#359： Tribe of Mentors： Short Life Advice from the Best of the Best
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Summary
Do you sometimes wish you had a cabinet of counselors you could go to for advice anytime you wanted on how to make life better and easier for yourself? Well, my guest today created his own board of Mighty Mentors, a metaphorical roundtable of some of the most successful people in the world, and asked them all the same 11 questions. And after that, he wrote a book to share all those insights with the rest of us.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you sometimes
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wish you had a cabinet of counselors you could go to for advice anytime you wanted on how
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to make life better and easier for yourself? Well, my guest today created his own board
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of Mighty Mentors, a metaphorical roundtable of some of the most successful people in the world
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and asked them all the same 11 questions on how to live a more fulfilling and productive life. And
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after that, he wrote a book to share all those insights with the rest of us. His name is Tim
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Ferris. He's an author and host of the Tim Ferris podcast. We had him on our podcast discuss his
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last book, Tools for Titans. In his latest book, Tribe of Mentors, short life advice from the best
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in the world, Tim shares the answers he got to the 11 questions he posed to a diverse range of
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successful people like Steven Pressfield, Jocko Willink, Bear Grylls, and Greg Norman, among
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many. Today's episode, Tim shares insights from the people he interviewed on how to say no without
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feeling guilty or looking like a jerk. The book, successful people frequently gift others and what
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to do when you're feeling overwhelmed, distracted, and just generally down. This episode is packed
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with actionable advice. So we want to take notes after the show's over, check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash mentors. Mr. Tim Ferris, welcome back to the show. Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure.
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You've got another tome of a book out. Tribe of Mentors. Yep. Short, like, yeah, all your books have
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like taken up an entire shelf on my bookcase. You know, every time I say, and I should probably start
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saying, I'm going to write a really long book, and then maybe it'll end up really short. Because
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every time I say, this time it's going to be a really short book, it ends up 600 plus pages. But
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yes, it's another book that, oddly enough, is almost exactly the same weight as Tools of Titans,
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so you could do bicep curls and be very symmetrical. There you go. I mean, yeah, even the title says
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Short Life Advice, but again, the book is 600 pages long. But there's lots of short life advice
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here. So let's talk about what was the impetus behind this book? And it weighs the same as Tools of
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Titans, but how is it different from Tools of Titans?
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Yeah, there's some critical differences. The similarity is really mostly format in the sense
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that people really loved the short, actionable profiles of Tools of Titans. So that has persisted
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into Tribe of Mentors. But Tribe of Mentors, the origin story is totally different. I had a very,
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very difficult and very intense year in 2017. It seems like a lot of people did. It was a really
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gnarly year. And I turned 40, which wasn't that big a deal to me. Didn't run out and buy a Corvette
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or anything. But the number was meaningful in the sense that I felt like I had passed the midway
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point, at least based on averages of lifespan in the US. I was like, you know what, now maybe I'm
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finishing the second half of this one lap that we call life. That was one piece. And a lot happened
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within a four to eight week period. So that happened. The 10th anniversary of the four-hour
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workweek coincided with the exact day. I mean, 10 years to the day of the publication of the four-hour
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workweek found me stepping on the stage at TED for the first time to talk about how I came very close
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to committing suicide in college and how I've battled with bipolar depression my entire life,
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which was a really odd, surreal juxtaposition. And that led to a lot of conversations with other
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people who are struggling with darkness. And you think of the room at TED, everybody has everything
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figured out. But a really high percentage of people reached out to me to tell me about their demons and
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how close they'd come to the brink. So that happened. Then a bunch of my friends died, not to make this
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super heavy really quickly, but a bunch of my friends died from natural causes, but very unexpectedly or
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via accident. One person I knew, well, yeah, knew past tense, committed suicide. And just a lot hit me
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at once. And I thought, you know, maybe I'm spending time on things I don't want to be spending time on.
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Maybe I've overcommitted. Maybe I want to double down on my family and a handful of loved ones and
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learned to say no to everything else. And I sat down with some tea one morning and journaled on
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questions I wanted to answer. And it was really hard. I've had it overwhelming. The list got really
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big. And I asked myself one question towards the end, which I've learned to use a lot in the last
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two years. And that is, what might this look like if it were easy? And I wrote down many, many, many,
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many different ideas. And there's only one that really stuck, which was, why don't I take these
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questions and ask a hundred plus people who are the best at what they do in many different areas of
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many different ages, say from 20s all the way up to 70s and 80s and borrow from them, just take their
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answers and try them out and see what works for me. And that's, that's how the book came to be.
