features and consider how they might evolve over time. (Location 5757) Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera; “I think it’s an analogy for that choice we all have in life: Are you going to fulfill your potential? Or, are you just going to give into the peer pressure of the moment and become nothing?” (Location 5809) “Writer’s block does not actually exist. . . . Writer’s block is almost like the equivalent of impotence. It’s performance pressure you put on yourself that keeps you from doing something you naturally should be able to do.” (Location 5832) Open up and be vulnerable with the person you’re going to interview before you start. It works incredibly well. Prior to hitting RECORD, I’ll take 5 to 10 minutes for banter, warmup, sound check, etc. At some point, I’ll volunteer personal or vulnerable information (e.g., how I’ve hated being misquoted in the past, and I know the feeling; how I’m struggling with a deadline based on external pressures, etc.). This makes them much more inclined to do the same later. (Location 5845) It’s always smart, before starting any collaboration, to ask yourself, “What are their incentives and the timelines of their incentives? How do they measure ‘success’? Are we aligned?” (Location 5904) The question I ask whenever I’m straining for extended periods is, “What would this look like if it were easy?” (Location 5951) ✸ Morning routine Every morning, Justin does 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation followed by outdoor kettlebell swings with 24 kg (53 lbs). I do exactly the same thing 2 to 3 times per week, aiming for 50 to 75 repetitions of two-handed swings per The 4-Hour Body. (Location 5970) Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.” (Location 5995) Truth is, young creative minds don’t need more ideas, they need to take more responsibility with the ideas they’ve already got.” (Location 6013) Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life—6 weeks, 4 months, 2 years—to travel the world on your own terms. (Location 6054) And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it. (Location 6060) Peter is one of those guys who, every time you meet them, leave you shaking your head and (productively) asking, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?!” He recently asked me, “What’s your moonshot?” leading me to re-explore many of the questions and concepts in this profile. (Location 6153) think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.” (Location 6156) “WHEN 99% OF PEOPLE DOUBT YOU, YOU’RE EITHER GRAVELY WRONG OR ABOUT TO MAKE HISTORY.” (Location 6158) “I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ (Location 6163) “It’s a children’s story that is the best MBA degree you can read. Between [the concept of] supercredibility and Stone Soup, [you have a great foundation]. (Location 6195) MORNING ROUTINES Peter stretches during his morning shower: (Location 6197) TF: Peter’s breathing exercise focuses on expanding the lungs with fast, large inhales. His affirmational mantra, which he repeats a number of times, is “I am joy. I am love. I am gratitude. I see, hear, feel, and know that the purpose of my life is to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the Earth.” Peter’s breathing is similar to some of Wim Hof’s exercises (page 41), which I now do in a cold shower (state “priming” per Tony Robbins, page 210), right after my morning meditation. As for the flossing-longevity connection, Peter is the first to admit this might be correlation instead of causation: People anal retentive enough to floss regularly probably have other habits that directly contribute to longer life. (Location 6202) Before bed, Peter always reviews his three “wins of the day.” (Location 6209) HOW TO FIND YOUR DRIVING PURPOSE OR MISSION Peter recommends Tony Robbins’s Date with Destiny program, which he feels helps people improve their “operating system.” This is how he developed his affirmational mantra. Peter also poses the following three questions: “What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else? “If Peter Diamandis or Tim Ferriss gave you $1 billion, how would you spend it besides the parties and the Ferraris and so forth? If I asked you to spend $1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue? “Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people? Exposure to things that capture your ‘shower time’ [those things you can’t stop thinking about in the shower]?” (Location 6217) TF: Still struggling with a sense of purpose or mission? Roughly half a dozen people in this book (e.g., Robert Rodriguez) have suggested the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek. (Location 6225) Law 2: When given a choice . . . take both. Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.   SOPHIA AMORUSO Sophia Amoruso (TW/IG: @SOPHIAAMORUSO, GIRLBOSS.COM) is the founder and executive chairman of Nasty Gal, a global online destination for both new and vintage clothing, shoes, and accessories. Founded in 2006, Nasty Gal was named Fastest Growing Retailer in 2012 by Inc. magazine, thanks to its 10,160% three-year growth rate. Sophia has been called “fashion’s new phenom” by Forbes magazine, and she has become one of the most prominent and iconic figures in retail. She recently founded the Foundation, which awards financial grants to women in the worlds of design, fashion, and music. Sophia’s first book,, is a New York Times bestseller and has been published in 15 countries. JUMPING AND BUILDING A PLANE ON THE WAY DOWN “I like to make promises that I’m not sure I can keep and then figure out how to keep them. I think you can will things into happening by just committing to them sometimes. . . . I had started to leave feedback for my customers on eBay saying [things like], ‘Hey, coming soon, nastygalvintage.com.’ [Not long after, I realized], ‘Oh, shit, I better build a website. I better actually do this.’ So I figured it out, launched the website, and when I launched the website, eBay decided to suspend me around the same time. It was not a transition, it was literally: ‘I’m going to try this website thing, and I hope I can go back to eBay if it doesn’t work out.’ It became apparent pretty quickly that that wasn’t going to be an option. I got suspended for leaving the URL in the feedback for the customers.” A DAY THAT ENDS WELL . . . TIM: “When you were CEO of the company, on a day when you look back and you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah, I kicked ass today,’ what did the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like, or what were your morning routines?” SOPHIA: “A day that ends well is one that started with exercise. That’s for sure.” ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “I just really want people to remember that they’re capable of doing everything that the people they admire are doing. Maybe not everything, but—don’t be so impressed. I guess that’s where my head goes. . . . There’s no reason that you can’t have the things that the (Location 6249) B.J. typically spends the first few hours of his day “powering up” and getting in a good mood, until he gets an idea he’s excited about, or until he has so much self-loathing and caffeine that he has to do something about it. (Location 6339) “I find that being in a good mood for creative work is worth the hours it takes to get in a good mood.” (Location 6343) B.J. likes and recommends two podcasts related to debating, the second of which is completely farcical: Intelligence Squared and The Great Debates. (Location 6359) This chapter will teach you how to say “no” when it matters most. It will also explain how I think about investing, overcoming “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and otherwise reducing anxiety. (Location 6395) Are You Doing What You’re Uniquely Capable of, What You Feel Placed Here on Earth to Do? Can You Be Replaced? (Location 6410) Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!”—then my answer is no. (Location 6435) Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in “kinda cool” commitments that will sink the ship. (Location 6446) One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read. (Location 6451) great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there. Large, uninterrupted blocks of time—3 to 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 to 4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1 p.m. (Location 6453) time—3 to 5 hours minimum—create the space needed to find and connect the dots. (Location 6454) Where in your life are you good at moderation? Where are you an all-or-nothing type? Where do you lack a shut-off switch? It pays to know thyself. (Location 6514) Making health 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolutely all-or-nothing. If it’s 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important not to. (Location 6539) If you’re suffering from a feeling of overwhelm, it might be useful to ask yourself two questions: In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract? Am I having a breakdown or a breakthrough? (Location 6603) To me, it means using pain to find clarity. If pain is examined and not ignored, it can show you what to excise from your life. (Location 6608) For me, step one is always the same: Write down the 20% of activities and people causing 80% or more of your negative emotions. (Location 6609) His 2015 TED talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” was among the top 15 most viewed TED talks of 2015. (Location 6672) STARGAZING AS THERAPY “When you are struggling with just about anything, look up. Just ponder the night sky for a minute and realize that we’re all on the same planet at the same time. (Location 6676) “Just the basic joy of smelling a cookie. It smells freaking great. [And it’s like the snowball.] You’re rewarded for being alive and in the moment. Smelling a cookie is not on behalf of some future state. It’s great in the moment, by itself, on behalf of nothing. And this is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is its purposelessness, and just delighting in a wacky fact of perhaps a meaningless universe and how remarkable that is. One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize those little moments.” (Location 6755) “If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.” (Location 6763) “Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.” (Location 6765) Did the person take 10 minutes to do their homework? Are they minding the details? If not, don’t encourage more incompetence by rewarding it. Those who are sloppy during the honeymoon (at the beginning) only get worse later. (Location 6783) Maria, I, and at least six other guests in this book read and recommend On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. (Location 6812) The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it. . . . (Location 6831) “The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long” “How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love” “9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings” Anything about Alan Watts: “Alan