I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
Tim Ferriss
I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.
My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents.
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.
In a digital world, there are numerous technologies that we are attached to that create infinite interruption.
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.
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.
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.
For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work.
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.
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.
You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.
The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.
I think that survivorship bias, the survivorship bias is something I'm very acutely familiar with because of investing.
Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that's something I'm accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn't bother me.
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.
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.
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.
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.
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.
World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences.
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.
Exercise is overrated.
I'm very familiar with how people can confuse correlation with causation.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
I learned to associate discomfort with getting better. And that transcended wrestling and applied to a lot of other things in life.
I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante.
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.
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.
I definitely grew up with a lot of venom and distaste for city people.
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.
I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm very often described as a 'risk-taker' and 'extreme,' and there are a few examples of that, certainly in the physical experimentation.
Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.
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.
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.
