The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog. Tim is an author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, investor (FB, Uber, Twitter, 50+ more), and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (400M+ downloads)
This bear scared me when I was little, but it made $1,000,000 per month in royalties for the inventor. Stephen worked on it. This is a continuation of my previous Q&A with Stephen Key, who has licensed to companies ranging from Coca-Cola and Disney to Nestle. He was also involved with the design of both …
I first met Stephen Key in 2001. Two months later, I used a few recommendations of his — shared over the customary gin tonic — to help a friend double overseas sales in less than two weeks in New Zealand and Australia. How? Licensing. It can be a beautifully elegant model. Stephen is somewhat famous …
Continue reading “A Beginner's Guide: How to Rent Your Ideas to Fortune 500 Companies (Plus: Video)”
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk and zen teacher once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., has a knack for making the esoteric understandable. In discussing what some call “present state awareness”–experiencing and savoring the present—he offers a simple parable: Let’s say that you want to eat a peach for …
Sometimes you need to make friends and influence people. Other times, you should just test drive them and push their buttons. The art of irritation can, in fact, be just as valuable as the art of persuasion. How so? Let’s start with the problem: people are good liars and actors… up to a point. What …
Continue reading “How to Test-Drive Friends and Irritate People”
Forget drag races and movie stars with “nitrous.” Instead, imagine using spotting planes, counterfeit police cars, and thermal night-vision cameras to break the record for the famed Cannonball Run from NY to LA: 32 hours and 7 minutes. How to do it? Sustain approximately 130 miles per hour on average the entire time (when you …
Continue reading “Meet the Real Fast and Furious: 130 MPH, Creating Supercars, and Breaking Records”
Deconstructing Arabic in 45 Minutes Conversational Russian in 60 minutes? This post is by request. How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would argue less than an hour. Here’s the reasoning… Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should …
Continue reading “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor)”
How did this first page of brainstorming lead to out-raising Colbert Report 3-to-1? 1:30am Bratislava, Slovakia, this past September 31 One cappuccino, two cappuccino, three cappuccino, four. Neurons humming but still no dice. It was time to get nervous. “Hey, mate. We’re heading out to Sub Club. You want to come?” Chris, a Kiwi and …
Continue reading “Embracing Ignorance as Advantage—a Case Study (Plus: Speaking Nov. 5th and 10th)”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Some of my best how-to posts are coming up soon (how I deconstruct languages in one hour, applying metrics to personal life, interviews with gold medalists on performance, etc.), but today I ask you to indulge me and some odd behavior. Two problems became clear to me a few …
Continue reading “How I Prostitute Myself (and Other Options for You)”
The menu in the Slovak Republic: full-contact video below. Long time no see! I just landed back in CA from a long overdue mini-retirement through London, Scotland, Sardinia, Slovak Republic, Austria, Amsterdam, and Japan. Some unpleasant surprises awaited me when I checked in on the evil e-mail inbox. Why? I let them happen. I always …
Continue reading “The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen (and Weapons of Mass Distraction)”
The prophetic AJ Jacobs, who wrote the inspiring “My Outsourced Life” for Esquire back in 2005, has gone prophetic. A huge fan of radical lifestyle experiments, he has already read all 33,000 pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, experimented with Radical Honesty for an article called “I Think You’re Fat”… even pretended to be his nanny …
Continue reading “What Happens When an Agnostic Follows the Bible Literally for One Year?”