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And it's very different from Tools of Titans in the sense that there's a lot of advice that I wanted
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to include and solicited about overcoming failure and dark periods and creating those emotional safety
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nets to prevent you from downward spirals. There's a lot about how to say no, different techniques and
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strategies that people have ranging from say, co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz, all the way to
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writers and so on, who have had to learn to say no. I even included rejection letters that I got from
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people who said they had to decline being in the book, which is a whole separate story. And what to do when
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you feel overwhelmed, distracted, unfocused, you know, what do these people do tactically, very concretely. So the
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subject matter is quite different, I would say. And I suppose what I've explained so far alludes to the
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fact that in Tools of Titans, it was basically a highlight reel from the podcast. I mean, you had
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95% of the people in the book were from the podcast and I was pulling out my favorite pieces.
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In Tribe of Mentors, it's a completely new cast of characters and nearly no one in the book has been on
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the podcast. And I asked them all the same 11 questions. So it's easier to spot patterns in
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the responses that you see. So long story long, that's Tribe of Mentors. And like pretty much all
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of my books, but particularly, I would say this one, I needed this book and I couldn't find it. So I had
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to write it. And writing, let's, maybe not for you, but for me at least, it's painful. It's a really
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It takes a lot to get me to write a book, but 2007 was really brutal and I needed help. So I went out
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and I found the help and then put it into the book. Yeah. You asked the same 11 questions. You
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had a ton of them. So, I mean, how did you hone in on these 11? I mean, what was it about these
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questions you were like, this is going to make my life easier or somewhat more easier if I know the
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answer to these? Yeah. A lot of them were variations of the questions I had been asking
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myself or the tactical versions of the questions I'd been asking myself. So separating, say the
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critical few from the trivial many and saying no to more things, categorically just across the board
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saying no to many different types of things as policies. What's the best way to do that?
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And I would ask then people about what they've learned to say no to more in the last year or
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two and what tactics or techniques, what wordings had they found helpful? The overwhelm and distraction.
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I feel like this past year, there's just so much anger and doubt and so much bold news. I mean,
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that's not a fake news comment that meaning just like salacious headlines that are effectively like
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five new ways to hate your neighbor. I mean, it's really a difficult time to be on any device or
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laptop of any type that is connected to the internet. I wanted to learn how to really block out that noise
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more effectively. And on and on it goes. So for every one of these, I wanted to figure out very specific
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next steps that I could take. And I also took many of the questions, at least half from fine tuning on
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the podcast where there were certain questions I found that reliably got really good, useful stories
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or really good actionable advice. Like for instance, some of the, some of them are not as profound as
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the, what would you put on a billboard if you had to choose one word or a quote of yours or anyone else
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to convey to millions or billions of people. That's a deep, heavy question. It does get good answers,
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especially if you add the end why to the end of it. So that's one of the questions I ask.
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But conversely, if you're just looking for, I want to just order something on Amazon prime,
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like a little magic bullet that helps some aspect of my life. Okay. Well then you can ask everyone,
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you know, what purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most improved your life in the last year
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or in recent memory. And then wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. You have something that's lighter weight
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that you can use. So that's also one of the questions.
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So let's get into some of these questions and I'm going to ask you about the ones that I was
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drawn to. That was funny. As I was reading it, there'd be answers that I would read every single
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time. It was like, like the, how to say no. Cause I have, I suck at saying no and I'm still working
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on it, but there was some, I kind of glanced over cause this didn't resonate with me. And I'm sure
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that's how you're supposed to read the book. Yep. Let's, let's talk about how to say no. I mean,
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it must be something you've had a problem with. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. It's, I mean,
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it's a continual uphill battle for people. And every time you think you've improved,
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there's a new channel of inbound fill in the blank or invitations or feelings of obligation
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and guilt and so on, whenever you think you have it somewhat figured out, then there's,
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there's more added to it. But this is a toolkit that is, I mean, I'm not going to spend too much
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time on defining the problem because I think it's so obvious, but in a world where there's
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more information and noise and invitations and email and social notifications and so on,
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then you could possibly consume or act on in a lifetime. Like there's more generated every
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day than you could possibly consume or respond to. You have to get really good at a ignoring things.
