008 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss show podcast

Chase Jarvis
Creativity is a new literacy
Hacker mentality - develop it in yourself

Once you are great at your craft, the rest is vision, hack the system

Negotiation is an essential life skill

Being great at your craft is a requirement

Learn to position yourself in marketplace

Be great at telling your story, storytelling is a great influence tool, packaging story is mission critical find ways to hack the system

How do you differentiate yourself in market place? be different, not better...zig when everybody is zagging

There are no more gate keepers like magazines & publishing houses...there is internet

Take ideas from other spheres, industries to be great at your skill

Be different not better

22 laws of marketing book

blue ocean strategy book

business model generation book

share your work, austin cleon book

smartcuts, kevin kelly

polymaths vs hyperspecialists

specialization is for insects -Isaac Azimov, be polymath!!!

Kickstarter

Indiegogo

Youtube

Patreon

It is permissible to be polymath

If you spread yourself too thin vs. if you have predisposition with right tools, you can become good pretty quickly

What did you start saying no to for reaching your goals?

Set limits to number of activities to be able to reach your goals 20 % customer make 80% of your income

007 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss show podcast

Stephen Dubner

Freakonomics book coauthor

Storytelling is very important skill

1st come up with as many ideas as it is possible 

2nd kill all of them 

3rd take those ideas that did not die and use them

Thinking fast and slow book

Correlation vs. Causation 

Daniel refuted stories, experts may not understand your idea, thus do not rely on their expertise, question their & your own assumptions 

Test assumptions 

Uncover biases 

Become a better thinker

You are yourself in all circumstances 

People try to replicate other successful people by reading their biographies, that is common bias among many people

Freakonomics principles & rules 

Train to think in objective way 

Put away your moral compass at considering all kinds of issue or while thinking 

Be curious like a child

Writings is crystallizing your thoughts, clearing thinking

 

7up series documentary - sociology, decision making, nurture vs. nature 

Clothes you wear influences your thinking & behavior

Levels of the game McPhee book 

006 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss show podcast

6 formulas for more output and less overwhelm 

1. Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be in front of computer screen. 

2. Make a cup of tea and sit down with pen & paper. 

3. Write down 3-5 things that are making you anxious/uncomfortable, the stuff you delay all the time. Most important tasks= most uncomfortable tasks 

4. Ask yourself: 

a) If this is the only thing I accomplish, will I be satisfied with this day? 

b) Will this task ease or knock off other important tasks, is it force multiplier? 

5. Choose only those tasks that have positive response, no more than 3 tasks. 

6. Block out time and work on only ONE of these tasks. Eliminate distractions & focus on task at hand. 

7. If you get distracted or procrastinate, then calmly return to task at hand & finish it. 

If everything is important, then nothing is important. 

What you do is far more important than how you do it. 

Doing something well does not make it important.  

Being busy is a form of laziness & indiscriminate action. 

Do not underestimate yourself, overestimate the world.

005 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss show podcast, Jason Silva

Brain games national geographic documentary

Epiphany addict - realizing something great, new discovery

shots of awe/search in youtube

Festival of dangerous ideas

Learn to get into flow state by Steven Kotler

Discover your talents and passions

Dopamine – how to manipulate it for our advantage

cognitive ecstasy wonder junkie

Set, setting & environment dictate your emotions

Do activities that take you into flow state

I worried about many hardships and most of them did not happen - Mark Twain

Enemy Dostoyevsky double

Memento movie

Matrix movie

Inception movie

Joseph Cambell’s Hero's journey book
https://player.fm/series/the-tim-ferriss-show-1578275/episode-5-jason-silva

004 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss Show Podcast, Ryan Holiday

Philosophy is used for solving practical problems

You do not control the world around you, you only control your response to the world around you

Stoicism - operating system for making better decisions in your life

Real problem is to think that you need money for surviving

Enjoy wealth but do not think that it is key for your survival, practice voluntary poverty

Make riches serve you, not you serving to riches

The problem is not having riches, but riches having you

Tucker Max
Robert Green

Find a mentor whom you can use as a ruler to compare yourself

Jack Canfield
chicken soup for the soul

Fog of war documentary

Wall of Sound documentary

How to be a good writer?
Live interesting life, do something interesting and write about it....write only when you have something to say...unless do not write at all

If you do 1 or 2 things you will feel busy, if you do 4 or 5 things you are not that busy and things help each other

