The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

What would you do if you had a 250-lb. football player on top of you?

Most women would be raped, and most men would be beaten unconscious.

In both cases, you end up on the ground and must first try and establish what’s called the “guard” position — your legs locked around your attacker’s mid-section, which allows you to better control distance. Most self-defense courses will only train you enrage your attacker, ensuring a worse ending.

Here are two ring-tested approaches that just plain work for saving your ass:

Want to see some of these moves in real life? Check out UFC 75 tonight for free at 9pm ET/PT on Spike TV. Not for the faint of heart but a good tutorial in what actually works. Be safe!

I consider physical training a crucial part of lifestyle design and optimization. This is the first of two posts that will focus on practical strategies for surviving a full-force physical attack.

Parts I and II focus on stand-up defense against punches and chokes, and parts III and IV — taught with UFC grappling coach, David Camarillo — will focus on ground escapes and finishes.

Trained competitive fighters have a wide range of techniques, but I will limit the video tutorials below to simple-to-remember defenses against the most common attacks for men and women in the standing and ground positions. First we’ll look at punch defenses for men (especially against the overhand right) and choke defenses for women… Continue reading “How to Survive a Physical Attack: Punches and Chokes”

The spectrum of human memory potential: Daniel “Brainman” Tammet beats blackjack and Japanese schoolchildren become human calculators.

Numbers, or digit strings, are considered by many mnemonists and cognitive scientists to be the most difficult data to memorize. If numbers are both abstract and difficult, how did Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan memorize PI to more than 10,000 places? How did my classmate in Tokyo also multiply four-digit numbers in seconds?

The answer is proper encoding, or translation of the abstract to the concrete. Hideaki used what I’ll teach you here, whereas my classmate used a phantom abacus like in the above video.

The average person can only hold seven or fewer numbers in their working memory at any given time, using vocal repetition as an aid. Using proper encoding, trained subjects can memorize all of the area codes in the United States within a 24-hour period… Continue reading “Savant School: How to Memorize 10,000 Numbers and More”

1 part stimulant, 1 part loco pro, 1 part…((c) leptonsoup333)

I celebrated when I sold my first book. For about 5 minutes. Then I panicked.

My senior thesis almost killed me, and now I had an entire book to write. I interviewed close to a dozen best-writing authors (Pulitzer Prize winners and New Yorker staff writers vs. best-selling authors) about their writing processes. How did they churn out high quality work day after day?

“Sit in front of the typewriter or computer from 8am to 6pm each day, with a short break for lunch and the gym. Just put in the your time no matter what,” one said. I tried that and almost pulled a Hemingway.

Another suggested that I write from 5-7am, write chapters out of sequence (which ended up being great advice), and asserted that writer’s block was a myth. My brain gremlins disagreed.

And on and on and on.

After much experimentation, I figured out my personal recipe for creativity on-demand: circadian scheduling, altered states, and white noise. Huh? It’s actually simple… Continue reading “The Creativity Elixir: Is Genius On-Demand Possible?”