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#80: Thomas Edison's Formula for Greatness artwork

#80: Thomas Edison's Formula for Greatness

The Tim Ferriss Show

June 8, 2015

This episode is intended to help you with unexpected problems that will crop up this week. My guest is Ryan Holiday, who became Director of Marketing at American Apparel at age 21 (!). He’s a beast.

Speakers Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday

TopicsEntrepreneurshipBusiness

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably athletic greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the four-hour body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food-sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multi-mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of. Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with. That's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula. Which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tfs. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tfs, as in Tim Ferris' show. athleticgreens.com/tfs. 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 five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've 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, and that's why I created 5-Bullet Friday.

It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always gonna be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to 5-Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. 5-Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.

Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with 5-Bullet Friday subscribers.

So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot, and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday, and thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. This episode is brought to you by two sponsors that I use all the time. The first is Vimeo, and why should you check it out? You should check it out because I keep track of all the movies I watch, and I watch some really esoteric, weird stuff. I find some gems in the rough, if that's the proper expression, the diamonds in the jungle, however you wanna put it, and I've collected some of my favorite movies at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Vimeo. That's all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Vimeo. And there are a couple that I like to highlight, and there are all types, and that includes a lot of non-fiction, so documentaries on break dancing, big wall climbing, motorcycles, the resurrection of manual labor, and there are others that I've recommended that you guys have loved, like the science fiction short, The World of Tomorrow, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. 16 minutes, it'll blow your mind. Check it out, World of Tomorrow. All of these are listed, and you can watch trailers. I'm gonna suggest you watch two trailers in particular because many of you have already checked these out based on my recommendation, and they could really, really improve the quality of your life. The first is Waking Up by Sam Harris. The second is The Lady in Number Six, and just check out the trailers. The trailers are literally one to two minutes long. You could check these out, pause right now, and I think that you'll get a very good taste for why I like these. So Waking Up with Sam Harris is really one of the best introductions and guides to pragmatic meditation and mindfulness. If you want to be a high performer in high stress environments, this is what you want to check out. Sam Harris is a PhD in neuroscience, and a lot of people think, when I've talked about meditation in the past in interviews, because 80% or so of the top performers I interview, including people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and DJs and athletes all have a meditation practice. You don't have to grow dreadlocks and listen to digital redo or play the digital redo to do this. It can be very, very pragmatic and systematic. So check out the trailer, Waking Up with Sam Harris.

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