#655: In Case You Missed It: January 2023 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out 5 bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. That's why I created 5-Bullet Friday.

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SPEAKER_2 (1:44)

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Tim Ferriss (2:07)

Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life.

This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blogslashpodcast and find all the details there.

Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_3 (2:58)

First up, James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits.

Tim Ferriss (3:07)

If you want to build a good habit, roughly speaking, there are four things that you can do. You want to make it obvious.

You want to make it attractive.

Matthew Walker (3:16)

You want to make it easy.

Tim Ferriss (3:17)

And you want to make it satisfying. So obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying.

Now, if you're sitting there and you're thinking, how can I get myself to meditate more? You can just turn those into questions and you can say, how can I make the behavior more obvious? How can I make it more attractive? How can I make it easier? How can I make it more satisfying? And you'll start to notice different things that you could do. So for example, how can I make meditation more obvious? Well, do you have a clear space where you're going to do this? You know, like maybe you need a meditation pillow and it's in the corner of your bedroom or it's in the corner of some other room that is the dedicated meditation space.

And this is exactly where it happens. So it's obvious where the behavior is going to occur.

Make it attractive. There are many different types of meditation and there are a lot of ways to get into it. And this is true for any habit, by the way.

For some reason, I think we often choose habits that we feel like we should do, but it's not necessarily the one that we want to do individually.

And, you know, there may not necessarily be a thousand ways to do everything in life, but there's almost always more than one way. And you should choose the version that you're most genuinely excited about, you know, that is most appealing and interesting to you. Because if you're genuinely interested in it, then there's going to be all kinds of ways to improve. You'll find all sorts of things that you could like refine or make it better. But if you're not actually interested, if you're like not genuinely engaged in the task, even the obvious stuff is going to feel like a hassle. You know, it's going to feel like a chore, even if it's straightforward. So do you want a guided meditation? Maybe it'd be nice to have somebody kind of walk you through it. Or do you want to find a meditation that has like lovely music associated with it? Do you not want anything? Do you just want silence and you want to be able to like hear yourself think for a minute or listen to your own breath for five minutes? And that's kind of the objective. But what sounds most attractive and appealing to you? Try to find a version of the habit that you're actually interested in. This actually, I think, connects to the timing piece that you were talking about, Tim, which is, yeah, in the morning is a great time for a lot of people. But if you have young kids and like your four year old is running around and you're trying to figure out how to get pants on them and you need to make breakfast, that's probably not a good time to do it. So like, find a time and a space where that habit can live, where it's attractive and you're not just going to end up frustrated because you're trying to like swim upstream.