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So cultivating selective ignorance and being able to live with that conditioning yourself to accept
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that as a binary reality. And then secondly, you have to get very good at declining things.
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And there are different categories of declining. There is, for instance, there are different
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approaches ranging from using email autoresponders, which say something like, as a policy,
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unfortunately, I receive more volume of email than I can physically respond to. But below are a couple
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of answers to very common questions. Please take a look. And then you have, for instance, bullet number
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one, as a policy, I'm no longer doing X, Y, and Z. And that could be speaking engagements.
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It could be in-person meetings, for instance. It could be conference calls. It could be coffee dates
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where people pick my brains. It could be anything. That is one level of refusal. Then you have,
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say, acquaintance or stranger refusal. And that could be the approach of, like I mentioned,
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a Dustin Moskovitz or an Andrew Ross Sorkin, very well-known journalist, where you give no reason
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for the decline. You simply say, thanks so much for your thoughtful email. I'm really sorry, but I
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cannot commit to anything like this right now, or I don't have bandwidth for this right now. Wishing
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you all the best of luck. Tim, right? It's very straightforward. You're not offering a reason
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because then that offers the opportunity for a rebuttal or a counter. And I'm sure you've seen
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this happen, right? That's one level down from autoresponder. You have a blanket template response,
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which you can, on your iPhone, for instance, in settings or using a program like TextExpander,
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create short two-letter combinations that automatically auto-populate these template responses.
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And that'd be one angle. Then one level below that, perhaps, you have semi-acquaintance or
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acquaintance asking you for something. And then you might add in a personal touch that could be just
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one additional line. And this is what, for instance, Danny Meyer, famous restaurateur,
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Shake Shack, et cetera, used in his rejection letter that was sent to me, which I included in the book
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with permission, or Neil Stevenson, famed science fiction author of Snow Crash and so on, same story,
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where they might say something along the lines of, I'm struggling so much with my own to-do list
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that every time I knock off one of my own items, it seems to spawn 10 more just in the hopes that
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I'll get to the point where someday it becomes shorter rather than longer. I'm saying no to all
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outside invitations or commitments for X period of time, right? And that takes the sting out of it
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a bit. It lets you know where they are and allows you to consider walking a mile on their shoes so
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you understand exactly why they're refusing it, even though they might want to accept. And very often
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that comes along with phrasing along the lines of, I realize this is a great opportunity and I'm sure
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I'll be kicking myself later for saying no, but just for my sanity right now, I can't commit.
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Very common that there's some phrasing along those lines. Wendy McNaughton, very famous illustrator,
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did that in her email to me. And that can also be used for friends, of course. So there are different
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ways to go about it. But I think underlying all of those very specific lines and so on that you can
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copy and paste. Another common pattern is making something a policy or a diet. And what I mean by
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that is I remember receiving a refusal from a polite decline from a billionaire investor when I asked him
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if we might be able to have lunch or breakfast and chat about A, B, and C. It was very specific.
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And I'd spent time with him before. And he said, really sorry. I'd love to, but I'm going on a no
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meeting diet. No meeting diet for the next quarter because I've gotten so behind in other channels. I
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just need to catch up. And I was like, wow, no meeting diet. That's interesting. And I started using
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it. No meeting diet, no conference call diet for X period of time. And for whatever reason,
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maybe it's because it's depersonalized. People respond really well to it generally, but people
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are going to get hurt feelings. People are going to get upset. There are people who will take it
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incredibly personally. And you have to accept that as a tax of having been fortunate enough to be in a
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position where you have more inbound than you can handle. Does that make sense? That makes sense.
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Yeah. Some variation of the following has also popped up over and over again in
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Tribe of Mentorers, which is there's no one sure path to success, but there is one sure path to
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failure. And that is trying to please everyone. Yeah. That's where that stoicism comes in, right?
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Exactly. Exactly. Which also crops up a lot. Like Ariana Huffington, her most gifted book is
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Yeah. And we'll talk about that gifted book
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question because I thought that was another section I focused on a lot. But one of the most powerful
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bits of advice I got from the how to say no, the issue that I often have is someone will ask me
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something that's like three months from now. And I'm like, yeah, of course. And then when it comes,
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you're like, damn it, I don't have time for this. And so I forgot who said it, but it was like,
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imagine if the event was this Tuesday. Would you say yes to that?
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And I think Tim O'Reilly and Kevin Kelly, all three of them, but they got it from Esther Dyson.
