Quotes from Timothy Ferriss

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This

In cooking—as in business and war—hope for the best but plan for the worst.

If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren't you?

What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.

courage was more important than confidence. When you are operating out of courage, you are saying that no matter how you feel about yourself or your opportunities or the outcome, you are going to take a risk and take a step toward what you want. You are not waiting for the confidence to mysteriously arrive. I now believe that confidence is achieved through repeated success at any endeavor.

But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.

the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case—to count the pea pods.

The best defense is a good offense. —DAN GABLE, Olympic gold medalist in wrestling and the most successful coach in history; personal record: 299–6–3, with 182 pins

a person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time.

Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I've been there and

Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you're a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.

So red teaming is: You take people who aren't wedded to the plan and [ask them,] 'How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?' If you have a very thoughtful red team, you'll produce stunning results.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more "pretty goods" until no one else has your mix. .

Ben Franklin's excellent advice: "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Options - the ability to choose - is real power. This book is all about how to see and create those options with the least effort and cost. It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money - a lot more money - by doing half of what you are doing now.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe." —Abraham Lincoln

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

I'm often asked how I define "success." It's an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things - achievement and appreciation. One isn't enough: Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable. Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.

Dreamline Questions: What are you good at? What could you be the best at? What makes you happy? What excites you? What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself? What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it? What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. —MALCOLM X, Malcolm X Speaks

we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it." We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.