Watts has changed my life. I’ve written about him quite a bit.” (Location 6839) ‘Discipline equals freedom.’” TF: I interpret this to mean, among other things, that you can use positive constraints to increase perceived free will and results. (Location 6870) paradox of choice (e.g., “What should I do now?”) and decision fatigue (e.g., “What should I have for breakfast?”). (Location 6872) “I’m up and getting after it by 4:45. I like to have that psychological win over the enemy. For me, when I wake up in the morning—and I don’t know why—I’m thinking about the enemy and what they’re doing. (Location 6914) —Sebastian discussing why unifying disasters and crisis, like 9/11 or the World War II Blitz bombings on London, often results in dramatic decreases in suicide, violent crime, mental illness symptoms, etc. (Location 7016) DON’T USE VERBAL CRUTCHES “God, I really dislike laziness. . . . There are these clichés like ‘the mortar slammed into the hillside.’ (Location 7027) As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.” (Location 7034) ✸ What advice would you give your younger self? “I would say to myself, ‘The public is not a threat.’ When you realize that we all need each other, and that we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away.” (Location 7035) Three people or sources you’ve learned from—or followed closely—in the last year? David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List.” Nir Eyal, Hooked. Anything by Kevin Kelly, most recently The Inevitable. (Location 7097) shirtless pics and animals were “like crack.” (Location 7113) When you take a picture with your smartphone, it’s typically recording your GPS coordinates and other data about the picture, such as device used, into the image. This is called EXIF data and is metadata that’s hidden in the image, and anyone can recover it if you send the image directly to them. (Location 7166) So red teaming is: You take people who aren’t wedded to the plan and [ask them,] ‘How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?’ If you have a very thoughtful red team, you’ll produce stunning results.” (Location 7219) 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.” (Location 7238) you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.” (Location 7242) STAN’S WORKOUT ROUTINE Stan starts his workout at home, if he’s at home: Set of push-ups to max reps 100 sit-ups, 3-minute plank, 2 to 3 minutes of yoga Set of push-ups to max reps 50 to 100 crunch-like crossover (legs up), 2.5-minute plank, 2 to 3 minutes of yoga Set of push-ups to max reps 50 to 100 crossover sit-ups (the first two variations combined), 2-minute plank, 2 to 3 minutes of yoga Set of push-ups to max reps 60 flutter kicks, followed by static hold; 1.5-minute plank; set of crunches; 1-minute plank; 2 to 3 minutes of yoga STAN: “Then I’ll leave my house and go to the gym, because my gym opens at 5:30. It’s three blocks from my house.” TIM: “I assume we mean a.m.” STAN: “Yeah. If I get up at 4, I can do all that from 4:30 to about 5:20, then at 5:25, go down to my gym. When I get to the gym, I do four sets of pull-ups, alternated with inclined bench press and standing curls. [One-legged balance exercises are the rest break between them.] Then I’ll do a few other things, and I can do all that in 30, 35 minutes. So by 6:15 or 6:20, I can be done at the gym, head back home, get cleaned up, and then start work.” (Location 7246) “What are three tests or practices from the military that civilians could use to help develop mental toughness?”: STAN: “The first is to push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of. You’ll find new depth inside yourself. The second is to put yourself in groups who share difficulties, discomfort. We used to call it ‘shared privation.’ You’ll find that when you have been through that kind of difficult environment, that you feel more strongly about that which you’re committed to. And finally, create some fear and make individuals overcome it.” (Location 7264) The advice I’d give to anyone young is it’s really about developing people who are going to do the work. Unless you are going to go do the task yourself, then the development time you spend on the people who are going to do that task, whether they are going to lead people doing it or whether they are actually going to do it, every minute you spend on that is leveraged, is exponential return.” (Location 7276) So I go in in the morning, and I’m listening to one book there. I turn it on and [I’ll listen] while I brush my teeth, while I shave, while I put my PT clothes on, because my wife’s out in the bedroom. . . . (Location 7283) He had heard certain phrases like “Eat more vegetables” a million times, but ignored them for years, as it all seemed too simplistic. Ultimately, it was the simple that worked. He didn’t need sophisticated answers. (Location 7322) “What you just explained is exactly what I was going to suggest. Think about how old you are right now and think about being a 10-year-older version of yourself. Then think, ‘What would I probably tell myself as an older version of myself?’ That is the wisdom that I think you found in that exercise. . . . (Location 7336) Think about how old you are right now and think about being a 10-year-older version of yourself. Then think, ‘What would I probably tell myself as an older version of myself?’ That is the wisdom that I think you found in that exercise. . . . [If you do this exercise and then start living the answers,] I think you’re going to grow exponentially faster than you would have otherwise.” (Location 7337) “This might sound really crazy, but I’ll just look in the mirror and laugh at myself . . . break down this wall of being so pretentious about not being able to be silly. (Location 7356) What would you put on a billboard? “‘YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!’” (Location 7366) I also build memento mori (reminders of death) into my schedule, whether reading Seneca and other stoicism, spending time with hospice caretakers, visiting graveyards (e.g., Omaha Beach), or placing the memoirs of the recently deceased cover-out in my living room. “If you earn $68K per year, then globally speaking, you are the 1%.” WILL (Location 7369) you. . . . It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world—Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better?—and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.” (Location 7397) Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This book is a friendly and accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation, and includes an 8-week guided meditation course. Will completed this course, and it had a significant impact on his life. (Location 7400) The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The ability to be convincing, sell ideas, and persuade other people is a meta-skill that transfers to many areas of your life. This book didn’t become that popular, but it’s the best book on persuasion that Will has found. It’s much more in-depth than other options in the genre. (Location 7403) ✸ Advice to your 20-year-old self? “One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. (Location 7405) You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’ “An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.” (Location 7408) Tony guides you through each in depth, and I recall answering and visualizing variations of: What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past? What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it. What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it. What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it. (Location 7421) The live process took at least 30 minutes, with Tony on stage and 10,000 people in the audience. I could hear hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crying. It was the straw that productively broke the camel’s back of resistance. Confronted with vivid and painful imagery, attendees (present company included) could no longer rationalize or accept destructive “rules” in their lives. As Tony put it to me later, “There is nothing like a group dynamic of total immersion, when there is nothing around to distract you. Your entire focus is on breaking through and going to the next level, and that’s what makes the Dickens Process work.” (Location 7434) One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used Scott Adams’s (page 261) affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it. (Location 7440) “Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, [in order] to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.” (Location 7446) “I usually know when I’m on to something when I’m a little bit afraid of it. I go: ‘Wow, I could mess this up.’ ” (Location 7448) “On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.” (Location 7483) But I do meditate frequently and certainly try to make that every day [for 10 to 30 minutes].” (Location 7499) “‘Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away. . . . (Location 7518) “We’re so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to have this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. It’s just chatter in the mind, and it’s so captivating that we’re not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state, and it’s through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environment. But we are just talking to ourselves nonstop, and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity.” (Location 7520) What is “vipassana” meditation? “It’s simply a method of paying exquisitely close and nonjudgmental attention to whatever you’re experiencing anyway.” (Location 7525) “Sam Harris guided meditations.” Per Sam: “People find it very helpful to have somebody’s voice reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds.” (Location 7528) “If she [my daughter] does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience . . . a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable.” (Location 7538) A thought experiment worth experiencing: The Trolley Problem (55:25) (Location 7566) “SECRETS ARE A BUFFER TO INTIMACY” (Location 7578) ✸ A book to give every graduating college student? “I would say The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It’s a beautiful book by a writer who fought in Vietnam. That book actually got me back to reading. When you go to college, reading gets kicked out of you a little bit.” (Location 7594) ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’ I literally have this on my coffee table so I see it every single day.” (Location 7626) “Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?”: “. . . By cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are woefully under-preparing them for life.” (Location 7634) you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain-vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit—aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering. What doubt, fears, and “what-ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can—or need to—make? Envision them in painstaking detail. Would it be the end of your life? What would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1 to 10? Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen? What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily? Chances are, it’s easier than you imagine. How could you get things back under control? What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarios? Now that you’ve defined the nightmare, what are the more probable or definite positive outcomes, whether internal (confidence, self-esteem, etc.) or external? What would the impact of these more-likely outcomes be on a scale of 1 to 10? How likely is it that you could produce at least a moderately good outcome? Have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off? If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control? Imagine this scenario and run through questions 1 to 3 above. If you quit your job to test other options, how could you later get back on the same career track if you absolutely had to? What are you putting off out of fear? 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. Define the worst case, accept it, and do it. I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. 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. What is it costing you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to postpone action? Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction. If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years? How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed 10 more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you? If you telescope out 10 years and know with 100% certainty that it is a path of disappointment and regret, and if we define risk as “the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,” inaction is the greatest risk of all. What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this without resorting to the BS 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. (Location 7723) “Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.” (Location 7749) I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.” (Location 7781) “Many, many people are working very hard, trying to save their money to retire so they can travel. Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought.” (Location 7789) “I really recommend slack. ‘Productive’ is for your middle ages. When you’re young, you want to be prolific and make and do things, but you don’t want to measure them in terms of productivity. You want to measure them in terms of extreme performance, you want to measure them in extreme satisfaction.” (Location 7793) in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in a survival mode, but in a contented mode. . . . (Location 7812) Another of my favorites is fear-rehearsing—regularly microdosing myself with the worst-case scenario as inoculation. (Location 7820) Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. (Location 7831) How might you put this into practice? Here are a few things I’ve done repeatedly for 3 to 14 days at a time to simulate losing all my money: Sleeping in a sleeping bag, whether on my living room floor or outside Wearing cheap white shirts and a single pair of jeans for the entire 3 to 14 days Using CouchSurfing.com or a similar service to live in hosts’ homes for free, even if in your own city Eating only A) instant oatmeal and/or B) rice and beans Drinking only water and cheap instant coffee or tea Cooking everything using a Kelly Kettle. This is a camping device that can generate heat from nearly anything found in your backyard or on a roadside (e.g., twigs, leaves, paper) Fasting, consuming nothing but water and perhaps coconut oil or powdered MCT oil (see page 24 for more on fasting) Accessing the Internet only at libraries Oddly, you might observe that you are happier after this experiment in bare-bones simplicity. I often find this to be the case. (Location 7842) Once you’ve realized—and it requires a monthly or quarterly reminder—how independent your well-being is from having an excess of money, it becomes easier to take “risks” and say “no” to things that seem too lucrative to pass up. There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. (Location 7852) ‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery,’ which I just loved, because you’re not pleasing anybody. You’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience and [assuming] they can’t handle the truth. It’s patronizing.” (Location 7886) every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better. (Location 7901) The first year and a half, two years of standup is just getting comfortable on stage. Your material doesn’t matter. . . . (Location 7922) “I remember reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. That’s good fodder for a young man. It sets these bold, stark characters—you could even call them Christ figures—and you think to yourself, ‘I want to be that.’ (Location 7984) I got into Joseph Campbell—The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (Location 7987) “I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.” (Location 7999) “When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.” (Location 8001) “The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, [that’s when] the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening.” (Location 8017) ✸ Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. (Location 8026) ✸ Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. (Location 8030) ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . (Location 8037) ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? (Location 8040) His most recent book is We Learn Nothing, (Location 8048) Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. (Location 8119) The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. (Location 8121) I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. (Location 8140) I highly recommend listening to both of Cal’s episodes. They will make your spine tingle. (Location 8162) “Lesson number one, when people ask me what [interviewing] tips would I give, is aim for the heart, not the head. Once you get the heart, you can go to the head. Once you get the heart and the head, then you’ll have a pathway to the soul.” (Location 8187) ‘What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?’ (Location 8195) “What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?” (Location 8203) For males: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. That’s a good start for a journey.” (Location 8216) ‘From now on, when you wake up, I want you to go outside. As soon as you wake up, open the blinds, and go outside, naked if possible, and be in the sun for 20 minutes.’” (Location 8263) TF: I now do my morning meditation outside and shirtless whenever possible. (Location 8264) NEED TO GET UNSTUCK? MAKE YOUR TASK LAUGHABLY SMALL (Location 8285) As mentioned before, more than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed meditate in the mornings in some fashion. But what of the remaining 20%? Nearly all of them have meditation-like activities. One frequent pattern is listening to a single track or album on repeat, which can act as an external mantra for aiding focus and present-state awareness. Here are just a few examples: (Location 8308) Toward the end of a session, when I’m getting tired, I’ll also switch from default “flow” music to default “wake-up” music. (Location 8327) ✸ If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say? “Breathe.” (Location 8350) What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve made? Taking the time to walk to work every day (5 miles, 1 hour 15 minutes) (Location 8360) Probably, this is my inner ritual. I have to feel guilty about not writing for 3 hours or 4 hours. (Location 8382) Trust your reader. Understand that he or she can fill the empty spaces. Don’t over-explain.” (Location 8397) Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird a lifeline during book-related crises of faith. (Location 8408) Try one for two pages of longhand writing. Go for uninterrupted flow, and don’t stop to edit. Step one is to generate without judging. Chances are that you’ll surprise yourself. Write about a time when you realized you were mistaken. Write about a lesson you learned the hard way. Write about a time you were inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Write about something you lost that you’ll never get back. Write about a time when you knew you’d done the right thing. Write about something you don’t remember. Write about your darkest teacher. Write about a memory of a physical injury. Write about when you knew it was over. Write about being loved. Write about what you were really thinking. Write about how you found your way back. Write about the kindness of strangers. Write about why you could not do it. Write about why you did. (Location 8427) The result was Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein. (Location 8446) Humans naturally remember faces, people, and locations/spaces well, (Location 8451) We don’t need in-person mentors as often as we think. Every day, using people from this book, I will ask myself questions like “What would Matt Mullenweg do?” or “What would Jocko say?” (Location 8456) ‘Oh, everything feels terrible and awful. It’s all gone to shit.’ Then I’d [consider], ‘But if you think about it, the stars are really far away,’ then you try to imagine the world from the stars. Then you sort of zoom in and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s this tiny little character there for a fragment of time worrying about X.’” (Location 8460) Her surprise hit TED presentation, “The Art of Asking,” (Location 8483) titled The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help. (Location 8484) “Basic vipassana meditation, nothing fancy, no crazy mantras, no gods or deities, just basically sitting on the earth as a human being and paying attention to your breath and your body and letting thoughts come and go, but really trying not to be attached to the drama that comes visiting.” (Location 8503) “General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” (Location 8535) [TF: “These ideas” = having a “secret” as described in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: knowing or believing something that the rest of the world thinks is nonsense.] (Location 8603) act of creation is itself a violent action.” TF: This odd technique does seem to quickly produce a slightly altered state. Try it—write down a precise (Location 8628) TF: This odd technique does seem to quickly produce a slightly altered state. Try it—write down a precise sequence of curse words that takes 7 to 10 seconds to read. Then, before a creative work session of some type, read it quickly and loudly like you’re casting a spell or about to go postal. Eric also finds late nights, around 3 a.m., to be ideal for deep creative work. (Location 8629) the hallucinogenic elite, whether it’s billionaires, or Nobel laureates, or inventors and coders. . . . A lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means.” (Location 8643) You’re surrounded by smart