To write one book is hard, but the more you write, the easier it gets


Ryan runs everyday

Top 2 3 books
Sarah Bagwell how to live book
Ulysses s. Grant biography book
The fish that ate the whale book

Pharnam Street Shane parish blog

Maker vs Manager schedule

Paul graham essays

To be rich you need either make lots of money or limit your wants & desires

Keep your identity small, be able to live for small salary, do not develop expensive habits, otherwise when you get poor it will be difficult to live

Learn and practice financial management, save money for difficult days

Human action, technology are creating climate change and super storms

Being greedy when others are fearful, being fearful when others are greedy - Warren Buffet

Sub-reddits are great source of info

Survivorship bias

War of Art S. Pressfield book
Meditations Marcus Aurelius book
Robert Green book

Learn to read people

Gladiator movie

Shown of the dead movie

https://player.fm/series/the-tim-ferriss-show-1578275/episode-4-ryan-holiday

003 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss Show podcast, Kelly Starret and Justin Mager

One should sleep 8+ hours per night

Quantified self-tools

Observing deep sleep

Blood testing, one blood test is a snapshot, and continuous tests give chart and explain our internal processes

Folic acid and methylation

Better information - better decisions

Heart rate variability exercises (HRV)

Listen to yourself, to your body for improving health and life quality

Observe yourself, read people, it is easy to read people by their emotions & movements

If you know yourself, you know others

If you wake up and have no erection...then you have health issue

Sitting and office work is very bad, similar to smoking and killing yourself slowly

Improve your cognitive performance by fixing your diet, posture

To improve your thinking, mental performance, improve your physical performance, it is cheap & effective

Sleep hygiene:

Pitch dark room

It should be a little bit cold

Taking away chair at school will have major impact in health improvement of children, work in office

While working, avoid sitting for long hours

Think critically, use technology to optimize our potential

https://player.fm/series/the-tim-ferriss-show-1578275/episode-3-kelly-starrett-and-dr-justin-mager

002 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss Show podcast, Josh Waitskin

Playing simultaneous chess games is like juggling balls

Constantly be learning

Cognitive biases: sunk cost fallacy, confirmation bias, false constructs

20/80 analysis

What rules people following that are not required that I can exploit?

Who is good at skill, who shouldn't be?

Questions you ask yourself and your internal dialogue defines your thinking

Meditation is a very powerful tool at self improvement, you start seeing yourself from side to meditate sit cross legged in comfortable position, follow and return to your breath

Journaling is another useful tool for self improvement

Cultivate habit of relaxing and working, turning on and turning off set and practice morning and evening routines

Dao de Jing
Shantaram

Collect & ask questions to yourself, they define your thinking

Ghandi Lao tzu
Buddha

https://ja.player.fm/series/the-tim-ferriss-show-1578275/episode-2-joshua-waitzkin

001 cliff notes from Tim Ferriss Show podcast

Kevin Rose

To make good investments, observe leaders, opinion makers and look for social trends

Be curious about everything

Be in good shape, do workouts

Annual letters of Warren Buffett

Barbell approach to investing - 20 % highly speculative investment & 80 % highly conservative & income guaranteed investment - do not gamble more than you can afford to lose

Phillip Rosedale

When one has no fear, he starts to think big Meditation practice

4hww is about maximizing productivity & per hour output

Food Inc documentary

Tell the truth, make fun of yourself before someone else will make fun of you laugh

Learn to catch a wave and use it to make profit

Practice gardening and farming as hobby when you start a business, focus on your product

https://player.fm/series/the-tim-ferriss-show-1578275/episode-1-kevin-rose

The Story of Stuff

        From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever. http://storyofstuff.org

How to learn, retain and use vast amount of information in short time

Do you read a lot? I do. Once I read so much that I felt as if I live in a bubble of my imagination that I formed from reading too much. And there was one problem in this situation. It was not the bubble that I have formed, it was memory. I could not remember most of things I read before. I mean I was able to remember big ideas, but I could not remember details so I could use these ideas in life. It was partially due to too much social media information I have been consuming, just recently I started following information diet and feeling little bit better. However I am still not good enough at following my own advice. I need follow what I advised myself. So anyways, this post is about how to learn more in shorter time and be able to use it.

Do you feel this? You read a book or learn something, but what you have learned stays unused. It stays in notebooks or files you have created. It stays as notes you have taken during learning process. I feel very disappointed for not being able to use what I have learned. I mean what we learn does not reach operational level; a reflex point at which you can use gained knowledge. What would you do if you could learn something in shorter time and be able to use it quite decently? I wish I could reach such a level. There are numerous ideas I wish I could do if I had such ability.

