The Lessons, Hacks & Books That Changed My Life - Tim Ferriss - #780

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tim Ferriss. He's an entrepreneur, author and a podcaster. Tim is one of the world's leading thinkers, and his podcast recently crossed 1 billion downloads. Today, we get to hear his biggest lessons from two decades of hacking life and self-improvement. Expect to learn Tim's ultimate hack for productivity, what his morning routine looks like, what Tim thought would make him happy when he was younger but didn't, how to deal with depression, which books Tim most often gifts, his best 10 exercises for health and longevity, his thoughts on the current state of podcasting, how to avoid the perils of audience capture, how to cultivate self-belief, the secret to becoming a high performer and much more. This was very cool. It kind of felt like things coming full circle a little bit. Before I ever started Modern Wisdom in 2018, I listened to a podcast from Tim called How to Release a Podcast in 2017 So he was the guy that taught me how to launch a show before he even knew who I was and before this show even existed. So it was cool to sit down with him, an absolute OG of this podcasting world and his insights and life lessons really are unique. He's got this sort of wonderful blend of tactical accuracy and the more pithy sort of philosophical insights. Very, very cool. And there is just so much to take away from today. So I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. And that means that you will miss episodes when they go up. The next few weeks have some of the biggest guests that I've ever brought on Modern Wisdom coming on and you don't want to miss them. And if you want to support the show, if you want to say thank you for finding Tim Ferriss and strapping him to a chair for three whole hours, or if you just want to make me very happy, navigate to Spotify and press the follow button in the middle of the page or the plus in the top right-hand corner on Apple podcasts, I thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tim Ferriss.
Most people, I think, would look at you and assume that you're this hyperproductive, super optimized efficiency machine. How much truth do you think's in there?

**Tim Ferriss** (2:27)
I think there's some truth to it. I think I'm more effective than I am efficient. So if you were to look at me day to day, part of the reason I don't really ever have journalists shadow me or do anything like that is because if you were to be a fly on the wall, I think I look like I'm doing a whole lot of nothing a lot of the time, or I'm just futzing around. But I think the choosing what you do matters a lot more than how you do any one given thing. So I do think I'm good at picking, let's call it lead dominoes, the tip over other things. So high leverage targets that tend to make other things irrelevant or a lot easier. So I'm good at that. But in the actual execution, I think I look like a drowning monkey a lot of the time. So I would say there is some truth to it. But I would probably replace efficiency with effectiveness. And then in the last 10 to 15 years, I think I've de-optimized a lot since, for instance, if you're running a marathon, you're not going to take a taxi from point A to point B. You're sure that will be efficient, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. So there's a lot more that I would put in that process over outcome category, I would say.

**Chris Williamson** (3:27)
Talk to me about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:30)
So effectiveness is, there are different ways to look at this. The way I look at it is effectiveness is what you do. Efficiency is how you do something. But doing something well does not make it important or high leverage. Does that make sense? So if you do an 80-20 analysis and you determine, say, in learning a language that if you learn the thousand highest frequency words, you're going to be conversationally fluent. Choosing that subset of vocabulary and then studying it at a B minus level is better than choosing the wrong set of vocabulary and studying at an A plus level. So the what matters more than how or the material matters more than the method. The task that you choose matters more than how you do any given task. That's how I tend to think about it.