“Nothing bothers me more than sloth. The objective is to fix mistakes of ambition and not make mistakes of sloth. I work my ass off.”
-Tim Ferriss, from the new issue of Men’s Journal, Sept. 2008
Since I’m going nuts preparing for Burning Man, this post will be a short one.
The quote above is from the latest issue of Men’s Journal, where the main editorial cover story is a profile of me and the rise of The 4-Hour Workweek. There are also fascinating profiles of John McEnroe (awesome insight into his tennis strategies) and Gavin Newsom, as well as a cool snapshot of Tonny Sorensen, CEO of Von Dutch and former world champion in Tae Kwon Do.
The journalist, Larry Smith, spent almost three full days with me and covers a lot of details that haven’t been covered before, including background and education; core tenets of lifestyle design and common misinterpretations; interviews with family, professors, and friends; experiments involving critics; even how I organize my environment and home… Read More
Derek Sivers is a stud. I thought I’d share the conversation we had at SF MusicTech Summit. Dozens of topics covered include:
- Testing asssumptions vs. cheating
- PR and reaching out to unreachables
- Micro-testing ideas and products: from The 4-Hour Workweek to Trent Reznor
- Personal outsourcing for creatives
- Filling the void and creating meaning outside of the inbox and office
Derek is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader. He is also the musician who started CD Baby, the world’s largest online music store for independent musicians. Here are some current numbers:
- 242,846 artists sell their music at CD Baby
- 4,574,622 CDs sold online to customers
- $83,590,381 paid directly to the artists
With more than 2 million digitized tracks under management, CD Baby is also the largest provider of independent music for iTunes… and it all started as a hobby.
How does it work now that it’s enormous? From Derek’s blog:
When I was the owner and president of CD Baby, it ran without me, and I hardly spent 4 hours on it in the last 6 months. It’s wonderful.
Here are a few snippets from our conversation… Read More
This is the final continuation of Part 1, where Torah Bontrager — who escaped the Old Order Amish culture to attend Columbia University — explained common misconceptions and myths about the Amish, as well as the pros and cons of being raised in this alternative American culture.
Don’t pimp real foxes. That’s just mean. (Photo: wildphotons)
38.16% of the people who visit this site are still using Internet Explorer (IE). It’s like buying a hybrid car for the gas mileage and then driving with flat tires and the doors open.
This post will serve two purposes: first, to introduce beginners to features of Firefox (FF) that make it worthwhile; second, to introduce more experienced users to the favorite add-ons of Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of WordPress) and Garrett Camp (co-founder of StumbleUpon). Perhaps you’ll like one or two of mine… Read More
The more dangerous the trip gets, the more momentary we all become. Songs sound better, foods taste better, and seventy-cent-a-bottle cane whiskey is fun to drink.
Last year on April 8th, Slovenian marathon swimmer Martin Strel became the first man to swim the entire length of the Amazon River from headwaters in Peru to the Brazilian port city of Belém: 3,274 miles. It took him 66 days with a support crew of near twenty people following him in a boat for protection.
He’d already conquered the Danube, the Mississippi, and the Yangtze. In 1997, he became the first to swim non-stop from Africa to Europe, and he did it in 29 hours, 36 minutes, and 57 seconds… without a wetsuit. WTF? Seven swimmers had attempted it before and all had failed.
The Amazon was different. As the “Fish Man,” as the locals called him, reached the finish line at Belém, he had to be helped to his feet and ushered into a wheelchair amidst a cheering crowd. His blood pressure was at heart-attack levels and his entire body was full of subcutaneous larvae. But he lived to tell the tale.
I recently caught up with Martin about how he trained for and accomplished this feat…Read More
Do you want to spend more time with loved ones or friends, but you also have business goals that — under current models or habits — require 80 hours per week or checking e-mail at 20-minute intervals?
This cognitive dissonance leads to failure in both areas, but few people are able to fix the problem.
Dr. Stewart Friedman was recently profiled in the New York Times for his unusual field-testing of “four-way wins,” or goal structuring that integrates four facets of life–work, home, community, and self.
It’s not often that you see the phrase “rock star adoration” in the newspaper of record.
I reached out to Dr. Friedman, founder of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project and former work-family adviser to both Al Gore and Jack Welch, while writing The 4-Hour Workweek. He is absolutely brilliant with micro-testing and fixing two largely unaddressed issues for type-A personalities: psychological interference and conflicting goals… Read More
[Note: The vote was postponed from Tuesday (today) to tomorrow, Wednesday. There is still time to take the actions below.]
This is the most important and controversial post I’ve ever written. For American readers, the short video above could be the most important video you watch in your lifetime.
I hesitated to post this and will alienate some readers, but I accept that.
Wednesday, July 9th, could mark the beginning of official condoning of warrantless surveillance of law-abiding citizens in the US, not to mention foreign nationals. I am not an alarmist and believe in qualified surveillance with process — this is different. I’ve done the homework.
The above is an 18-minute interview that I just finished with Daniel Ellsberg, famous for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. His actions are often credited with helping end not only the Nixon presidency but also the Vietnam War. He consulted for the Kennedy Administration after receiving a PhD. from Harvard in Economics and served in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Remember that part of lifestyle design is creating a good environment for you and those you care for. Central to this is preventing dangerous laws — the rules of your environment — from coming into existence. This is not about being political. It’s about being responsible. There are Republicans in Congress who oppose this bill, so it shouldn’t be written off as leftist propaganda.
In the video above, I interview Ellsberg to learn what every American needs to know — and do in the next 24 hours — about the new FISA (Foreign Information and Surveillance Act) amendments. The interview, and below partial transcription, answers questions like… Read More
This fireside chat at Google in London was also simulcast to their offices in Ireland, Sweden, and Moscow. It was a blast.
It covered tons of topics never discussed on the blog before: proposed improvements to Gmail (please!), the real original book title, using telephone vs. e-mail, principles and case studies, metrics (including exercise), analysis vs. intuition, the declining dollar and personal outsourcing & geoarbitrage, and much more.
If you’re bored at work, you can listen to the audio while you browse Facebook :) My collection of 55 odd videos on YouTube can be found here if you want more semi-productive distraction before 5pm.
In fact, I volunteered for TiE when I first moved to Silicon Valley in 2000 to observe some of the best and brightest in action. I’m not Indian, but entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. Consider this:
Today, TiE events are a parade of the Who’s Who among CEOs and VCs of Silicon Valley, from founding Sun Microsystems CEO… Vinod Khosla to former McKinsey CEO Rajat Gupta to former Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, who sold his company to Microsoft in 1998 for $400 million. “TiE is the best kept secret,” says Bhatia, who in April launched a new startup InstaColl. Others jokingly call TiE “the Indian Mafia”, the invisible hand behind at least 300 startup companies at any given moment…
In expectation of TiE’s annual conference on entrepreneurship, TiECON 2009 (May 15/16), I asked four of its members, all accomplished venture capitalists at some of the world’s most prestigious firms, to answer questions about start-ups and finance that 35,000+ of you suggested via Twitter, plus a few I wanted to add. The questions include, among others:
What is the best pitch meeting that you remember and why?
What are the most common mistakes or assumptions smart founders make in pitch meetings with VCs?
What unfavorable terms do founders often miss or underestimate in term sheets?
How can someone get you to look at a business plan if they don’t know anyone in your network (e.g. outside Silicon Valley elite, didn’t go to Stanford)?
