Tim Ferriss Quotes

In all, Kepler tested seventy circular orbits against 's Mars data, all to no avail. At one point, performing a leap of the imagination like Leonardo's to the moon, he imagined himself on Mars, and sought to reconstruct the path the earth's motion would trace out across the skies of a Martian observatory; this effort consumed nine hundred pages of calculations, but still failed to solve the major problem.

Diversity in counsel, unity in command.” –Cyrus the Great

But I will say this: the more clear I am about what my goals are, the more easily I can say no.

Busy is a decision.” Here’s why: Of the many, many excuses people use to rationalize why they can’t do something, the excuse “I am too busy” is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest. I don’t believe in “too busy.” Like I said, busy is a decision. We do the things we want to do, period. If we say we are too busy, it is shorthand for “not important enough.

We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” — Archilochus

The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.

If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” –Annie Dillard

So much of the job is more emotion and ‘heart work’ than it is ‘head work.’ The head comes in after, to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it’s not the head, and it’s not an intellectual activity.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creature

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing that person who’s struggling to lose weight who thinks that they need to run 20 miles a week. They have no desire to do it, their knees hurt, they hate it, and they’re not losing weight. And I’d like to say, ‘Well, I’ve got great news for you. You don’t ever need to run another step a day in your life, because there’s no value in that.’ “There is value in exercise, though, and I think that the most important type of exercise, especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really high-intensity, heavy strength training. Strength training aids everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial density and orthopedic stability. That last one might not mean much when you’re a 30-something young buck, but when you’re in your 70s, that’s the difference between a broken hip and a walk in the park.

Neuroscience has begun to reveal some fascinating things about how the brain works, shedding light on the concept of personal identity, the data-handling limitations of the central nervous system, and the way that the brain smooths over its liabilities and discontinuities to sustain a sense of unified consciousness. We are beginning to realize that each of us really does contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it, and that the chorus of voices within was built up over eons of evolution, like geological strata in the or the .

To quote the industrial statistician George Box: “Every model is wrong, but some are useful.