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Yeah. Would I say yes to this if it were next Tuesday?
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Right. I've caused more problems for myself saying yes to things that are months in advance. That,
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man, that was a game changer for me. That's a really good one. Another one
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from Kyle Maynard, who was born a quad amputee. So he's a congenital quad amputee. He has no arms,
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no legs. His arms are cut off basically mid-arm, legs just basically at the hip, but let's just call
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it mid-thigh. And he's the first quad amputee without the aid of prosthetics to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
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And to put that in perspective, there are able-bodied athletes who have died climbing
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Mount Kilimanjaro. He military-crawled the entire thing. He's a stud in many other ways,
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but he's gotten to know a lot of people at the top levels of special operations. And he's also
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spent time with many, many well-known CEOs. And one CEO gave him great advice that had a huge impact
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for him. And it's had a huge impact for me. And that is if you're considering an opportunity or an
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invitation project or an employee, it doesn't really matter, or even an entree at a restaurant
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and you want to get an honest opinion on an entree you're considering ordering,
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you can rank or ask someone else to rank it from one to 10, but a seven isn't allowed. This is really
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subtle, but very, very, very powerful. I've been using it all the time. So you can rank from one to
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10, but you can't use a seven. Why? Because the seven is the non-committal or semi-ambiguous
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Switzerland of answers. It doesn't really give you a lot of meaningful information. On the other hand,
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if you're considering an invitation and a six is barely passing, that's a no. And an eight is,
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you know, I'm 80% stoked on this. I'm actually really excited, nine, 10 or above and beyond.
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When you remove that seven, it becomes a very clear yes, no answer. And what Kyle noticed for
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himself is that when he looked at things he would give a seven, it was almost always out of guilt or
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obligation or fear of missing out, which are not good reasons to commit to time-consuming anything
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when time is a finite, non-renewable resource. So that's been hugely helpful for him and also
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hugely helpful for me. Rank it from one to 10, you can't use a seven. And by the way, testing this in
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restaurants, because you always hear the, oh, well, everything is good on the menu. And you're
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like, thank you very much for no information. But if you ask them for a specific entree,
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how would you rank this one to 10? You can't use a seven. Something's going to happen. Either they're
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going to waver. And then, yeah, I'm not sure. That's a six or less. On the flip side, if someone
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says eight and they do it quickly, you know, it's a good dish. And I've had a hundred percent success
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rate with that so far. And the other thing that was encouraging about some of the answers in the
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book to that question was that some of these people, very successful people said, I can't answer
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that. I'm terrible at saying no still. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I left those in very deliberately,
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right. Just to show that if you're terrible at this, you're not uniquely flawed. Like some of
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these people who, who many would assume are just hitting home runs with everything are terrible,
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terrible, terrible at it. Right. So it's a lot of very accomplished people just answer. I'm terrible
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at this. I can't wait to read other people's answers. All right. So let's go to that question.
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What book do you gift most frequently? And that was, I've, man, I've gotten like, I've had like
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50 new books on my Amazon wishlist because of this, but, um, why ask that question instead of
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like, what's your favorite book? Why ask what gift, what book do you gift most frequently?
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Yeah. Uh, because of several reasons. Number one, the people I interview tend to be very well
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read. They've read hundreds or thousands of books. And if you ask them, what is your favorite book or
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what are your favorite books? It's too long of a search or it's too broad of a search query.
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It would take too long typically for them to figure it out. And they, they normally come up
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with one or two books that they've really liked in the last year or two, which is not what you're
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looking for. Second, they're very often well-known people who are aware of the risk that if they say
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X, Y, and Z is my favorite book, that it will end up in Wikipedia haunting them forever. And they'll
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look back and they'll say, good God, if I had 10 minutes to think about it, I would have given you a
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different answer. Most gifted conversely, usually it produces a very, very clear, very short list.
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Almost nearly everyone, not everyone, but nearly everyone has their go-to two to four books that
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they gift to many people. This is important for another reason. Favorite book means favorite book
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for the person you are asking. Most gifted book means it is one of their favorite books they feel
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applies to more people than just themselves. It's more broadly applicable. So those are a number of the
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reasons that I've chosen to tweak it and make it what book or books have you gifted the most to
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other people and why. Right. You're kind of using the market to figure out, right? They're putting
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skin in the game when they actually go out and buy a book for somebody. Exactly. You mentioned there
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was patterns you saw and there are. What was the book you saw brought up over and over again that
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surprised you? You know, maybe it shouldn't surprise me, but Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
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popped up a ton. The one that popped up more than I might expect that is lesser known is Poor Charlie's
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Almanac by Charlie Munger, who's the right hand and investing partner of Warren Buffett, most famed
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investor in history, arguably. Then there were books that also came up, even fiction like Siddhartha,
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for instance, by Herman Hess came up repeatedly, which I went back and reread as a result because
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I'd read it in high school or college and really taken nothing from it. And I went back and I read
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it now at age 40. And I think this is true for many books, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and so on.
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You may have read a long, long time ago that they don't fully have an impact until a little later in
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life when you've put on a bit more mileage, had more experiences, have seen or experienced death
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in some capacity. And then you really have the life experience and lenses through which
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to view the pages and get something from them. So Herman Hess, Siddhartha was another that cropped up.
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The one that I was surprised by was Ayn Rand. There were a few people who said that. I knew
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something about their politics a little bit and I was like, they're not objectivists, but they're
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Yeah, Atlas Shrugged came up a lot, certainly came up a ton. And so Ayn Rand or Ayn Rand, depending
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on how you say your name, came up a lot as setting the stage for these people to strive
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for self-reliance. And it's important to note that you don't have to agree with everything
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in a book to make it one of your favorite books or one of your most gifted books at all.
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Right. It just has to net, net have a huge positive impact. And Atlas Shrugged certainly
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came up a ton. One that has come up a lot is the five love languages also.
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Yeah. I've been hearing that more and more from people.
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Yeah. It's a really, for intimate relationships, even just familial relationships, very fascinating
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book. And some of the icons of the icons of the business world and private conversations
00:25:15.080
not in this book have also mentioned the five love languages. And the list goes on.
00:25:20.360
And then there are the esoteric books, the really weird books.
00:25:23.400
That was really interesting. That makes up like the bulk of my Amazon wishlist or these
00:25:27.520
just really weird things I've never even heard of.
00:25:29.060
Yeah. So for instance, I mean, the books that have informed the world's best poker players
00:25:34.820
that tend to be pretty out there, or a lot of them are pretty out there and very
00:25:40.440
fringe books on rational decision-making. Those are some of my favorites to dig into.
00:25:49.200
You know, weird ones. They're really weird ones.
00:25:52.160
What I like about this, I mean, I hate reading like airport pop business books because they usually
00:25:59.280
Yeah. They spent 50% of the book defining the problem that you already know, or you
00:26:05.580
And then they mentioned the marshmallow test somehow. And then you're like, all right.
00:26:10.280
But yeah, reading those like really theoretical books gives you insights that you can apply
00:26:15.540
to other parts of your life, whether it's your business, your personal life. I found that
00:26:20.640
Yeah. Oh, definitely. And many of these folks, just to note another,
00:26:25.560
perhaps unexpected pattern is that if you look at the many of the best investors in the book,
00:26:33.620
so you have Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund, $160 billion under management,
00:26:38.480
Bridgewater Associates. If you look at some of the books he has gifted the most, if you look at
00:26:44.000
the books that say Esther Dyson who came up earlier, who's one of the, one of the best investors out
00:26:53.140
there and just fascinating. I mean, she trained as a cosmonaut in former Soviet union for a period
00:27:00.760
of time as well. Many of these investors pay a lot of attention to books on evolution, different types
00:27:10.340
of evolution. So for instance, her most gifted books, Esther's most gifted books include
00:27:17.760
The Biology of Desire, Why Addiction is Not a Disease, looking at addiction and the evolution,
00:27:25.640
evolutionary basis or biological basis for that. Two of her books are very closely related.
