A biography for Tim Ferrisshasn’t been written yet.
“When I left the U.S. for the first time, I spent my first year abroad in Japan. That culture shock and abundance of new stimuli combined with a lack of guidance forced me to develop my own approaches to learning and juggling.”
“I still feel there are much smarter self-promoters out there than me. I am very methodical about my messaging, and I know how to gain attention very quickly.”
“I really feel like knife skills - not just in the kitchen, but in life - are really critical.”
“I am a human guinea pig and a professional dilettante.”
“I'm very often described as a 'risk-taker' and 'extreme,' and there are a few examples of that, certainly in the physical experimentation.”
“You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.”
“I always thought I was going to end up teaching ninth grade, specifically, because I had a lot of really formative influences, I think, at that fork in the road, where a lot of crucial decisions are made by young folks.”
“For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work.”
“I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'”
“If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.”
“I think that whenever you feel reactive or are being reactive as opposed to proactive, that inherently - consciously or subconsciously - creates a lot of stress.”
“If you look at the purported dangers of salt or fat, there is no consensus of support in scientific literature. So I would ask first: 'Is it possible to have an informed government that actually follows the science?' From what I've seen, it's not likely.”
“I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.”
“I encourage active skepticism - when people are being skeptical because they're trying to identify the best course of action. They're trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.”
“There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.”
“I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.”
“I gauge success in years, not weeks. The weekend box-office approach to book launches is short sighted and encourages crappy books.”
“The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.”
“It's very easy to confuse confident motion with being productive - and they're not the same thing. Productive to me means measurable outcomes that apply to my most important to-dos that positively affect my life. That's it.”
“Workaholics typically have a lot of achievement with very little appreciation of what they have, whether it's cars or friendships or otherwise. That is a shallow victory. Then you have people with a lot of appreciation and no achievement, which is fine, but it doesn't create a lot of good in the world.”