Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

by Timothy Ferriss

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.

Inside suffering is the seed of change.

fulfilled. Happiness, or at least peace, is the sense that nothing is missing

in this

read with a purpose in mind.

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

But

all of it is malleable, every day is new, and memory and identity are burdens from the past that prevent us from living freely in the present.

Ignore: The news. Complainers, angry people, high-conflict people. Anyone trying to scare you about a danger that isn’t clear and present.

Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.

Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair. Play the hand that you’re dealt to th...

“You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people.

I aspire to only work with people who I can work with forever, to invest my time in activities that are a joy unto themselves, and to focus on the extremely long term.

remember that you have to die.”

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

TIM URBAN is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers.

Musk is unusually cheflike. Most of us spend most of our lives being like Keating, or what I call a “cook” (someone who follows someone else’s recipe). We’d all be happier and more successful if we could learn to be chefs more often—which just takes some self-awareness of the times we’re being a cook and an epiphany that it’s not actually as scary as it seems to reason independently and act on it.

I think we all have two main characters in our heads: a rational decision-maker (the adult in your head) and an instant gratification monkey (the child in your head who doesn’t care about consequences and just wants to maximize the ease and pleasure of the current moment).

By focusing inward on yourself as a writer instead of outward on what you think readers will want to read, you’ll end up creating the best and most original work, and that one-in-a-thousand person who happens to love it will end up finding their way to you.

The point of both the Epitaph Test and the Deathbed Test is that by the time you’re on your deathbed and your epitaph is being drafted, it’s too late to change anything—so we want to do whatever we can to access that magical end-of-life

Science isn’t about being right preemptively or knowing the answer. Science is motivated by the human drive to struggle to discover.

I like to think about careers through Dan Siegel’s model of a river flowing between two banks, where one side is chaos and the other side is rigidity.

“For Julia, in the Deep Water”

“Integrity is the only path where you will never get lost.”

Don’t let yourself define what matters by the dogma of other people’s thoughts. And even more important, don’t let the thoughts of self-doubt and chattering self-criticism in your own mind slow you down. You will likely be your own worst critic. Be kind to yourself in your own mind. Let your mind show you the same kindness that you aspire to show others.