00:27:30.280
This one is From Bacteria to Bach and Back, subtitled The Evolution of Minds by Daniel Dennett,
00:27:37.420
How Consciousness Arises, How Much It Depends on the Sense of Past, Present and Future. And when you dig a
00:27:42.140
little bit and you ask these folks why they pay so much time reading about evolution, it's because
00:27:50.180
they want to be able to spot the cognitive biases and the consensus realities and the uninformed
00:28:01.080
conclusions we come to based on millions of years of hardwiring that is optimized for a reality that
00:28:09.620
existed say 50,000 years ago. Right? I mean, we're really not designed to be living in cities
00:28:16.820
with a constant barrage of information and sensationalistic headlines and so on. Biological
00:28:26.720
evolution is very, very slow. And in the grand scheme of things, if you look at, say, from the
00:28:31.840
agricultural revolution to industrial and now to where we are, it's just the blinking of a firefly and
00:28:40.860
we're not prepared for it. So by studying what we are hardwired to do, which is very often exactly the
00:28:47.740
opposite of what is in our best interest, you can spot uncrowded bets. You can spot contrarian
00:28:56.020
thinking when it is most advantageous. And that's exactly what good investors do in many, many, many,
00:29:01.780
many cases. So that was another cool, I thought, connection that was very obvious when you read
00:29:07.540
through the book is that really good investors who are consistently, and when I say consistently,
00:29:11.780
I mean for decades beating the market and at the top of their game, pay a lot of attention to
00:29:17.580
evolution. Yeah. I'm going to ask you this question. What book do you give most frequently?
00:29:21.640
The book that I give most frequently for many, many years was a Penguin Classics book,
00:29:31.500
Letters from a Stoic. It is a compilation of letters written by Seneca.
00:29:37.540
A Stoic figure, a Roman, famous playwright, arguably the most famous playwright of his day,
00:29:43.540
also the wealthiest investment banker, or its equivalent, and an advisor to the emperor at the
00:29:48.420
time. And these are very pragmatic letters to one of his students or protégés named Lucilius.
00:29:56.380
Like, oh, Lucilius, I hear that so-and-so is smack-talking you behind your back in the Senate.
00:30:00.940
Like, here's how I would handle that. Dear Lucilius, I'm so sorry to hear of your mother's passing
00:30:05.940
and your difficulty with grief and how it's affecting your work and your family life.
00:30:10.860
Here's what I would suggest. Very concrete. I've given out hundreds and hundreds of copies of
00:30:18.020
Letters from a Stoic directly to people who have visited my homes over the last, say, 15 years.
00:30:25.120
Had a huge impact on me. Those can be found for free online as the Moral Letters to Lucilius.
00:30:33.640
L-U-C-I-L-I-U-S. And they had such a tremendous impact on me that I ended up spending six months,
00:30:42.100
and this just goes to show when you say to yourself, oh, I'm going to do this, it'll be really easy,
00:30:46.160
you should stop and really think about it. Putting together a free set of PDFs, e-books,
00:30:53.560
called The Tao of Seneca, T-A-O, like The Way of Seneca, The Tao of Seneca, which are all of these
00:30:59.240
letters plus interviews with modern thinkers and illustrations and stuff that's completely free.
00:31:05.640
So the book I've given away the most was originally the Penguin Classics version,
00:31:11.200
Letters from a Stoic, which I would keep stacks of at home in the closet.
00:31:14.920
And if anyone came to my house who hadn't ever read these letters, I would give them a copy before
00:31:20.420
they left. That would definitely be far and away number one. I've also given away a lot of copies
00:31:25.260
of the fiction book Zorba the Greek, which I think is great for people who tend to be very
00:31:30.460
hyper-analytical and trapped in their own heads because it chronicles the adventures and
00:31:36.800
misadventures of a very type A analytical driven person. And Zorba, this character who's
00:31:44.920
exactly the opposite, just a wild man who enjoys life and is very Epicurean, throw caution to the
00:31:52.240
wind type of character. So the two of them make for a really entertaining and very informative
00:31:58.620
contrast as they go through all of their various adventures.
00:32:02.140
Yeah. Seneca sounds like the proto-tribe of mentors then.
00:32:05.200
Yeah, in a way. In a way it is, in some senses.
00:32:08.340
And Zorba the Greek, the movie's also fantastic.
00:32:10.900
Yeah, I haven't yet seen it. I haven't yet seen it. Now, based on that, I might actually see it.
00:32:15.500
I didn't want to see it because I didn't want to sully how much I love the book. Because for
00:32:20.620
instance, you take His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and The Golden Compass and so on. That
00:32:25.820
movie was terrible. It was so bad. It just made me angry that they desecrated this incredible work
00:32:30.880
of fiction. So I'm glad to hear that Zorba the Greek is good. I might watch that over the holidays.
