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

by Timothy Ferriss

For flexibility training, most people think holding a stretch for longer periods of time is the way to get flexible. I think that’s a bad recommendation. The real magic happens when you break that time stretching into sets with rest periods. Rest is very important for flexibility training. Even if you’re not out of breath or tired, your body needs time to adjust to the stretch response.

You’ll get much better results performing a stretch for one minute with three minutes of rest, repeated three times, rather than doing the same stretch for three minutes all at once. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. To do it right, you need to do sets with rest.

I’ve gotten better at telling my brain “no” when it wants to relate to conversation with a “bigger” story. What I mean is, somebody might be telling me a story about an experience they had, while I have a related story that sounds even bigger or more dramatic than theirs. Rather than wait for a moment to jump in with mine, I’ll just let that desire go and ask them more questions about their experience. What I’ve discovered is incredible: the loss of the opportunity to possibly impress someone is far outweighed by what I learn when I ask more questions. There is always something else to their story that will amaze you. Don’t expect that what they start with is as exciting as it will get.

Crepe Erase body products for my sun-damaged skin.

books that have greatly influenced your life? Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wooden is

Champions Think, Train, and Thrive by Jim Afremow.

Without a doubt, I would say my dawn simulator [Philips Wake-Up Light].

The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler.

[Coaches] focus on you first. Mentors rightly focus on themselves first and you second. Lastly, a good coach builds regimens designed to make you better, [versus simply] providing advice, as a mentor would.

For me, it has been calendar architecture. I am a lion about it and expect everyone around me to respect it and help me with it. “Calendar architecture” is designing and implementing a repeatable schedule every day. As an introvert, this requires a lot of alone time, and everyone around me protects this in my day. It is also designed to keep my day from being filled up with “gristle.”

I’m a bit of a pen geek. I recently found an erasable pen—the FriXion by Pilot in blue. It writes so smoothly, and being able to erase it gives me a sense of power and delight. I often use the pen with a “smart” notebook (like the Rocketbook Everlast smart notebook) that can be reused.

with little experience or skill. He is the author of Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier, which I recommend reading after watching the videos titled Freestyle: Made Easy.

Love the plateau. All worthwhile progress occurs through brief, thrilling leaps forward followed by long stretches during which you feel you’re going nowhere. Though it seems as if we’re making no progress, we are turning new behaviors into habits. Learning continues at the cellular level . . . if you follow good practice principles.

One of the most powerful books in business I ever read was Managing, by the former head of ITT, Harold Geneen. It

is The Good Heart by the Dalai Lama.

took the top floor along with some lower floors. I learned from that experience in Japan to leverage a real estate strategy for Salesforce. It’s an example of how I learned that if I’m upset about something, I should spend time asking myself, “What could I learn?” Because another opportunity is probably going to come in the future, and I will be better able to re-execute it.

I try to take a day off a week and

[Note from Tim: Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Peace Is Every Step, also had a huge impact on my life.]

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

A three-dollar yellow legal pad. When I was 25, I taught hip-hop classes and tended bar to pay the bills while slowly building my online business. Every time I taught a class or poured drinks, I brought that yellow legal pad with me. Because inevitably, people would ask, “So, what else do you do when you’re not teaching/bartending?” I’d tell them about my online business, hand them a pen and my yellow legal pad, and ask them to subscribe to my email list. That yellow legal pad and a long-term focus on nurturing my subscriber list is the foundation of my entire career. It’s helped me set and exceed major life goals, build a global business, and generate more than $75 million in revenue for my company.

Learning and using a relationship communication tool called the Imago Dialogue, created by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt. It’s a structured way to talk with your spouse or significant other, especially when you’re fighting. At first, it all feels a bit hokey and totally unnatural. But when you learn how it works and use it earnestly, it’s nothing short of miraculous for your intimate relationships.

