Top 60 Tim Ferriss Quotes

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.’

I suppose my professional life can be split into writing books that all sound like infomercial products, most notably ‘The 4-Hour Workweek,’ and then tech investing.

I think there’s a difference between having a bestselling book – meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers – and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.

I definitely grew up with a lot of venom and distaste for city people.

The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-base.

If you walk into any bookstore, you can look at the newsstands and see which magazines are nationally-distributed, and you recognize certain names. Same with television. With the blogsphere, however, you actually have to dig, and know how to use multiple tools to figure out whom you should be speaking to.

If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you’re going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there’s no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I’m fine with the consequences.

Turning 40 didn’t, as a number, scare me or throw me off at all.

Everyone is going to binge on a diet, for instance, so plan for it, schedule it, and contain the damage.

I don’t journal to ‘be productive.’ I don’t do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.

Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.

As far as income goes, there are three currencies in the world; most people ignore two. The three currencies are time, income and mobility, in descending order of importance. Most people focus exclusively on income.

Having a size 9 foot is fantastic because almost all of the shoe companies do their prototyping in size 9, so if you visit a place like Nike headquarters, you can try every sort of wacky, out-there model.

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Being called a huckster and a charlatan started several years ago, so that’s something I’m accustomed to. In most cases, it doesn’t bother me.

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.

To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.

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.

Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It’s really that easy – and that’s what I do.

The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.

I think that survivorship bias, the survivorship bias is something I’m very acutely familiar with because of investing.

I view myself as an experimentalist. I’ve tried everything in the book, and I have replicated results to one extent or another.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

If you optimize for money too early, you will be minimizing for learning, almost without exception.

I started using Twitter about year after its very early adoption and ended up investing in it around that same time. I’m involved with the Tech scene and companies ranging from Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

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.

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.

When you elevate the heels more so than you elevate the sole of the foot, you trigger a cascade of compensations in the knees and hips that cause tight hip flexors, and then those hip flexors cause lower-back pain.

I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching ‘The 4-Hour Body.’ I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It’s also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.

I really feel like knife skills – not just in the kitchen, but in life – are really critical.

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.

I was really small and had a lot of health issues growing up. I mean, not compared to some people, certainly, but I had a number of full-body blood transfusions when I was kid.

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

At its core, I don’t view Facebook as a social network. I think it could become the driver’s license of the Internet. And beyond that, it can become the pipes and the plumbing upon what most of the Internet is built. I think it’s very well positioned.

I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in ‘American History X,’ yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.

The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.

I like work/life separation, not work/life balance. What I mean by that is, if I’m on, I want to be on and maximally productive. If I’m off, I don’t want to think about work. When people strive for work/life balance, they end up blending them. That’s how you end up checking email all day Saturday.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

Work is an activity that is financially-driven or one that you’d like to do less of.

A ‘social media fast’ is a fast, I suppose like any other. In this case, you’re simply giving up whether it be a device or a particular type of social media site. And I do this at least once weekly.

Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.

My parents did a great job of raising me and my brother. Very supportive parents.

Online I see people committing ‘social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response. This lends more credibility by driving traffic.

I gauge success in years, not weeks. The weekend box-office approach to book launches is short sighted and encourages crappy books.

I’m very familiar with how people can confuse correlation with causation.

Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.

Converting your own passions into a job is the fastest method for eliminating any passion you once had.

The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.

I learned to associate discomfort with getting better. And that transcended wrestling and applied to a lot of other things in life.

If you do something as simple as 15-minute ice baths three days a week, and you time those baths properly, you can significantly multiply your fat loss.