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

by Timothy Ferriss

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? When in doubt, let kindness and compassion guide you. And don’t be afraid to fail.

Adversity. Everybody spends their life trying to avoid it. Me too. But the best things that ever happened to me came during the times when the shit hit the fan and I had nothing and nobody to help me. Who are you really? What do you really want? Get out there and fail and find out.

The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We’re like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. I

My favorite word in any language is saudade—the Portuguese word that’s at the heart of Brazilian and Portuguese culture and music. It means, roughly, a sweet longing for a beloved thing or person that will likely never return.

Time is the only thing we can’t get back.

You work hard because you’re inspired to, not because you have to. Work becomes fun, and you have energy for days because this life is not a “young man’s game.” It is an “inspired person’s game.” The keys belong to whoever is inspired, and no specific age, sex, gender, or cultural background has a monopoly on inspiration. When you’re creative, you render competition obsolete, because there is only one you, and no one can do things exactly the way you do. Never worry about the competition. When you’re creative, you can, in fact, cheer others on with the full knowledge that their success will undoubtedly be your own.

you sometimes have to do what I call a “crowd-thinner.” One wrong person in your circle can destroy your whole future. It’s that important.

busy is a decision. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for “not important enough.”

she felt that confidence was highly overrated. I was instantly intrigued. She explained that she felt that most overly confident people were really annoying. And the most confident people were usually arrogant. She felt that overexuding that amount of confidence was a sure sign that a person was compensating for some type of internal psychological deficit. Instead, Dani declared that courage was more important than confidence. When you are operating out of courage, you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step toward what you want. You are not waiting for the confidence to mysteriously arrive. I now believe that confidence is achieved through repeated success at any endeavor. The more you practice doing something, the better you will get at it, and your confidence will grow over time.

There is very little luck involved. Winning your great job is about hard work, stamina, grit, ingenuity, and timing. What might look like luck to you is simply hard work paying off.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? I do not believe in work-life balance. I believe that if you view your work as a calling, it is a labor of love rather than laborious. When your work is a calling, you are not approaching the amount of hours you are working with a sense of dread or counting the minutes until the weekend. Your calling can become a life-affirming engagement that can provide its own balance and spiritual nourishment. Ironically, it takes hard work to achieve this. When you are in your 20s and 30s and want to have a remarkable, fulfilling career, you must work hard. If you don’t work harder than everyone else, you will not get ahead. Further, if you are looking for work-life balance in your 20s or 30s, you are likely in the wrong career. If you are doing something you love, you don’t want work-life balance.

“Avoid compulsively making things worse.”

Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult. Almost getting into the wrong marriage helped me recognize and enter the right one. Falling sick made me focus on my health. It goes on and on. Inside suffering is the seed of change.

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? “Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” Desire is a driver, a motivator. In fact, a sincere and uncompromising desire, placed above everything else, is nearly always fulfilled. But every judgment, every preference, every setback spawns its own desire and soon we drown in them. Each one a problem to be solved, and we suffer until it’s fulfilled. Happiness, or at least peace, is the sense that nothing is missing in this moment. No desires running amok. It’s okay to have a desire. But pick a big one and pick it carefully. Drop the small ones.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want, not what you’re “supposed to.”

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? SleepPhones. It’s a headband that goes over your eyes and ears and that has inside two ultraflat earphones so you can listen to books as you fall asleep.

And specialize—the great human achievement is to specialize as a producer of goods or services so that you can diversify as a consumer. Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty.

For my social life “yes” list, a similar test could be called the Deathbed Test. We all hear about these studies where people on their deathbed reflect on what they regret most, and the cliché is that nobody ever says they regret spending more time in the office. That’s because a deathbed offers people a level of zoomed-out clarity that’s hard to get to in our normal lives, and it’s only when we’re lacking that clarity in the fog of our day-to-day rush that we’d think it makes sense to neglect our most important personal relationships. The Deathbed Test pushes me to do two things: Make sure I’m dedicating my time to the right people with the question, “Is this someone I might be thinking about when I’m on my deathbed?” Make sure I’m spending enough high-quality time with the people I care about most with the question, “If I were on my deathbed today, would I be happy with the amount of time I spent with this person?” An alternative is thinking about other people’s deathbeds—“If X person were on their deathbed today, how would I feel about the amount of quality time I’ve spent with them?” The people who matter most are always in competition for your time with both your work and with other people, and the Deathbed Test can be a good reminder that the only way to dedicate the proper amount of time to your key people is by saying no to a lot of other stuff and a lot of other people.

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students. I am often asked whether one should work in the private or public sector. I always advise working in the private sector, and wish I did this before entering politics and the public sector. The private sector teaches important skills like entrepreneurship that can then be applied to any area of work later on.

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? I wear a SubPac M2 Wearable Physical Sound System while I commute on the subway to my office, and sometimes while I work at my desk. The system lets you feel the vibration of music through your body. Music producers, gamers, and deaf people are the primary users. I find the full-body experience of music makes listening to music or even a podcast more of an immersive somatic experience rather than just a conceptual head thing.

“It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding what game you want

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? Sam Barondes’ book Making Sense of People has had a big impact on my thinking, and I sometimes give a copy to people in the midst of hiring someone or even deciding whether to get engaged. As part of my role as an investor, I interview 400 to 500 people a year to decide whether to hire them or invest in their various startups or investment funds, and the most useful mental model I have found to help understand what makes people tick is the one Barondes describes in his book. The model is called the “Big Five” or OCEAN: open-minded, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic. The academics who developed the model clumped every English adjective that could be used to describe someone into categories and reduced them to as small a set of factors as they could. The Big Five is considered the equivalent of gravity in the academic literature on personality. There have been thousands of studies using it, and it’s considered much more statistically accurate than alternatives such as Myers-Briggs. The killer combination is high open-minded, high conscientious, low neurotic.

