Mindmap: Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss

Tribe of Mentors is a collection of over 100 mini-interviews, where some of the world’s most successful people share their ideas around habits, learning, money, relationships, failure, success, and life throught 11 right questions.

https://paulminors.com/blog/tribe-of-mentors-by-tim-ferriss-books-summary-pdf/#2-INFLUENTIAL-BOOKS 

https://fourminutebooks.com/tribe-of-mentors-summary/ 

1. $100 PURCHASES

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

è Cold stream 0.5$ “I took a swim and had a trillion-dollar moment with the water and my best friend. (summer 2022)

2. INFLUENTIAL BOOKS

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

è Tren duong bang (by Tony Buoi Sang) has great impact on me when I was in high school. I realize that I need English like fish need water, without English I can’t imagine that my life will it be. This book was the reason that made me chose Animal science major, and it totally changes my life to diffenrent way.

è Enzyme facor (Hiromi Shinya): atomic habits, healthy, …

è Deep work (by Cal Newport): deep focus, deep life, productive methor,…

- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Đi tìm lẽ sống)

- The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (Người lạc quan thần túy)

- The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Những thiên thần tốt đẹp hơn trong bản chất tự nhiên của chúng ta: vì sao bạo lực bị từ chối)

- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (Lược sử loài người)

- Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger (Sổ tay niên giám của Munger)

3. LESSON FROM FAILURE

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

Took Animal sicence major <-  easy to replace, less value, heavy work, waste time with stupid people. Why wouldn’t I care about vertainary instead or another majors, I had 27 point to do it.

è Learn to love what I do, and chasing to my child dream (firefly farm, biodynamic farm), it’s greater to have an aim in life. But if I have to take a moment in that certain past time, I would love to choose it again. Animal sience <- crastman work while I collect skill I need, stoping work for money, work for learning, invest soon and study hard

è And school is stupid, grade doesn’t meaning, not chasing certificate and learning from real life

Don’t know much about financal literacy <- learn it (Rich dad, poor dad)

If I know it soon, it driven me rich soon. I had money from annual scholaship every year (10tr) and part time jobs but I have’nt money literacy, so I passed my chance to invest soon. I feel regret about this.

è Learn it

I’ve never really fight for something. I’m still lazy, doing shit (watching doraemon, wasting my time for overnothing, matubating,…)

è Everyman 4 hours sleep, deep work, deep learning, deep life, learning new skill faster (being a cratfman who collect his skill for someday, connecting the dots)

3.1. Annie Duke learned through poker to disconnect failure from outcomes. Bad decisions can still lead to short-term success and good decisions to unexpected short-term failure. “Every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward.”

3.2. Annie Duke learned through poker to disconnect failure from outcomes. Bad decisions can still lead to short-term success and good decisions to unexpected short-term failure. “Every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward.”

3.3. Annie Duke learned through poker to disconnect failure from outcomes. Bad decisions can still lead to short-term success and good decisions to unexpected short-term failure. “Every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward.”

With each failure come three great opportunities:

- Learn to see what you control.

- Figure out where you need to improve.

- Freely express your ideas.

4. BILLBOARD MESSAGES

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? So many interesting quotes. If I were to pick the best ones, they would be?

è A picture of myself + All ideas will pass away, only the story will stay

- Everything you want is on the other side of fear

- “I am too busy” is the most inauthentic excuse to rationalise why we won’t do something.

5. BEST INVESTMENTS

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?

- Education and mentors

- Meditation

- Investing in others’ success

6. IMPACTFUL HABITS

In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?

è Reading, Healthy lifestyle (drink, eat, breath, workout (using left hand, HI, runing like a horse, gym…)…, deep work

Meditation – Walking – Sleeping well – Working out – No-sugar diet – Expressing gratitude.

- Kevin Kelly avoids working on things that someone else could do, even if he enjoys doing it and would get paid well to do it. This way, he’s left with projects that only he can do, which makes them distinctive and valuable.

7. UNUSUAL HABITS

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

è Everyman (morning get up at 2 am)

- After ordering his iced latte, Adam Anderson will give the barista a $20 bill and tell him to comp the person after the person behind him for whatever he or she wants, and to give that person the change as well.