Our inability to use what we learn is practically very hard to pinpoint from vast amount of factors and address it. Partially it is our faulty memories, partially it is our irregular schedules, and partially it is non-systematic approach to learning process and not knowing how our memories work. So, to address this situation I read a lot about learning process, how our memories work and found ideas that may help us. This list of ideas may help us to learn more and be able to use gained knowledge if only we will be consistent in our efforts. So let’s begin to learn these ideas.

Be passionate. Make yourself extremely interested in topic to remember more of it. Ask questions. Focus on what you are learning. I know, we all do that, what we are learning is interesting and important but often we may turn on our autopilot and wonder in our imagination or go thought a list of tasks we need to do. To comprehend information well, make yourself interested in it, ask questions, reflect about what you are learning.

Use Pareto principle. Focus and learn 20 % of information that you will use 80 % of time. The only issue with this idea is to find out which 20 % that forms what you are learning. After finding that information, focus on it. Ask yourself or experts in that subject, what information or concepts are the most frequently used. If you look at language use, there are words that you will use once in every 3-5 hours, there are words that you will use once in every 2-3 days, words that you will use once a week, and words that you will use once a month.  You can ignore words that you will use once in 3-4 months. You do not need to learn them because such words are very situational. I think there is a similar situation in other domains also. Learn the 20 % to use 80 % of time.

Take good notes. Attentively take notes of key ideas from start. Review, simplify and compress notes with various memory techniques such as chunking, mnemonic, acronyms and images. Good notes are simple, short and can be reviewed very quickly. Ideal notes will be in a form of flash cards that you can review in daily basis.

Use Feynman technique. (Need to read this amazing person’s books and watch his interviews) So, Feynman technique works in the following way:

1. Select the topic and study it.
2. After studying, explain the idea in simple language so that a little kid can understand it. While doing this, find out problem areas that you cannot explain or describe well. These areas are the things you did not understand properly.
3. Study the target ideas you did not understand until you will be able to explain them.
4. Repeat the process and explain the idea(s)

Once you will be able to explain what you have learned, you can be sure that you have mastered the concept. By the way Feynman technique used with teaching process accelerates your learning and information retaining process. I often try to tell my friends what I am learning. This helps me a lot.

Connect ideas and experience. Link all ideas and concepts with your experience. There more you connect what you are learning with your life experience, the easier you will remember what you are learning. Just a bunch of concepts that exist in a form of text is hard to remember in comparison with ideas that you can relate to as experience.

Visualize ideas you have learned. Imagine key concepts in strange, funny and unusual pictures. This takes time to do, but it is much less time than rote memorization process. Just take one idea or concept, imagine it in funny situation or make it funny by adding something, link it with another concept as a story. By this way you will remember more. Watch the video below and you will understand power of visualization.

Practice spaced repetition. We all forget everything we learn, it is natural process. The forgetting process was studied by HermanEbbinghaus. With help of this study, he discovered a forgetting curve – how fast people forget what they learn. To remember more of what you have learned, practice spaced repetition. What I understood is that you can pull back to your memory most of things if you repeat them often during certain periods. To ease the process, use spaced repetition apps. There are many of them: Anki, Quizlet, Cram, Anymemo etc. My favorite one is Anki, it is good, simple and desktop software is easy to use for creating flashcards. 

Review what you learned. Test your memory by remembering what you have learned. List, describe and explain the ideas you have learned. Just check how much you could retain in your operational memory. The more you can remember the better, since you can use gained knowledge in practice, this is the goal of learning – acquiring knowledge and being able to use it in our life.

Practice healthy habits. Eat healthy food, do workouts everyday and sleep enough (at least 7 hours). Nutritious food gives necessary chemical elements that will improve your cognitive performance. 40-60 minutes of workout made of aerobics, calisthenics and strengths training also help you to maintain your brain in peak performance. Sleep is essential for memory transfer; neural activity produces toxic metabolic waste. Active brain produces more of such waste; sleep helps us to clear that toxic waste out. This last paragraph needs sources and I was lazy to cite them. You can search them by yourself, if you are interested. So far these are my findings. I sensed good changes when I used these principles in my study process. However, I need to be more disciplined to get good results.