people. Bring them in. Get other people’s opinions. Share it with them. And most importantly, emotion is what matters. It’s an emotional journey. . . .” (Location 8691) doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. (Location 8719) of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math. (Location 8723) in doubt, starve it of oxygen. (Location 8734) you respond, don’t over-apologize. (Location 8749) you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”—Epictetus (Location 8757) We can make the world a better place. We can ask more of ourselves. We can do more for others. I think that our life is a journey. . . . Dig deep on your journey and the world will benefit from it.” (Location 8864) 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.” (Location 8867) “If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.” (Location 8888) “In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. (Location 8894) NOW, USE THAT TECHNIQUE ON PURPOSE “Tell your friends that you’re a happy person. Then you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.” (Location 8929) 90% FEAR, 10% DESIRE “I find that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear-based. The other 10% are probably desire-based. There’s a great definition I read that says, ‘Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts,’ which means that enlightenment isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day.” (Location 8931) “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” (Location 8941) try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that’s where I’ve chosen to be unhappy. I think that is an important one.” (Location 8943) Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). (Location 8949) Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) (Location 8957) Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. (Location 8960) “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” (Location 8962) “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” (Location 8963) “If you study even the smallest bit of science, you will realize that, for all practical purposes, we are nothing. We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small, backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse. (Location 8972) Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually you will fade, your works will fade, your children will fade, your thoughts will fade, this planet will fade, the sun will fade . . . it will all be gone. “There are entire civilizations that we remember now with just one or two words like ‘Sumerian’ or ‘Mayan.’ Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No. “If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then you [should realize] that this is such a short and precious life, it is really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or however long the universe is going to be around.” (Location 8976) So the best advice I learned by mistake, and that is: Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else. (Location 9004) changed my life, perhaps more profoundly than anybody in my life.” I then read Tara’s first book, Radical Acceptance, (Location 9030) if you’re meditating and anger comes up, maybe the memory of some personal slight, you might silently repeat “anger, anger” to yourself and acknowledge it, which allows you to quickly return to whatever your focus is. (Location 9035) Inviting Mara to Tea This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! . . . The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. —Rumi (Location 9040) “The key in a restaurant, and the key in any kind of high-pressure situation, I think, is that 75% of success is staying calm and not losing your nerve. The rest you figure out, but once you lose your calm, everything else starts falling apart fast.” (Location 9066) TIM: “What do you think financially successful people who are generally unhappy have in common?” RICHARD: “Misplaced goals. I think chasing the financial is not the right way to do it. That (Location 9171) ✸ Advice to your 25-year-old self? “Don’t be so fucking shy. . . . (Location 9176) I give this advice to people. If you ever see Jimmy Fallon on the street, don’t say, ‘I love The Tonight Show!’ Just say something like: ‘What do you think of kiwi?’ and he won’t be able to not be like, ‘I love kiwi!’ (Location 9222) the best thing to do is give people questions they’re not expecting.” (Location 9237) a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.” (Location 9244) When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t. The Jar of Awesome creates a record of great things that actually happened, all of which are easy to forget if you’re depressed or seeing the world through gray-colored glasses. (Location 9250) TF: Lapsang souchong has a very smoky, peaty flavor. (Location 9275) So he asks lots and lots of ‘dumb,’ in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. (Location 9287) It also plays into what psychologists call the ‘spotlight effect,’ [as if] everybody must be caring about what I do. And the fact is: Nobody gives a crap what I do.” (Location 9334) ending the work day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.” (Location 9379) had a practice of ending his writing sessions mid-flow and mid-sentence. This way, he knew exactly where to start the next day, and he could reliably both end and start his sessions with confidence. (Location 9384) I believe that when you’re not cultivating quality, you’re essentially cultivating sloppiness.” (Location 9401) “JUST GO AROUND” FOR