The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog. Tim is an author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, investor (FB, Uber, Twitter, 50+ more), and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (400M+ downloads)
Richard Powers’ The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an incredible book. It’s beautiful and brutal, poetic and therapeutic. Several guests on the podcast recommended it to me, and Hugh Jackman gave me the best description: “It works on you in the way nature does. It’s patient, and it’s in no rush. It’s slow and it’s steady and it’s true.”
Some of my dear friends are journalists, and they’re wonderful people. They measure twice and cut once. They are thoughtful, unrushed, and considerate, despite organizational pressure and incentives to be the opposite. That takes extraordinary discipline, and it’s fucking hard. It isn’t the path of least resistance, and I admire the hell out of them for doing what is right, despite the uphill path. This includes some amazing humans at the NYT. This praise doesn’t mean that they write fluff pieces; it means they aim to be fair and humane and take the time necessary to think about ethics and the Golden Rule.
A close friend of mine recently asked me for a cheat sheet for getting into better shape in 2021. He specifically asked about supplements and abs several times. He’s looking for a rapid reboot.
This post will share the most impactful articles and books that I’ve read in the last 12 months. If you’d like to learn more about how I read, keep track of things, and review highlights, you might enjoy this YouTube video.
“I felt like I went through 15 years of psychological therapy in one night.” — Actual patient featured in Trip of Compassion “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”— William Gibson This post is about my largest bet of 2020. It relates to pain and promise. I’ll start with the pain, …
When the world—inner or outer—seems upside-down, journaling is often what saves me (here’s a real example). My girlfriend recently found a gem in “The Isolation Journals,” a project by Suleika Jaouad (@suleikajaouad) intended to be “a 30-day creativity project to help make sense of challenging times.” Each day for 30 days, you receive a journaling …
Continue reading “A Dialogue with Yourself: Past, Present, and Future”
The next two weeks are going to be very difficult, and the risk of ventilator shortages due to COVID-19 is high. Manufacturing will ultimately help, but it takes time. I’m already aware of one hospital in New York that can no longer provision one “vent” per patient, and demand is likely to grow dramatically over …
Continue reading “Emergency Technique: How to Increase Ventilator Capacity 2–4x in 10 Minutes”
NOTE FROM TIM: The following was written by a close friend who has decades of experience in healthcare systems and advanced training in computer science and healthcare data science. He preferred to publish anonymously to avoid political headaches, so I’ll call him “Felix.” We are publishing this quickly for reasons that will soon be obvious, …
“Hope is not a strategy.“ — James Cameron A prescient article titled “Body Count” by Epsilon Theory/Ben Hunt (@epsilontheory) was recently sent to me by one of my smartest and most connected friends. It paints a spooky picture of the Chinese reports of what has been informally referred to as “Wuhan coronavirus.” Per the WHO …
Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Coronaviruses and Seatbelts”
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.