The Tao of Seneca: Practical Letters from a Stoic Master, Volume 1, book review

The Tao of Seneca: Practical Letters from aStoic Master, Volume 1

ASIN: B01AIXJ0U

How strongly I recommend it: 10/10

Go to Amazon or Audible pages for more details and reviews.

About the book

The Tao of Seneca (volumes 1-3) is a collection of letters written through the words of Seneca to his friend Lucillius.  All three volumes are introductory books to Stoic philosophy. The book contains numerous advice that can be applied to your life. In addition to this, the book is written in eloquent language that makes it a pleasant read. Many people in the past and at present read Seneca’s letters, among them Thomas Jefferson, NFL coaches, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and many others. Stoicism is practical operating system for thriving in high-stress environments, says Tim Ferriss. Actually, I learned about the book from his blog, where Tim included all three volumes into his book club section. Having read the 1^st volume, I can say that it makes you to reconsider your thinking process and values, change your attitude to life. The book contains numerous amount of ideas, for this reason I am sharing only those ideas that resonated with me in a form of bullet points. By this way it will be very practical for any person who wants to learn these ideas and review them from time to time. By the way, you can download all three volumes for free in Tim’s blog where he shared them. Thank you Mr. Tim Ferriss for sharing these amazing books with the world!

Here is a sample letter from the book read by Tim Ferriss in his podcast, listen to it and feel the taste of the book.

Book notes and key lessons I have learned

Wisdom

• No one is able to borrow or buy a sound mind.
• Submit yourself to reason, if reason will be your ruler, you will become ruler of many.
• Instead of reading many books, read, reread and digest few master thinkers’ books.
• Serving to philosophy (thinking) is freedom, serving to desires and emotions is a slavery.
• Wisdom is always desiring the same things and always refusing the same things.
• The best ideas a property of all people.

Thinking

• We suffer more in our imagination than in reality.
• We have a habit of imagining, exaggerating and anticipating suffering and pain.
• Believe in what you prefer to believe, and do not harass your soul.
• We agree too quickly with other’s opinions but do not test ideas that cause our fears.

Self-improvement

• Strive and be persistent at improving yourself everyday by studying, training and changing yourself.
• Inwardly strive to excellence and self-improvement, on your exterior conform to society.
• Find mentors according to whom you can improve yourself, you cannot fix crooked without a ruler.
• Your greatest obstacle and trouble is you, where ever you go, you take this burden with yourself. Thus improve yourself instead of trying to escaping from yourself.
• Men complain about their hardships but not about their laziness and foolishness.

Gratitude 

• Every day wake up with joy and gladness, because you are alive.
• He who accepts voluntary poverty (minimalist and voluntary content life) is rich.
• Be grateful to be rich, otherwise you will be poor even if all the wealth of the world belongs to you.
• Your wealth does not matter if it is bad in your own eyes.

Wealth

• No man is born rich, as nature gives to newborn only milk and rags.
• To be rich, have what is necessary and then have what is enough.
• It is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more that is poor. Be content and you will be rich.
• Live according to nature and you will be rich. Live according to opinion and you will be poor.
• He who needs riches least enjoys it most.
• Hunger costs a little, greed costs a lot.

Friends

• Judge a person before making him your friend, only after that trust him. Many people do the opposite.
• To make a friend loyal, regard him as loyal, and he will become loyal friend to you.
• Evaluating a person by clothes or riches is like evaluating a horse by its saddle, look at person’s soul and character instead of his possessions.
• Be friends with poverty so fortune cannot catch you off guard.
• Wise man is self-sufficient, though he wants to have friends.

Social status

• Every king descends from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.

Fear and hardships

• Practice fear setting on regular basis.
• Repeatedly practice voluntary poverty and the worst case scenarios and ask yourself: “Is this what I am afraid of?”
• While fortune is kind, fortify yourself against her violence by facing your fears.
• Regular experience of fear will make tough decisions easier, whether it is quitting job, starting business, changing career or anything else.

Time and life

• Nothing is ours except time.
• Largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.
• Certain moments are torn from us, some are gently removed, and others glide beyond our reach.
• The most disgraceful loss of time is due to carelessness.
• You cannot lengthen your life, but you always can live noble and content life, no matter how long you will live.
• Live everyday as a separate whole life, so you will live numerous lives, not one life.
• Keep resolutions you have made instead of coming up with new ones
• The only chain that is binding us to life is the love of life.
• While we are postponing, life speeds by.

Death

• Young and old should look directly in the face of death; there is no rule by which death takes people’s lives.
• Death does not come suddenly, you die every day. Every day that has passed is in death’s hand.
• You do not know where death is awaiting you, so be ready for it everywhere.

Ideas on how to read the book

This book is so dense with ideas that it needs to be consumed by small bites. Instead of swallowing it, read or listen to one or two letters per day, this is the advice of Tim Ferriss. Pause in places where you need to think through ideas. Reflect on where you can apply ideas in your life. Review key ideas on regular basis so you can instill them into your life.

"If" poem by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Source: A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)

Start following information diet to regain mental clarity

Pearl by Pawel Kuczynski

Do you feel constant urge to check your mobile and social media?

Do you spend most of your time staring at screen?

Do you often forget what you have heard few seconds ago or what you need to do?

Do you feel as if your peers are doing great things and achieving their goals while you are stuck in the same place?

Are you failing at focusing at task at hand and not reaching your life goals?

If you are answering yes to above written questions then I suspect you are not following information diet and consuming more content than you can process. Too much information and constant use of information technologies will have a negative impact on your mental health and your life in general. You start wasting huge amount of precious time on useless things, fail to finish your tasks for the day and be stuck in the same place (career position, financial condition, and professional level) for many years.

I was very bad at following information diet for many years. Several years ago, I even did not know that I have such a problem. It seemed to me that diving into Internet and spending time in social media for several hours a day is a normal thing and assumed that many friends of mine do this. Furthermore this was and still is such a fun thing to do. However, by passage of time, it became clear that I need to limit my time and care more about what I am directing and spending my attention in daily basis. Then I learned about information diet and started following it. In last few years, I made good progress at cutting out most of information that do not make any useful contribution to my life. During this period I came up with few ideas that made good changes in my life. I want to share them with you here. Most of these ideas are not new or innovative, I learned them from Internet, and you also can search, learn and follow information diet, here is the link. So let’s start.

Information diet

Practice info diet – ignore all irrelevant, time consuming and unactionable information. Most of things you learn do not make any contribution to your life at all, why you spend time on them? Start cutting out such useless information from your life.

Maintain peaceful environment. Spend more time in quiet and peaceful environment. Eliminate all noise. Set distraction free mode in all devices and information channels so they do not beep or give some noise to pull your attention.

Limit news, social media TV, music, and movies. News and social media feeds are the most useless and junk information you inject to your brain. Limit time you spend in front of TV and watch only few movies in one week. Limit time you spend on social media (mine is 30 - 50 minutes per day, want to limit even more) and do not check email 1^st thing in the morning.

Make search list in advance & avoid netsurfing (jumping into rabbit hole of hyperlinks). Start forming a habit of making search list to search later or cut out social media while you are working on your device so you can focus on your task and finish it.

Select fun stuff wisely & limit its number. Choose few best movies, books or TV shows from available options, less is more. I try to be selective at reading books and watch up to 2 movies a week not more.

Socialize with your community. Spend more time with friends and do not use mobile phone while having fun with your friends.

Information channels

TV set. Choose few important channels and unsubscribe from the rest.

Radio and music. Select few radio channels and music lists and delete the rest.

Mobile phone. Set your mobile on distraction free mode. Turn off all notifications except few important ones. Delete everything useless in inbox, sent & draft messages, contacts, pictures, audios, videos, apps and other files.

Emails. Maintain empty email. Delete useless information from inbox, sent, archive, contact lists and other folders. Avoid posting and sharing your email in public web pages. Set spam filters.

Browsers. Sort out and delete old tabs. Uninstall useless and annoying apps, widgets, gadgets, and add-ons. Install apps that block ads and other distractions. Update browsers.

Social networks. Update all your profiles. Follow few important friends, influencers, groups and block the rest. Turn off email notifications. Modify privacy settings to limit distractions. Deactivate useless accounts.

Blog and news websites. Choose few important blogs and unsubscribe from the rest of information sources.

Podcasts. Unsubscribe from all podcasts you do not listen and keep only 2-3 of them that you listen on regular basis.

Computer. Set simple theme on desktop. Select and backup essential materials and delete the rest. Go through documents, pictures, audios, videos, software and other files. Update essential programs, firewall and antivirus.

So far these are the ideas and practices I learned and following till this day. They were very useful to me and I made pretty good changes in my habits and life. I hope this information will be useful to you and you also will be more conscious about information you are consuming in daily basis.