If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
— Tim Ferriss
I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.
I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.
The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.
To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.
The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.
Workaholics typically have a lot of achievement with very little appreciation of what they have, whether it's cars or friendships or otherwise. That is a shallow victory. Then you have people with a lot of appreciation and no achievement, which is fine, but it doesn't create a lot of good in the world.
Resveratrol is fascinating stuff. One of the best sources of information about it is the Immortality Institute. They have a forum where some people are in the 500 Club, as they call it. They've been taking 500 milligrams for years. It's a really great source of data.
Converting your own passions into a job is the fastest method for eliminating any passion you once had.
Work is an activity that is financially-driven or one that you'd like to do less of.
Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It's really that easy - and that's what I do.
The best entrepreneurs I've ever met are all good communicators. It's perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.
There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.
Exercise is overrated.
The first thing I would do for anyone who's trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.
I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'
At its core, I don't view Facebook as a social network. I think it could become the driver's license of the Internet. And beyond that, it can become the pipes and the plumbing upon what most of the Internet is built. I think it's very well positioned.
Online I see people committing 'social media suicide' all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you're never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don't warrant a response. This lends more credibility by driving traffic.
One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.
I like work/life separation, not work/life balance. What I mean by that is, if I'm on, I want to be on and maximally productive. If I'm off, I don't want to think about work. When people strive for work/life balance, they end up blending them. That's how you end up checking email all day Saturday.
I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.
There's an entire generation of male strength and endurance athletes, even recreational lifters, who have never gotten off the ephedrine-caffeine-aspirin stack. The process of getting off stimulants is really horrible.
If retirement means laying on a beach and rubbing coco butter on your stomach, about 48 hours of that will be enough for most people. You'll want something new.
I've found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn't realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors. And I tested all different varieties and species of cinnamon from Ceylon to Saigon.
Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.
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.
Every time I find myself stressed out, it's because I do things primarily driven by growth.
I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.
Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.
I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
I encourage active skepticism - when people are being skeptical because they're trying to identify the best course of action. They're trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.
Rather than spend my life on data entry and typing, I also take photos on my iPhone of business cards, wine labels, menus, or anything I want to have searchable on-the-run.
I tend to split my activities into fun, income and legacy. The number of things in that finance bucket is pretty few and far between and doesn't consume much time at all.
I started using Twitter about year after its very early adoption and ended up investing in it around that same time. I'm involved with the Tech scene and companies ranging from Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter.
Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.
The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'
It's very easy to confuse confident motion with being productive - and they're not the same thing. Productive to me means measurable outcomes that apply to my most important to-dos that positively affect my life. That's it.
For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work.
There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.
A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.
If you do something as simple as 15-minute ice baths three days a week, and you time those baths properly, you can significantly multiply your fat loss.
Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.
I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.
I'm not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you're in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.
The problem with New Year's resolutions - and resolutions to 'get in better shape' in general, which are very amorphous - is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn't work. I don't care if you're a world-class CEO - you'll quit.
If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: 'Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?' From what I've seen, it's not likely.
If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