- Peter Attia loves egg boxing.

8. SAYING NO

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to (distractions, invitations, etc.)?

Saying no is tough for everyone, however it seems the most successful people say no… to almost everything.

- Gary Vaynerchuk says 20% yeses to things that seem dumb, “because he believes in serendipity.”

- Samin Nosrat say “the more clear I am about what my goals are, the more easily I can say no.”

9. STAYING FOCUSED

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do?

Taking frequent breaks, meditation, working out, walking, and making lists.

è Meditation room, take a nap 20’, go swimming

10. BAD ADVICE

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

è From my poor parents: good study so you can have a good job. I don’t like packing mylife. I want something different, I want to get rich, special life, great experiment

You have to drink

You need a PhD degree…bla bla

From my professor: I work for passion not for money

11. ADVICE FOR STUDENTS

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?

è Learning financial litercy soon

Getting advantage from media like blog, youtube, pinterest, twitter, …

Stay hungry stay foolish

Making your child dream come true

- Long-term thinking, embracing adversity (nắm lấy nghịch cảnh), persisting (kiên trì), exploring, and being kind & respectful towards others is the way to go

- Don’t wait until you get a job to do the thing you want to be doing (Veronica Belmont).

- Always try to find people who disagree with you. Challenge yourself to truly listen to people who have differing ideas and opinions than you do (Annie Duke)

- “Don’t accept others’ views or conventional wisdom.” Trying to find what success means to you. What level success you want?

Tools of Titans == habits and beliefs of 101 high-performing people

Inspiration and Goals

Many titans visualize their long-term goals, so it becomes easier to know what they’re fighting for.

è I want a good body (confident, handsome, and heathy to climb in every moutains and swim in every oceans) -> work out + skin care + stop matubation

è I want to make animation

è I want to be bestseller witer

è I want to be rich and I have my farm

Be Courageous. Be Brazen

Having a big goal you would love to tackle

what is the absolute worst that could happen? Picture the situation in vividly clear detail. (Tim Ferriss)

· How bad would this outcome be? How permanent would this damage be?

· If this happened, how could you work your way back and recover?

· How likely is this absolute worst case outcome, from 0% to 100%?

· Now that you’ve pictured the worst case outcome, what’s the best case outcome? What’s a realistic good outcome? How would your life be better here?

Work Habits and Career

Once you’ve identified your goals, you need to put in the work to reach them.

You Need to Focus

= they need to apply a laser-sharp focus to the opportunities that will fulfill their goals.

From music producer Kaskade: Imagine you have a glass jar, and next to it big rocks, pebbles, and sand. If you put the sand and pebbles in first, they take up all the space, and you can’t fit the big rocks in. But if you add the big rocks, then the pebbles, then the sand, everything fits. Likewise, if you focus on the minor to-do items, you won’t be able to fit the big priorities in.

Avoid a “culture of cortisol.” There’s so much emphasis on being busy and fear of missing out that you can go day to day perpetually anxious. There really shouldn’t be many emergencies in your life. Focus on your big goals, and cut out the 20% of things that cause 80% of your unhappiness.

Deciding What to Work On

Work in an area where you’re not easily replaceable. This is where you can make a unique impact.

Become a double/triple threat. Many people try to become the very best in the world at one specific thing, the equivalent of playing basketball well enough to make the NBA. But this is very competitive and has a low probability of success. Instead, you can easily become above average at two or more things, then combine them to great effect.

5 skills as useful to augment any career: communication, management, sales, finance, and internationalization.

Personal Habits

Action, not Information

Start a Habit with a tiny push

Improving Your Weaknesses

Creativity and Ideas

Creativity and Ieas

Generate a Lot of Bad Ieads to Get Good Ideas

Spend your energy coming up with LOTS of ideas, even if they're silly. What matters isn't your hit rate, but rather the number of good ideas you have at the end.

Author James Altucher challenges himself to come up with 10 ideas a day. These aren’t necessarily business ideas, but also around themes like “10 ways I can save time”, “10 ridiculous inventions”, or “10 ways to solve a problem I have”

è Scrutinizes them and kills them off, the unkillable ideas are worth going forward with

How to think of ideas

Ask the dumb question

Put yourself into an environment that gives you maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people.

è Read Zero to one _Peter Thiel

Testing ideas

Once you have a lot of ideas, how do you find the good ones?

By yourself, you're unlikely to find the very best solution or see the entire picture. You need other people to stress-test your ideas

If an idea survives the trial by fire, then it's a good idea. If it doesn't, you've just saved yourself a lot of time.

Business Strategies

1000 True Fans

A true fan is defined as "a fan who will buy anything you produce."

Be Authentic

People crave realness and connection, and being yourself will find the audience that likes you for you.

Business Tactics

Don't think 10% bigger, think 10 times bigger.

Don't head for a hyper-competitive area. Competition is hard and sucks the profit out of companies.

Failure is not good. While this might sound obvious, accepting failure has become a common mindset in tech startups. In contrast, failure is actually painful and should be avoided.

Charge for what you're selling.

Peter Thiel asks, "If you have a 10-year plan, why can't you do this in 6 months?"

Happiness and Mindset

Being productive and reaching your goals obviously aren't the only important things in life.

Being happy and in control of your emotions is another form of success important to titans.

Be Grateful for Things: 5’/day (small things like and old relationship that really helped you, something great that you saw happen, or something simple that you can see)

For me: like the air, the stars, healthy, my parents, my brothers, my friends, books, … and myself

Dealing with nagative emotions

Anxiety:

Tim Ferriss poses a question in many of his interviews: "What would you tell your younger self?" The most common response was "relax, don't get anxious—everything will work out."

For anything in life, you have three options: change it, accept it, or leave it. It's not good to want one option but not act on it—like wishing you would change it but not doing anything to change it, or wishing you would leave it but not leaving it.

Stress:

Navy SEALs have a saying about leadership: "Calm is contagious." People mimic your behavior. If you stay calm, they'll be calm too. If you panic, they'll panic too.

Anger:

A Buddhist saying: "Holding onto anger is like holding a hot coal while waiting to throw it at someone else."

When feeling anger, don't suppress it or swat it away. Acknowledge it explicitly. This helps to dissolve the issue.

If I had $10 million, what would I be doing differently? Do I really need $10 million to get this lifestyle today?

Are you enduring a crushing career, hoping to one day escape into the nirvana of retirement? Life is short—try to design the life you want today, rather than put it off 20-40 years into the future (when, heaven forbid, a tragic accident or illness might cut it short).

Your ideal life might be deceptively easy to achieve. While building BrainQUICKEN, Tim Ferriss was stretched to his energy limit and felt trapped in his caffeinated, overworked mental state. He stopped and asked himself what kind of lifestyle he really wanted.

 After quick calculations, Tim realized his target lifestyle cost far less than he anticipated. The resource he lacked was time and flexibility, not cash. This motivated him to start redesigning his life immediately, before he even had $10 million.

What if I do the opposite of what I normally do, for 48 hours?

If you're stuck and not getting the performance you want, maybe you need to invert (dao nguoc) what you're doing. If you try the opposite for just 48 hours, the damage is limited—at worst, you fail and go back to your normal routine. At best, you find a totally new successful way to do things. As a salesman for a tech product early in his career, Tim wasn't meeting his sales numbers. At a loss for what to do, he looked at what the other salespeople were doing, and he decided to do the opposite. Other people worked 9 to 5; Tim decided to call outside of 9 to 5. He found that he was able to reach executives, who were still working outside normal business hours, and bypass their assistants, who were not.

If I lost something, do I need to make it back the same way?

Have you lost something like an investment or opportunity? Your natural instinct is to make it back the same way you lost it. But this ignores the value of your time and could be inefficient.

In 2008, Tim Ferriss owned a house in San Jose and lost money in the recession. Selling then would mean a $150,000 loss. His friends counseled him to rent the house until the value could rebound. Tim followed the advice and was miserable from all the property management headaches that followed. Instead, he realized the valuable asset here was his time, not cash. By babysitting his house, he might be able to recoup the $150,000 over 5 years. But using the same time and energy, he might be able to grow his brand and business by $500,000. Tim decided to sell the house.