LIFE “Lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it to another, is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate. (Location 9402) “The purpose of this unloading week is to prepare the body for the increased demand of the next phase or period,” and to mitigate the risk of overtraining. (Location 9433) It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music. (Location 9448) Brené’s 2010 TEDxHouston talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” (Location 9467) Brené is the New York Times best-selling author of Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection, and Rising Strong. (Location 9469) Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.” (Location 9480) “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” (Location 9482) The big question I ask is, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’” (Location 9489) If I’m not a little bit nauseous when I’m done, I probably didn’t show up like I should have shown up.” (Location 9496) A lot of time was wasted, a lot of energy was wasted, being worried.” TF: Across all guests, the most common answer to this question is some variation of “It’s all going to be alright.” (Location 9548) TESTING THE “IMPOSSIBLE”: 17 QUESTIONS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE (Location 9587) if I did the opposite for 48 hours? (Location 9594) do I spend a silly amount of money on? How might I scratch my own itch? (Location 9605) are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here? (Location 9625) I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do? (Location 9628) if I couldn’t pitch my product directly? (Location 9665) I need to make it back the way I lost it? (Location 9674) it be that everything is fine and complete as is? (Location 9722) If I feel stressed, stretched thin, or overwhelmed, it’s usually because I’m overcomplicating something or failing to take the simple/easy path because I feel I should be trying “harder” (Location 9732) can I throw money at this problem? How can I “waste” money to improve the quality of my life? (Location 9734) PULL-UP BARS ARE EVERYTHING Jamie’s morning workout routine, done roughly every other day, consists of: 15 pull-ups, 50 push-ups, 100 sit-ups 15 pull-ups (different grip), 50 push-ups 10 pull-ups (first grip) 10 pull-ups (second grip) (Location 9758) 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. (Location 9782) one of my favorite questions to ask is, ‘Is this an itch, or is it burning?’ If it is just an itch, it is not sufficient. It gets to this point of how badly you really want it. For me, I burned the boats. There was no way I was going to get a job. Failure was never an option. I had to make this work.” (Location 9841) “Life is not waiting for the storm to pass, it’s learning how to dance in the rain” (Location 9867) Oftentimes, everything you want is a mere inch outside of your comfort zone. Test it. (Location 9884) Also, some of you might also be thinking “That’s it?! A Princeton student was at risk of getting a bad grade? Boo-fuckin’-hoo, man. Give me a break . . .” But . . . that’s the entire point. 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. (Location 10051) 5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day (page 143) “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) (page 197) (Location 10102) Each morning, express heartfelt gratitude to one person you care about, or who’s helped or supported you. Text, message, write, or call. Can’t think of anyone? Don’t forget past teachers, classmates, coworkers from early in your career, old bosses, etc. (Location 10110) 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. (Location 10115) ‘No, I only do one thing. I live a creative life. When you put creativity in everything, everything becomes available to you.’ . . . (Location 10302) I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we’re born with that some people don’t cultivate, that they don’t realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.” (Location 10307) Start with Why by Simon Sinek. (Location 10321) They’re like, ‘Yes.’ Because it’s all about what they can do and how it’s going to fulfill them.” (Location 10335) How do I deal with setbacks, failures, delays, defeat, or other disasters? I actually have a fairly simple way of dealing with these situations. There is one word to deal with all those situations, and that is: “good.” (Location 10347) Zen in the Art of Archery, on the other hand, appeared to be 80% nonsense riddle-talk and 20% genius philosophical insight. (Location 10393) I then realized and explained to him: In the process of reading and rereading the lessons in this book, I’d absorbed much more than I’d realized. On autopilot, I was using “good” from Jocko, inviting Mara to tea like Tara Brach, looking at the stars as BJ Miller and Ed Cooke would, and putting fear in line, just as Caroline Paul did atop the Golden Gate Bridge. (Location 10401) Which books came up the most? Here are the top 17—everything with 3 or more mentions—in descending order of frequency: Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (3) Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (3) Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman (3) The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (3) The Bible (3) The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (3) The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (3) Watchmen by Alan Moore (3) Zero to One by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (3) (Location 10489)