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”? Persistence matters more than talent. The student with straight As is irrelevant if the student sitting next to him with Bs has more passion.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? Whenever I’m feeling like I need to prioritize what I’m doing or overthinking a particular situation that is making me anxious, I try to remember this great exchange in the film Bridge of Spies. Tom Hanks, who plays a lawyer, asks his client, who is...

Hi Tim, Gah. OK. I’ve been battling with this, and here’s the deal: after five intense years of creative output and promotion, interviews about personal journeys and where ideas come from, after years of wrapping up one project one day and jumping right into promoting another the next … I’m taking a step back. I recently maxed out pretty hard, and for the benefit of my work, I gotta take a break. Over the past month, I’ve cancelled contracts and said no to new projects and interviews. I’ve started creating space to explore and doodle again. To sit and do nothing. To wander and waste a day. And for the first time in five years, I’m finally in a place where there is no due date tied to every drawing. No deadline for ideas. And it feels really right. So, while I really want to do this with you—I respect you and your work and am honored that you’d ask me to participate—and as capital S stupid as it is for me professionally not to do it, I’m going to have to say thank you but … I gotta pass. I’m simply not in a place to talk about myself or my work right now. (Crazy for a highly verbal only child to say.) Hopefully we will get a chance to talk somewhere down the line—I promise any thoughts I’ll have for you then will be far more insightful than anything I can share with you right now. I hope the space created by my absence is filled by one of the brilliant people I suggested in my previous email. And really, thank you so much for your interest. I’ll be kicking myself when the b...

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.” –YODA

Powerful Jedi master “The best defense is a good offense.”

Leadership on the Line by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, because it is the most honest book I have ever read on leadership, and you can tell that by the book’s subtitle, Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. It’s deeply honest, and a book that I give to everyone, so they know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for if they choose to be a leader.

I define faith as the ability to hear the music beneath the noise.

When there is no light at the end of the tunnel, all you can see is the tunnel. I felt at that point there was no way forward. Probably the most important thing I had to do was resign. It was then that I heard a voice. I’m not going to say this was God talking to me, but it was certainly a voice that said to me, “If you resign, you have given your opponents the victory. You have allowed yourself to be defeated in this first battle of what you see as the major challenge of the coming generation.” I couldn’t do that.

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? First, seek out dissenting opinions. Always try to find people who disagree with you, who can honestly and productively play devil’s advocate. Challenge yourself to truly listen to people who have differing ideas and opinions than you do.

The fact is that when two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? In poker, you do a lot of failing because you lose a lot of hands. There are two ways to fail in poker. First, you could define failing simply as having a losing outcome, like losing a hand. But one of the lessons poker teaches you is that this is an unproductive way to define failure because you can win a hand by making very poor decisions and lose a hand while making very good decisions. So you can put all your money in the pot with a mathematically dominant hand and still lose because the rest of the cards that are dealt don’t go your way. If you define failure as merely losing, then you will think failure is just an outcome. And you might try to adjust your play to avoid losing even though your decisions were great (or repeat poor strategies just because you won executing them once). This would be the equivalent of deciding it is wise to run red lights because you made it through one safely a few times. Or to decide not to go through green lights because you got in an accident once doing that. Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won doesn’t mean I succeeded—not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my str...

“There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.” It also reinforced the belief, that which does not kill me makes me stronger.

it’s the quality of your relationships that will determine the quality of your life. Invest in your connections, even those that seem inconsequential.

A friend of mine recently told me a story that spoke to this point. He had taken his daughter to visit a college, and they requested a tour of one particular center she was set on. The facilities manager showed them around with great pride—from the principal’s office to the media center to the utility room. Surprised by the exhaustive tour, the daughter rolled her eyes but her father told her, “Just ask questions. You never know what will happen.” When they were finally done, the facilities manager gave them his card, and my friend instructed his daughter to write a thank-you note, and to specifically mention two things that were memorable about the experience. The next day, the daughter got a call from the president of the center. Evidently, the facilities manager had forwarded her email with a note telling him, “This is the kind of student we need here.” You can guess what followed. Always take the time to acknowledge people—and not just when you know you have something to gain. If you show interest in them, they will be interested in you. People react to kindness with kindness, to respect with respect. Relationships—even brief ones—are doorways to opportunity.

The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness: A True Story by Joel ben Izzy.

“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”—Hal Boyle.

And those books are Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler, and, perhaps most of all, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? Virtually all investors have been told when they were younger—or implicitly believe, or have been tacitly encouraged to do so by the cookie-cutter curriculums of the business schools they all attend—that the more they understand the world, the better their investment results. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more information we acquire and evaluate, the “better informed” we become, the better our decisions. Accumulating information, becoming “better informed,” is certainly an advantage in numerous, if not most, fields. But not in the field of counterintuitive world of investing, where accumulating information can hurt your investment results.

Beyond a certain minimum amount, additional information only feeds—leaving aside the considerable cost of and delay occasioned in acquiring it—what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” The information we gain that conflicts with our original assessment or conclusion, we conveniently ignore or dismiss, while the information that confirms our original decision makes us increasingly certain that our conclusion was correct.

the world is that it is simply far too complex to grasp, and the more dogged our attempts to understand the world, the more we earnestly want to “explain” events and trends in it, the more we become attached to our resulting beliefs—which are always more or less mistaken—blinding us to the financial trends that are actually unfolding.

But what makes no sense is their model of the world. That’s what doesn’t make sense. The world always makes sense.

Each day presents us with 86,400 seconds, which means each day presents us with virtually countless opportunities to reset, recover our balance, and continue rehearsing our best selves.

Now that was a highly dubious way of “resetting” each week, which I don’t recommend! But the idea of having a fresh restart whenever overwhelmed is excellent. So, let’s say by noon on any given day I’m running behind, and it’s clear I’m in danger of becoming overwhelmed in short order. Rather than attempting to keep all of my afternoon appointments, which I’d reach later and later as the day progressed, I scan my calendar, asking myself which is the earliest appointment I can “burn” by postponing it to another day. I’d rather reschedule one appointment and make the other three on time than be late and frazzled for all four appointments that afternoon.

I first met Josh many years ago after reading his book, The Art of Learning.

The principle: the power of empty space—or responding to aggression with a void. The lesson felt like a complete paradigm shift, and I ended up devoting a huge part of my life to its practice.

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? I love rain, storms, inclement conditions, chaos with hidden harmonies. Is that absurd?

It’s remarkable how the mind follows the body. Honestly, I think a lack of understanding or desire to understand that simple evolutionary reality is what inhibits so many people from rapidly improving their lives.

First, if you love something enough, it is far easier to really commit to something. Through true commitment and hard work, you can out-prepare the competition.

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin.

If the ask is more than a week away, I almost always say no, regardless of what is it. Exceptions include family things I need to attend, and a conference or two I really want to speak at, but other than that, if the “yes” would tie me to something further than a week or so out, it’s almost always a no. I keep it simple and direct. Unless there are special circumstances, I always explain why and say something like, “Thanks for the invitation, but I just can’t commit to anything more than a day or so in advance. I need to keep my schedule open for me and the people I work with on a regular basis. Best bet is to hit me up a day or two before you wanted to get together. If I’m available we can set up a time.”