Top 289 Quotes & Sayings by Tim Ferriss - Page 5

What do you want?' is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer.

I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and it's often a slippery target. For me, I've just thought about incentives.

Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.

In all cases where doubt crops up, ask yourself, "If I had a gun to my head and had to do it, how would I do it?" It's not as hard as you think.

People frequently fail when they try to do everything at once. They approach a massive project and quickly get discouraged. Taking small, but high-value steps takes less time, and you learn more in the long run.

I do my best writing between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.. Almost every friend I have who is a consistently productive writer, does their best writing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. My quota is two crappy pages per day. I keep it really low so I'm not so intimidated that I never get started. I will do the gathering of interviews and research throughout the day. I'll get all my notes and materials together and then I'll do the synthesis between 10 p.m. to bed, which is usually 4 or 5 a.m.

It's lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for "realistic" goals, paradoxically making them the most time-consuming and energy consuming. It is easier to raise $10,000,000 than it is $1,000,000. It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.

The bottom line is that you only have the rights you fight for.

Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W's you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.

Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It's about building a system to replace yourself.

Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.

There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

I open each class with an explanation of the singular importance of being a "dealmaker." The manifesto of the dealmaker is simple: Reality is negotiable.

Personal branding is about managing your name - even if you don't own a business - in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? Chances are that your "blind" date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.

Perfection is an impossible destination

The blind quest for cash is a fool's errand.

Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn't make it productive or worthwhile.

Massive elimination is the most important step and the most neglected step for entrepreneurs.

Seemingly unrelated [things] that are in fact really related, that's the stuff I like to talk about. Like dancing, language learning, swimming, three-pointers.

By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves to do otherwise: 'John, I'd love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I've got at least three hours of unimportant email to reply to before calling prospects who said 'no' yesterday. Gotta run!

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.

Nothing can match the wonderment that comes from staring up into the star-filled canopy above and realizing that you are a part of that creation.

Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.

The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.

Companies that start by redesigning the economics of an industry often finish by redesigning the whole industry-and owning it.

Doing less is not being lazy. Don't give in to a culture that values personal sacrifice over personal productivity.

To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

People feel personally slighted if you don't respond to them in 30 seconds and treat email as instant messenger.

Be bold and don't worry about what people think. They don't do it that often anyway.

I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.

People who avoid all criticism fail. It's destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms.

Life is too short to be small.

You and your friends could plan the trip of a lifetime in 6-18 months to visit the completed school, teeming with dozens or hundreds of students who greet you with smiles and thank you letters. You'll know it's your school because your names will be on the door.

You think you're fatigued, therefore you can't exercise. In fact, you choose not to move, therefore you feel fatigued.

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.

Unbeknownst to most fun-loving bipeds, not all stress is bad. Indeed, the New Rich don't aim to eliminate all stress. Not in the least.

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.

People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.

Happiness has a very short half-life.

If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.

I think willpower is very valuable.

Get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up

The brain is where most people really screw up.

Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan.

Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure.

It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strenths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.

There is an infinite selection of things that I could test in life, so I generally will look for a critical mass of word that comes back to me. At this point I have hundreds of friends who are the best at what they do, arguably number one in the country or in the world. I will oftentimes just kind of throw a volley out to people, ask them what they're obsessing on or what they find interesting that's on the fringe. If the same answer comes back a few times, I'm like, "Okay."

The book is first and foremost something I made for myself.