00:32:35.540
Yeah, Zorba, teach me to dance. You want to dance? That's great. Anyways, let's get to
00:32:41.820
this question about being unfocused, feeling overwhelmed, because I think that's what a lot
00:32:46.280
of people are feeling these days. What were some of the most common answers you got from folks on
00:32:52.560
how to combat that? Some of the most common answers were some variation of to get out of your
00:33:00.120
head, get into your body. That was one. So some component of exercise. And people have many
00:33:07.820
different approaches to this. So you can pick your favorite version of it. Another was that came up
00:33:15.100
again and again and again and again was journaling in different capacities, whether that's Richa Chata,
00:33:23.040
who's a very famous Bollywood actress, who will, if she's anxious or feeling overwhelmed, will write
00:33:31.600
about her problem or fear. She'll say, I am worried about X because, and then just write,
00:33:39.560
write, write, write, write, write. And then once she hits a pausing point, she'll ask the question,
00:33:45.320
so what? What then? What happens if that happens? And then she'll write again, so what? And she'll
00:33:51.080
keep asking, so what? Until the fear has been disarmed. And she finds that to dramatically lower
00:33:58.640
stress and anxiety, which is something I also do effectively. There are other people who,
00:34:06.500
like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, or Josh Waitzkin, who's thought of as a chess prodigy,
00:34:11.580
who will pose a question to themselves, say after dinner, go to sleep. Thomas Edison did this exact
00:34:18.300
routine as well. Then they wake up and before any input from their devices, before breakfast,
00:34:24.260
before any of that, they sit down and they journal on the question that they asked themselves the day
00:34:28.380
before or the situation that they posed to their subconscious mind. That's also very common.
00:34:34.340
There are, I would say, perhaps a dozen or 20 different approaches to journaling that people
00:34:40.760
describe in Tribe of Mentors, but the underlying point being to take what might be very nebulous
00:34:49.000
or disconcerting thoughts in your head and to trap them on paper so you can look at them under a
00:34:54.600
magnifying glass and either completely diffuse the boogeyman and realize that you have no real reason,
00:35:03.280
no real need to fear what you're afraid of, or to gain clarity on whatever the next steps might be.
00:35:09.340
No, I think writing is powerful because, as you said, emotions are irrational, they're nebulous,
00:35:13.500
but when you start writing, your brain kicks into analytical mode, like linear mode.
00:35:20.080
I think it's interesting, the Stoics, they used writing as a way to do that, to practice Stoicism.
00:35:26.500
They did, and I think it's very underutilized. And when I say writing, also, in today's day and age,
00:35:36.100
given what happens when you turn on a laptop, I think it is a competitive advantage, or at the very
00:35:45.280
least, very valuable to do this by hand. And just because I have it open to this page, you know,
00:35:52.680
Esther, not Esther Perel, different. Esther Perel is also in the book, is amazing. But Esther Dyson,
00:36:00.000
her answer, when she feels overwhelmed, is she asks, what is the worst thing that could happen?
00:36:06.660
And what she says is, fear of the unknown is generally far worse than the fear of something
00:36:10.540
specific. And that, and I'll just finish it because it's super short. If it's not the death
00:36:15.740
of yourself or those you are responsible for, there's probably some reasonable set of options
00:36:20.140
you should consider calmly and thoughtfully. This is straight out of Seneca, right? I mean,
00:36:25.240
this is straight out of stoicism. And it's most valuable when you put it on paper.
00:36:31.180
Yeah. No, Dwight Eisenhower did the same thing throughout his career. People don't know this.
00:36:34.600
He would just, if he had a problem, he would just write a memo to himself and then he'd throw it away
00:36:38.740
when he was done. What was the most unusual way to get focused or combat the overwhelm?
00:36:45.160
Uh, you know, I'm not going to get it totally right, but Greg Norman,
00:36:51.500
the golf player. Yeah. Golf legend, Greg Norman. I think he starts with like yelling at the top of
00:36:59.960
his lungs. That's stage one. And then there are other steps after it, but I remember just cracking
00:37:07.720
up when I first got his responses. Right. And I think it was funny because he all said like,
00:37:12.360
Oh, Buddhism changed my life. But then right after that, I was like, I yell this obscenity
00:37:16.440
as loud as I can. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There are some people stick their head in a bucket of ice.
00:37:23.020
It was a rather unusual one, I suppose. And I do ask people, I ask everyone, I mean,
00:37:29.300
this is one of the questions, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
00:37:34.180
And you get some really weird answers. And the point of that question is to
00:37:41.000
I suppose accomplish two things. One is to just humanize these people so that you realize
00:37:47.940
everyone's crazy. It's not just you. And that if you think anyone's normal, you just don't know
00:37:53.700
them well enough yet. So there's, there's that piece just to make everything more approachable.
00:37:59.320
But you also get some ideas for cool hobbies or weird superstitions that you might find kind of
00:38:06.160
cool. So if you're hyper rational, it might be kind of fun to adopt like arbitrarily two or three
00:38:11.840
superstitions that you find really enjoyable, which is something that I do.
00:38:17.140
Yeah. What are the, what are those superstitions? Or is it something you can't say because they're
00:38:20.720
like totems? No, no, no, no. I can, I, it's not like Candyman. I can, I can, I can mention
00:38:25.920
what they are. For instance, I don't like using red ink to sign anything. I'm pretty sure I picked
00:38:33.060
this up in China. It might've been somewhere else in Asia where in certain instances, red ink is
00:38:39.320
considered bad luck or for breaking contracts. So I don't like using red ink for signing anything.
00:38:44.440
And there are good superstitions and then bad superstitions, or you can think of things of
00:38:48.560
omens for good or omens for bad, right? So the number five, five, five is a good omen because I
00:38:54.900
finished copy editing the very last line of my second book, the four hour body looked up in a tea shop
00:39:02.740
and it was five 55. I already like repeating numbers. So now if five 55 pops up on my phone,
00:39:10.000
I always take a screenshot. So that's another weird one.
00:39:14.040
What do you do with the screenshots? I just keep, I just keep, I don't do anything with them. I just
00:39:19.500
like the act of taking the screenshot to pause and capture that moment. I don't cheers with water.
00:39:26.240
So if people are doing some type of toast with alcohol, I have to have some alcohol in my beverage
00:39:32.200
or I will not toast with a non-alcoholic beverage. So it's not just water. It's, it's also any non-alcoholic
00:39:39.800
beverage. I won't toast with it, but I will do a fist bump. I will, for some reason, I allow myself
00:39:44.340
to like fist bump other glasses, but I won't clink the glass together if it's say water. And I'm pretty
00:39:51.620
sure I got that from some Italians. So I have a handful here or there and I'm fully aware of how
00:39:56.800
ridiculous they are, but I just enjoy having a little bit of a rationality injected into my
00:40:05.400
life that can otherwise be like so quantified and so serious and blah, blah, blah. That's like,
00:40:10.980
you know, all, all work and no play makes Timmy a doll boy. Exactly. Well, Tim, there's a lot more
00:40:16.620
questions we could dig into. We're gonna have people go out and get the book. Where can they find out
00:40:20.160
more information about the book? Do you have a website for it? Yeah. Tribeofmentors.com.
00:40:24.000
You can find sample chapters. I put up, if you search Tribe of Mentors, Terry Cruz, I put up
00:40:29.800
six life lessons from Terry Cruz, but the best place to go is just tribeofmentors.com. And you
00:40:35.580
can find the entire list of mentors. You can find sample chapters, the whole nine yards. And certainly
00:40:41.580
I think it's number three on Amazon right now. Overall, every book, it's doing really well. Just
00:40:47.180
overtook Obama. So people seem to really be enjoying it. You can find it anywhere books are sold.
00:40:52.060
And I would just say to folks, it's a choose your own adventure guide. It's a buffet. So it's not
00:40:59.180
intended to be read cover to cover. You just pick and choose just like you did and find the things
00:41:05.040
that grab your attention. That's it. So if you even read 50 pages out of the 650, I consider that having
00:41:13.240
read the book. So it's really just finding the bits and pieces that grab your attention. And that's
00:41:18.740
really proud of it. It's been really helpful to me. I couldn't find it. So I had to write it. And
00:41:22.880
this is a reference book. It's the playbook that is a collection of playbooks. So I hope people enjoy
00:41:27.620
it. Awesome. Well, Tim Ferriss, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:41:31.300
My guest today was Tim Ferriss. He's the author of the book Tribe of Mentors. It's out now. It's
00:41:36.280
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at
00:41:39.800
tribeofmentors.com. Also check out Tim's podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, and his new podcast called
00:41:44.420
Tribe of Mentors. Find those on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever else you listen to podcasts.
00:41:47.680
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash mentors, where you find links to resources,
00:42:05.900
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:42:10.120
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the show,
00:42:13.900
I've gotten something out of it. I appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or
00:42:17.420
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00:42:20.800
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00:42:24.620
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00:42:34.080
your continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.