I've had a very good stretch with startup investing, and I think it's very important to know when to hold your chips.
— Tim Ferriss
My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents.
It's very easy to say, 'Well, hey, you should wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do what ABCD people do.' Just because it works for one person, just because it works for even many people, does not mean it will necessarily work for you.
I think that survivorship bias, the survivorship bias is something I'm very acutely familiar with because of investing.
When you're directed by social media, I think it's very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.
My parents didn't have much money growing up, but they always had a budget for books.
I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante.
I definitely grew up with a lot of venom and distaste for city people.
I was a very happy kid. I didn't get new bikes very often. We ate a lot of chicken legs for dinner. But I never felt in want of anything. I wasn't cognizant until much later of the discrepancy between what we had and what other people had.
What I don't like is snark for snark's sake. If you are going to make fun of me, at least be witty while doing it.
To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.
Having a size 9 foot is fantastic because almost all of the shoe companies do their prototyping in size 9, so if you visit a place like Nike headquarters, you can try every sort of wacky, out-there model.
People really do think they have to choose between high stress and high reward jobs, and low stress and low reward jobs.
In a digital world, there are numerous technologies that we are attached to that create infinite interruption.
After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.
When I left the U.S. for the first time, I spent my first year abroad in Japan. That culture shock and abundance of new stimuli combined with a lack of guidance forced me to develop my own approaches to learning and juggling.
The biggest misconception about work is that you need to spend the majority of your time doing it.
I'm very often described as a 'risk-taker' and 'extreme,' and there are a few examples of that, certainly in the physical experimentation.
I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.
I view myself as an experimentalist. I've tried everything in the book, and I have replicated results to one extent or another.
I don't journal to 'be productive.' I don't do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. It's the most cost-effective therapy I've ever found.
I think that whenever you feel reactive or are being reactive as opposed to proactive, that inherently - consciously or subconsciously - creates a lot of stress.
I always thought I was going to end up teaching ninth grade, specifically, because I had a lot of really formative influences, I think, at that fork in the road, where a lot of crucial decisions are made by young folks.
If you optimize for money too early, you will be minimizing for learning, almost without exception.
I learned to associate discomfort with getting better. And that transcended wrestling and applied to a lot of other things in life.
I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly. David Blaine is an example of someone who's better at self-promoting than me. He is much better than I am.
World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.
I gauge success in years, not weeks. The weekend box-office approach to book launches is short sighted and encourages crappy books.
When you elevate the heels more so than you elevate the sole of the foot, you trigger a cascade of compensations in the knees and hips that cause tight hip flexors, and then those hip flexors cause lower-back pain.
I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.
You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.
If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.
You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.
If you walk into any bookstore, you can look at the newsstands and see which magazines are nationally-distributed, and you recognize certain names. Same with television. With the blogsphere, however, you actually have to dig, and know how to use multiple tools to figure out whom you should be speaking to.
I was really small and had a lot of health issues growing up. I mean, not compared to some people, certainly, but I had a number of full-body blood transfusions when I was kid.
Turning 40 didn't, as a number, scare me or throw me off at all.
I'm very familiar with how people can confuse correlation with causation.
It's just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that's a dangerous dependence to develop.
A 'social media fast' is a fast, I suppose like any other. In this case, you're simply giving up whether it be a device or a particular type of social media site. And I do this at least once weekly.
I suppose my professional life can be split into writing books that all sound like infomercial products, most notably 'The 4-Hour Workweek,' and then tech investing.
If you're sitting in a monastery, where your schedule is set and you have very few uncontrolled variables, that's fantastic that you can do loving/kindness meditation, but that's not the world I live in.
I was never the most technical wrestler. But my coaches definitely instilled in me the belief that if you can push yourself and practice smarter than the other guy, you can beat him.
I work hard, but in spurts.
The more books there are on shelves, the more will be sold. Once you get to the level of The Secret and have 40-100 copies in many stores, managers have almost no choice but to put them in prime real estate like front-of-store, end caps, or front window.
I really feel like knife skills - not just in the kitchen, but in life - are really critical.
I didn't even like white wine. Then I tasted it and bought a case. It was the first case of any wine I'd ever bought.
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
One of the great things about stargazing is that it's immediately at hand for so many people. You know, you could get into scuba diving or bird watching, but the stars are always up there.
Most of my readers think I'm obsessed with time management, but they haven't seen the other - much more legitimate, much more extreme - obsession. I've recorded almost every workout I've done since age 18. Since 2004, I've been tracking everything from complete lipid panels, insulin, and hemoglobin A1c, to IGF-1 and free testosterone.
As far as income goes, there are three currencies in the world; most people ignore two. The three currencies are time, income and mobility, in descending order of importance. Most people focus exclusively on income.