Tim Ferriss changed my life about 6 years ago. This is an embarrassing revelation for me because it was a bunch of somewhat trite and unrealistic advice from the book, 4 hour work week. The reason it changed my life is because at his core, Ferriss challenges people to stop doing things because of inertia and because it's how it's always been done, then seek a better way. I was ready and capable of this, I think I just needed someone's permission and example that this way of thinking would work out in the end.
For my own story, my work, location and daily activities were not aligned with the life I wanted to live and weren't ever going to get me closer to what I wanted. I'd spent my 20's figuring out how to fit in, be likable, be a good employee. But the American dream is quite dead for most people and it was dead for me. Following the crowd was never going to even get me a white picket fence in my city, even if I'd wanted one.
The result has been the 6 most fantastically awesome years of my life. It's taken me to a new career, new locations, and new ways of doing everything. If you've read 4 hour work week, you'll know that Ferriss had years of adventures that most will never experience. It's been like that, but better.
For me the revelation after trying some of those things has been really odd. Turns out that deep down I love the grind. Any time I go on an extended optimize-for-life-lived journey (1 month +), I come back and think ”Well shit, that was an entire month I got nothing done towards everything I want to achieve in life”
That is to say, it’s important to try these things but don’t get too hung up on not having them. Maybe deep down you just don’t wanna.
Cool! And it sounds like you've learned something really valuable as well. I think that's the exact value of running lifestyle experiments. I also realized I wanted more than sightseeing tours and umbrella drinks, though for me it's probably 40% work and 60% life. And I got a lot clearer on my goals in both areas in the process.
I was in marketing and always had about 20% technical responsibilities. It took stepping back to realize that the more technical the project, the more praise and recognition I was getting. I pivoted much more technical, which of course meant more money and in my specific industry my skills are in short supply. Plus I have a business understanding that most technical people don't have because I used to be the customer.
This may seem obvious and inevitable. It's not and only appears so in hindsight. Nothing in life is inevitable. If you want something to happen, you need to make it happen.
Once you're over 40, life becomes lived inside the margins of things that are inevitable, such as physical decline and, of course, ultimately death. The plays out by the shortened timeline and more painfully by the disappearance of parents, loved ones, and colleagues. There is a lot of important things in life that are indeed inevitable.
I recently read that the 40s is often the least happy decade in life, as it's usually when people start hitting hard limitations and adjusting life goals. On the plus side, adjusted life goals often make later decades very happy.
This describes my journey somewhat. Started at ad and media agencies, was client side at tech companies, and gradually got more and more into the analytics, data, and technical bits.
I've held marketing and media leadership roles. But I've been teaching myself to code for fun and realized I might need to focus on more technical roles when I found myself doing things like reading the OpenRTB and AdCOM API docs for fun, and hanging out with engineers and data science folks more than fellow marketers.
Would you mind sharing what sort of role you're in now and how you went about that pivot?
I went to a gold rush and started selling shovels. We temporarily went to SF and I got a contract on a team building some reporting backend for low hourly rate. It was a job I wouldn't have been able to get in my home state and after a few months, I was able to springboard back into my industry in a purely technical role. I'm not sure where the gold rush is now, but sooner or later there will be another one, somewhere.
I'm in a temporary gig at some administration. It's basically a long game of 'always been like this'. It takes weeks to do anything there.. Coming from a different culture (planet even at this point). It took me 2 days to do it without harm. Imagine if everybody would strive to optimize globally (without breaking the system ofc)..
Tim Ferriss is an unapologetic self-promoter who often comes across as greasy and his major product is the Tim Ferriss id, but he's also right so much of the time. He offers very good advice from someone I would never want to be, and that's OK. I highly recommend reading beyond the slick SEO-optimizing presentation; there is a lot of good, actionable stuff in there.
> What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?
This echoes a sentiment I recently read in Turn the Ship Around: managers are frequently recognised and praised for things that happen while they are actively leading a team.
This sounds obvious, but it skews their leadership toward shorttermism. We should be better at recognising great leaders by how smoothly things run when they aren't present.
It's definitely worth keeping in mind for individual contributors without direct reports too. Would something grind to a halt or progress very slowly if you unexpectedly go offline? At least for me, probably more than I'd like.
This is similar to the idea of praising the people who are always putting out fires because their actions are visible, vs the people more in the background who design systems that don't catch fire and just hum along without complaint.
One of my first management mentors taught me that my job as a manager is to make sure I have no work to do (and that it takes a lot of work to get there ....), and I adopted this philosophy wholeheartedly. If I, as a manager, cannot take a month off at any time (after e.g. a year at a job, and with no highly improbable events occurring recently), I consider that my failure.
I really like a lot of Tim Ferris' ideas, but a common theme through that general "lifestyle optimization" genre is single people without a family to support.
But I guess maybe there is still value to the idea that often the "show stoppers" that keep you from breaking out of your familiar ruts are really just fears that you haven't actually examined yet.
Yes, sure. Though don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Most of this lifestyle inspiration genre is about doing things only single and debt-free people can do. I don't think that means the advice is irrelevant for people with responsibilities. I think you could take the same content and re-work it for a different audience and it would remain just as valid.
For example, many people with kids in cities really struggle with schools, affordable housing and childcare. Cultivating more financial and location independence can help solve all those issues by moving away from expensive areas where there's extreme competition for good schools and where you have no extended family support. And many people with families have their children on a very narrow program preparing them for a certain type of urban success. But I have a young nephew who lives in the countryside being raised by two former high-powered professionals turned farmers. There are other options and ways of life out there but it takes some "inverted thinking" to find them.
This is also what came to my mind when reading this article. Not everyone is capable of pivoting their life because of dependents and other inflexible obligations.
I've dubbed articles and advice like this as "manic pixey tech guy" syndrome.
He is a marketer at heart, so his material often comes across like this, but there is good content in there if the presentation doesn't turn you away too soon.
I still hate how spammy Tim's website is. You click an "X" to remove a sidebar ad, and instead it pops up another bigger ad in front of your face.
I thought the whole thing was to be happy with enough money (TMI, as he calls it). In an alternative universe, Tim Ferriss blogs for free, from a nice affordable location in the Caribbean, and "works" only 4 hours per week, instead of perhaps 50 or 60.
Wow this smells so much like bullshit. Looks like one of these guys making money on food supplements, but actually making money on guys thinking they can make money the way he does. The internet is full with these get rich quick guys.
I listened to the first 10 minutes of the audio, half of it is promotion to his other giggs, 40% is just fluff and only one or two sentences are actually useful. I stopped listening after that and skimmed through the questions, but didn't see any "wow" question that I never asked myself before.
For my own story, my work, location and daily activities were not aligned with the life I wanted to live and weren't ever going to get me closer to what I wanted. I'd spent my 20's figuring out how to fit in, be likable, be a good employee. But the American dream is quite dead for most people and it was dead for me. Following the crowd was never going to even get me a white picket fence in my city, even if I'd wanted one.
The result has been the 6 most fantastically awesome years of my life. It's taken me to a new career, new locations, and new ways of doing everything. If you've read 4 hour work week, you'll know that Ferriss had years of adventures that most will never experience. It's been like that, but better.
If this is speaking to you. DO IT.