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Here's a statistician joke for your next hot date: Person A: What happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar of 55 people? Person B: I don't know. What? Person A: The "average" net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars!"
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Busy" = Out of Control "Every time people contact me, they say, 'Look, I know you must be incredibly busy . . .' and I always think, 'No, I'm not.' Because I'm in control of my time. I'm on top of it. 'Busy,' to me, seems to imply 'out of control.' Like, 'Oh my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit!' To me, that sounds like a person who's got no control over their life." TF: Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I'm "busy,"..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren't lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
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job-security
society
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Timothy Ferriss |
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we would always think: 'Okay, if we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now?' The
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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BLAMING IDIOTS FOR interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children--they can't help it. It's their nature. Then again, I had (who am I kidding--and have), on occasion, been known to create interruptions out of thin air. If you're anything like me, that makes us both occasional idiots. Learn to recognize and fight the interruption impulse. This is infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines to follow.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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As chef Mehdi Chellaoui says, "I use lemon like I use salt." Mario Batali would agree: if something is missing, it's probably acid." --
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Timothy Ferriss |
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I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. --HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
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Timothy Ferriss |
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There is just less competition for bigger goals.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Named must your fear be before banish it you can. --YODA, from Star Wars:
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Timothy Ferriss |
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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.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Aristotle had it right, but he was missing a number: "We are what we do repeatedly."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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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 ..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. --WOODROW WILSON
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. --HEINRICH HEINE,
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Timothy Ferriss |
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love, be loved, and never stop learning--
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. The best way to approach a potential break is simple: Confide in them honestly but tactfully and explain your concerns. If they bite back, your conclusions have been confirmed. Drop them like any other bad habit. If they promise to change, first spend at least two weeks apart to develop other positive influences in your life and diminish psychological dependency. ..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject--medicine, for example--but if you don't have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a "credibility indicator." The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, n..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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just-in-time" information instead of "just-in-case" information."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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The question you should be asking isn't, "What do I want?" or "What are my goals?" but "What would excite me?"
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Timothy Ferriss |
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on a scale of 1-10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3 or 4.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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What bullshit excuses do you have for not going after whatever it is that you want? Please, write in, tell us on social media why these are real excuses with #bullshit afterwards. Oh my God, man, that's such a great story.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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If only I had more money" is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment--now and not later."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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I have had so many spectacular failures, but looking back, I can see how each of them led me a little closer to doing what I actually wanted to do. Years before I was ready to write a book of my own, I bungled two opportunities to co-write cookbooks with other people. These mistakes haunted me, and I was sure I'd never get to write another book. But I waited, and I persisted, and after 17 years I wrote the book I'd always dreamt of.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Emphasize strengths, don't fix weaknesses.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Tim's TED Talk, "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,"
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Timothy Ferriss |
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It's always the hard part that creates value.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren't you?
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Timothy Ferriss |
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As I detailed in my TED Talk, I think we all have two main characters in our heads: a rational decision-maker (the adult in your head) and an instant gratification monkey (the child in your head who doesn't care about consequences and just wants to maximize the ease and pleasure of the current moment). For me, these two are in a constant battle, and the monkey usually wins. But I've found that if I turn life into a yin-yang situation--e.g.,..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Dreamlining is so named because it applies timelines to what most would consider dreams.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn't written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Th..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You'll always know.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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you should never publicly criticize anyone or anything unless it is a matter of morals or ethics. Anything negative you say could at the very least ruin someone's day, or worse, break someone's heart, or simply change someone from being a future ally of yours to someone who will never forget
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Timothy Ferriss |
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If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success." --James Cameron "If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly." --Colonel David Hackworth "Not my circus. Not my monkeys." --Polish proverb"
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Timothy Ferriss |
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For a long time, I've known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable. "If I want a better-than-average career, I can't simply 'go with the flow' and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of ..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Busy is a decision." Here's why: Of the many, many excuses people use to rationalize why they can't do something, the excuse "I am too busy" is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest. I don't believe in "too busy." Like I said, busy is a decision. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for "not important enough."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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What would this look like if it were easy? "This" could be anything. That morning, it was answering a laundry list of big questions. What would this look like if it were easy? is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question. It's easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you're not redlining, you're not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the..
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Timothy Ferriss |
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18. Notice how I take "you" out of the sentence to avoid finger-pointing, even though it's implicit. "Normally, you make priorities clear" sounds like a backhanded insult. If this is a significant other, you can skip this formality, but never use "you always do X," which is just a fight starter."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Serving the customer ("customer service") is not becoming a personal concierge and catering to their every whim and want. Customer service is providing an excellent product at an acceptable price and solving legitimate problems (lost packages, replacements, refunds, etc.) in the fastest manner possible. That's it."
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Timothy Ferriss |
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
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Timothy Ferriss |
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This is the best thing you're ever going to learn in SEAL training.' We were excited to learn what it was, and he told us that when you're a leader, people are going to mimic your behavior, at a minimum. . . . It's a guarantee. So here's the key piece of advice, this is all he said: 'Calm is contagious.
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Timothy Ferriss |