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches. There are two coaches who have had enormous impact on me in the last five years: Carolyn Coughlin at Cultivating Leadership and Jim Dethmer at Conscious Leadership. Carolyn is the most gifted listener I have ever encountered. She surfaces my hidden assumptions—the ones that hold me rather than me holding them—and teaches me to ask better and better questions. Jim Dethmer may be one of the few living bodhisattvas. Jim has helped me refine my communication skills and helped me develop more conscious relationships at work and with my family. I picture masterful coaches like Jim and Carolyn playing the same role as the wizards from Lord of the Rings—they exude supportive, loving energy that creates the conditions for life feeling like an adventure from a secure base, an endless unfolding of possibility.

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

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Life will go faster than you know. It will be tempting to live a life that impresses others. But this is the wrong path. The right path is to know that life is short, every day is a gift, and you have certain gifts. Happiness is about understanding that the gift of life should be honored every day by offering your gifts to the world. 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.

The best advice I have seen comes from people who don’t try to tell me the answer … instead they give me a new approach to thinking about the question so that I can solve it better on my own. Most “bad” recommendations I could reduce to “I have been successful, so do it my way.” The best advice is more like, “I can’t answer your question, but this might be a good way for you to think about it.”

can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: This text helped rid me of the nagging incompleteness in my understood connection between the successes and failings of ancient and modern civilizations. Power needs tools and circumstance. Neither need be earned.

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois: A seminal work in American and African-American literature. Du Bois, a brilliant writer and sociologist, introduced notions like “double-consciousness” and the “veil of race” while examining what it means to spend lifetimes primarily viewing ourselves through the eyes of other people, power, and cultures.

Transcendental Meditation is something I’d long heard about but only stepped into this year, and it’s transformed my ability to center my mind and recharge in short periods of time. The David Lynch Foundation has made it so digestible without any of the rigidity or easier-said-than-done elements that I expect many of us find intimidating about beginning a meditation practice.

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. Though most people will typically blame other people or circumstances in their life when they are unhappy, Buddhists believe that we are the cause of our own suffering. We can’t control the fact that bad things are going to happen, but it’s how we react to them that really matters, and that we can learn to control.

The Back Buddy by the Body Back Company is my favorite purchase from the past five years, bar none.

“You have to lift off the back foot while taking a step forward, or you will not be able to move ahead.”

“Grudges are for those who insist that they are owed something; forgiveness, however, is for those who are substantial enough to move on.”

“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.”

“The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.”

“Look for a partner you’ll try to impress daily, and one who will try to impress you.” Over the last couple decades, I’ve noticed that the best, most enduring partnerships in business (and in life) are among people who are constantly growing together. If the person you choose to depend on is constantly striving to learn and improve, you too will push yourself to new levels of achievement, and neither of you will feel like you have settled for someone you eventually outgrow.

Barnacles of the good life tend to slow you down, if you don’t get used to risk-taking early in your career.

The advice to ignore (in certain situations) is to strive to become “well-rounded”—to move from company to company, looking to pick up different types of experience every year or two, when starting out. That’s useful in the abstract, but if you find that strength of yours (as an individual contributor or a team leader) at a company whose mission you are truly passionate about, take a risk—commit and double down, and rise through the ranks. Maybe you’ll be running the place before you know it!

The Game and Rules of the Game, for which he went undercover in a secret society of pickup artists, made him an international celebrity and an accidental hero to men around the world. In

audiobook I’ve given away most is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Though “nonviolent communication” is poorly named (it’s the equivalent of calling cuddling “nonmurderous touching”), the central idea is that, unbeknownst to us, there’s a lot of violence in the way we communicate with others—and with ourselves. That violence comes in the form of blaming, judging, criticizing, insulting, demanding, comparing, labeling, diagnosing, and punishing. So when we speak in certain ways, not only do we not get heard, but we end up alienating others and ourselves. NVC has a magical way of instantly defusing potential conflicts with anyone, from a partner to a server to a friend to someone at work. One of its many great premises is that no two people’s needs are ever in conflict. It’s only the strategies for getting those needs met that are in conflict. Disambiguation: The version you want is a 5-hour, 9-minute lecture. You can recognize it by the cover, which is a close-up of a hand flashing a peace sign. It starts slow, but then gets revolutionary. Do *not* get any versions of the printed book, which has the same title.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a masterpiece of explaining the sequence of discoveries that led to the development of the atomic bomb in an historical context. During

“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

“To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children … to leave the world a bit better … to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”—J. K. Rowling

“If I accept you as you are, I make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming I help you become that.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“No one owes you anything.” We live in a world that’s rampant with entitlement, with many people believing that they deserve to be given more. My parents raised me to be self-sufficient, and impressed upon me that the only person you can really depend on in life is you. If you want something, you work for it. You don’t expect it to be given. If others help you out along the way, that’s fantastic, but it’s not a given. I believe that the key to self-sufficiency is breaking free of the mindset that someone, somewhere, owes you something or will come to your rescue.

If you are struggling to figure out where you are headed in life or what you are passionate about, pay attention to activities, ideas, and areas where you love the process, not just the results or the outcome. We are drawn to tasks where we can receive validation through results, but I’ve learned that true fulfillment comes from love of the process. Look for something where you love the process, and the results will follow.

Earplugs for sleeping. I’ve tried them all. Hearos Xtreme Protection NRR 33

Lonfrote Deep Molded Sleep Mask is the best for airplanes or anywhere else.