Top 289 Quotes & Sayings by Tim Ferriss

The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.

I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

I was a very happy kid. I didn't get new bikes very often. We ate a lot of chicken legs for dinner. But I never felt in want of anything. I wasn't cognizant until much later of the discrepancy between what we had and what other people had.

The biggest misconception about work is that you need to spend the majority of your time doing it.

Resveratrol is fascinating stuff. One of the best sources of information about it is the Immortality Institute. They have a forum where some people are in the 500 Club, as they call it. They've been taking 500 milligrams for years. It's a really great source of data.

I work hard, but in spurts.

When you elevate the heels more so than you elevate the sole of the foot, you trigger a cascade of compensations in the knees and hips that cause tight hip flexors, and then those hip flexors cause lower-back pain.

Every time I find myself stressed out, it's because I do things primarily driven by growth.

I'm not averse to making a lot of money. But where does that end? I hang out with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that the standard by which I should measure myself? Where does that take you if you're in my business? I think it takes you to pretty dark, corrupt places.

If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: 'Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?' From what I've seen, it's not likely.

A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.

I have plenty of money to do what I want to do, and I have the relationships.

World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.

Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.

There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.

There's an entire generation of male strength and endurance athletes, even recreational lifters, who have never gotten off the ephedrine-caffeine-aspirin stack. The process of getting off stimulants is really horrible.

Exercise is overrated.

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.

It's very easy to confuse confident motion with being productive - and they're not the same thing. Productive to me means measurable outcomes that apply to my most important to-dos that positively affect my life. That's it.

I don't journal to 'be productive.' I don't do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. It's the most cost-effective therapy I've ever found.

For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work.

I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.

I've found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn't realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors. And I tested all different varieties and species of cinnamon from Ceylon to Saigon.

I learned to associate discomfort with getting better. And that transcended wrestling and applied to a lot of other things in life.

I tend to split my activities into fun, income and legacy. The number of things in that finance bucket is pretty few and far between and doesn't consume much time at all.

I like work/life separation, not work/life balance. What I mean by that is, if I'm on, I want to be on and maximally productive. If I'm off, I don't want to think about work. When people strive for work/life balance, they end up blending them. That's how you end up checking email all day Saturday.

I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.

If you optimize for money too early, you will be minimizing for learning, almost without exception.

I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.

The problem with New Year's resolutions - and resolutions to 'get in better shape' in general, which are very amorphous - is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn't work. I don't care if you're a world-class CEO - you'll quit.

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

A 'social media fast' is a fast, I suppose like any other. In this case, you're simply giving up whether it be a device or a particular type of social media site. And I do this at least once weekly.

There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that's something I'm accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn't bother me.

I encourage active skepticism - when people are being skeptical because they're trying to identify the best course of action. They're trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

The best entrepreneurs I've ever met are all good communicators. It's perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.

If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

If retirement means laying on a beach and rubbing coco butter on your stomach, about 48 hours of that will be enough for most people. You'll want something new.

Workaholics typically have a lot of achievement with very little appreciation of what they have, whether it's cars or friendships or otherwise. That is a shallow victory. Then you have people with a lot of appreciation and no achievement, which is fine, but it doesn't create a lot of good in the world.

Converting your own passions into a job is the fastest method for eliminating any passion you once had.

Online I see people committing 'social media suicide' all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you're never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don't warrant a response. This lends more credibility by driving traffic.

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

In a digital world, there are numerous technologies that we are attached to that create infinite interruption.

One of the great things about stargazing is that it's immediately at hand for so many people. You know, you could get into scuba diving or bird watching, but the stars are always up there.

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.

Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.

Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.

Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It's really that easy - and that's what I do.

The first thing I would do for anyone who's trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

At its core, I don't view Facebook as a social network. I think it could become the driver's license of the Internet. And beyond that, it can become the pipes and the plumbing upon what most of the Internet is built. I think it's very well positioned.

You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.

If you do something as simple as 15-minute ice baths three days a week, and you time those baths properly, you can significantly multiply your fat loss.

I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.

The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.

Work is an activity that is financially-driven or one that you'd like to do less of.

My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents.

I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly.