![]() Or, My sister is not selfish, and she thought that X, Y, Z. It’s where you take a phrase that is a belief of yours-I don’t have a sister but let’s just say, My sister is selfish and always asks me to do A, B, and C-and you turn it around by saying, I am selfish and I always ask her to do X, Y, and Z. tools like “turnarounds,” from Byron Katie. The solution involves focusing on things that can be very uncomfortable. But there's a big difference between looking for a reprieve and looking for a solution. I've gifted at least a hundred copies of this book to people, and it makes the point very early on that most of us say we want to be healed or we want to change, but that, in fact, is not true. That's a great starting place for learning to accept and be friends with the emotions and thoughts that you would otherwise label as bad.Īnother is Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. And there are many things that have contributed to that, including interactions with people like Tara Brach, who wrote an outstanding book called Radical Acceptance, which was recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who is as anti-woo-woo as possible. I’d say that’s the biggest change that I have focused on, and seen in myself over the last five to six years-that change in the inner voice. Have you been able to be more self-forgiving over the years? When that happens to me, I wonder if any of the therapeutic work I’m doing is actually helping me become a calmer, saner person. You said you lost your shit this morning. In a rare interview while promoting the audio version of Tribe of Mentors and Tools of Titans, Ferriss reflects on what he’s learned throughout his career, and how the success he set out to find 13 years ago looks very different from the success he’s after now. (He’s also been vocal about a lifelong struggle with his own mental health, specifically bipolar depression.) “Certainly I found myself, after checking a lot of those boxes, still suffering,” he says. After spending much of his career chasing after external markers of success-money, time, skills-he says he still knew something was missing. That professional pivot is, of course, tethered to Ferriss’s own personal trajectory. Whereas Ferriss was once in search of answers to questions about how to do more (and do it more efficiently), he says he’s now focused on going inside and helping you get comfortable being with yourself. It’s that struggle that Ferriss has turned his attention to in recent years, both with his last two books- Tribe of Mentors and Tools of Titans, tomes of crowd-sourced wisdom and advice from the type of world-class talents he has on his podcast-and with his recent venture as an ardent backer (both vocally and financially) of research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. ![]() “There’s a lot of struggle right now, whether that’s lowercase ‘s’ struggle or capital ‘S’ Struggle,” he says. He knows that much of the noise in the self-improvement or self-optimization space-plenty of which he has been responsible for-presents a rosy picture of people always functioning at their highest capacity, leaving little room for the messy fuck-ups and tantrums that characterize most everyday lives. “There’s nothing glamorous or justifiable about it-I just hit my threshold.”įerriss is forthcoming about his tantrum as a penance of sorts. “I just became a pouty three-year-old, who felt the need to throw a tantrum,” he says. ![]() He says there were a handful of issues in his “home slash oasis slash prison”-a broken fridge, for starters (not ideal during a time of isolation), a handful of small professional fires, and a general lack of sleep. In fact, the very morning we speak, he’s just lost his shit. ![]() That is decidedly not what is happening in my life day-to-day.” That does not mean that I wake up every morning sitting on a Lotus flower, meditating for six hours and then producing masterworks as Isaac Newton and Shakespeare and others supposedly did during quarantine. “I'm revisiting those questions and my answers to those questions during this time. “I am not focused on maximizing productivity because that begs the question: to what aim?” he says. But when we speak, via phone, toward the end of May, before historic protests rolled across the country, Ferriss assures me that productivity is not on his mind. Four other best sellers and a hit podcast, not to mention 1.6 million Twitter followers, have come in its wake. ![]() After all, his first book- The 4-Hour Work Week-was, in his words, “a toolkit for maximizing per-hour output.” Released 13 years ago, it turned him into one of America’s most popular productivity gurus. You might reasonably suspect that Tim Ferriss is having the most productive quarantine of all time. ![]()
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