Do whatever it takes to earn enough money, so that you can go all in on experiences or learning opportunities that put you in close proximity to people you admire, because proximity is power. Show up in every moment like you’re meant to be there, because your energy precedes anything you could possibly say.

energy. Even if you have a team, I still recommend choosing one platform to focus on at first. Before committing to another content channel or social platform, ask yourself, why exactly do you want to be on this platform? What are the specific business reasons you’re going to commit time, energy, and resources to regularly creating and engaging in that space? Does this really make sense given your other time commitments and big-picture goals?

There are nine Enneagram “types” and every person has one dominant type. But I’ve found it to be much more useful and predictive of how people actually behave.

Doesn’t seem like rocket science. Ask anyone and they’ll be utterly convinced they already start with the rocks, then fill in the pebbles, then the sand. I was, too. The first time I did this exercise (when reading The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, one of my all-time favorite management books) I was convinced that the majority of my time went into recruiting and working on our product [the “rocks”].

Don’t call yourself a visionary, or aspire to make a disproportionate impact, if you anchor all your decisions with what you see and know now. I am always surprised by how lazy people are when making serious decisions about their careers. Join a team not for what it is, but for what you think you can help it become. Be a “founder” in the sense that you’re willing to make something rather than just join something. You must seize opportunities when they

While we idolize the experts in our industry, we often forget that industries are often transformed by neophytes. The boldest transformations, like Uber disrupting transportation or Airbnb disrupting hospitality, are led by outsiders.

First, I would do something called the “bar complex.” It’s 12 barbell exercises done in a sequence. I do five rounds of the 12 exercises, starting with just the bar (45 pounds) and ten reps of each exercise. Each time I finish the circuit, I add five pounds to the bar and do two reps fewer than the round before it, so it looks like this: 10 reps x barbell (for each of the 12 exercises; same for the below) 8 reps x barbell + 5 lbs 6 reps x barbell + 10 lbs 4 reps x barbell + 15 lbs and (at heaviest) 2 reps x barbell + 20 lbs

Asking myself the question, “When I’m old, how much would I be willing to pay to travel back in time and relive the moment that I’m experiencing right now?” If that moment is something like rocking my six-month-old daughter to sleep while she hugs me, then the answer is anything: I’d literally pay all the money I’d have in the bank at, say, age 70 to get a chance to relive that moment.

including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

[One model that Whitney likes is the large weighted blanket from Weighted Blankets Plus LLC.]

is Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching: ancient Taoist wisdom applicable to anything. It can be read at different times in your life, and every time it’s revisited, it takes on entirely new meanings.

is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Robb Wolf’s The Paleo Solution.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

Have you ever seen the blog Wait But Why? [written by Tim Urban] They have a chart of the weeks of your life.

didn’t really start growing quickly for another year or two, and it really took off around 2012. That’s a four-year period where things weren’t going awesome. But, I thought: “That’s not that long. That’s like med school before you go into residency.”

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat.

Hobonichi Techo. It’s the kind of thing you see in Japan: a notebook turned into a high art. Maybe next year. . . .

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.

“We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

The Transformed Cell by Steven A. Rosenberg Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

When you stop caring about being right in the eyes of everyone—versus being right in your own eyes and the eyes of those who matter to you—it’s amazing how little you care to waste energy trying to convince people of your view.

The iMask Sleep Eye Mask

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil.

Ending Aging, Dr. Aubrey de Grey talks about his research into how we can stop the degeneration of cells, essentially finding ways to extend life.

or habit has most improved your life? The one thing I learned in music and collaboration is that music is a cyclical trend and entertainment in general is always in a cyclical trend. I’ve realized that instead of following the trends, you want to identify the trends but not follow them. It’s good to recognize trends, but if you follow them, you get sucked into them, and then you also fall with the trend.

Journal writing can be used for catharsis and healing or for growing and expanding capacity. Entries can be as short as a minute or as long as time permits. It typically takes two to four weeks before one can see and feel positive results. For the best outcomes, entries to one’s journal should be made by hand rather than on a computer.

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.