[Rerun] Tim Ferriss on Accelerated Learning, Peak Performance and Living the Good Life

a rerun. The next season of the Psychology Podcast will begin later this year. I haven't taken any break in five years of doing this podcast, so I thought it was about time to take a step back and think about how it can make this a better experience for you all. Until then, enjoy these episodes from our archives. Thanks so much for making time. I know you're extremely busy. Oh completely. We have a mutual friend, Josh white Skin,

who've known for quite a long time. He always talks about I was just texting with him about fifteen minutes ago. Oh my gosh, Well tell him you're talking to Scott Kaufman. I will, I will. That's really funny. He's a great guy. Yeah, so you probably get like lots of the same kinds of questions. So I thought i'd, you know, try to take this to another higher level because in some ways

we've had different we've had like powerle paths. So I've studied the science of high performance, the science of greatness, all this stuff my entire career. And you've you've been in the trenches, right, You've really been doing this firsthand. My I was the last research assistant of Herb Simon as an undergraduate and mentor. I was mentored by Randy Palace, and I noticed that both of these individuals are people

that you talk about in your own work. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I've the Randy Palace just to make sure of getting it right. That's the last lecture, right, I mean he's obviously done more than that, so I we can talk about that. But I have his book face out in my living room so I see it every day. That's so cool. Yeah. I took his Usability Engineering Usability design course at Carnegi Mellen. Okay, very cool, really great guy,

and I learned a lot from him. Yeah. So I've been I've been studying, I've been trying to debunk this this ten thousand hours role for quite some time, and in kind of a similar way you have, and I just want to point out how it's different from how others are trying to debunk it. So other people in my field have been trying to debunk the ten thousand hour role by saying, well, look, Erickson really demotes the value of talent, so you know, and that they're missing

that part of the picture. And I've been arguing, well, no, that's not that's not quite the point there. The point is you can really go up that learning curve really fast, and it's not completely just because of talent. It's because of all these other factors of like really knowing how to learn, knowing how you know, the role of inspiration.

I talk about a lot the role of active learning strategies and things of that nature, and so I read your stuff and I see a lot of colonalities in the sense that you're saying, like, look, we can really we can cut like you know, eight tenth of the time, you know, to learn some of this stuff, and it's not just because the person is cutting a tenth, it's just because they're more talented than someone else. So I

wanted to directly explicitly point that out. How I think, like, you know, our perspectives kind of conversion are actually different from the other the ten thousand hour MythBusters if that

makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So I'd love to hear some of your own personal experiences, like what you think are maybe some of the main principles that can help rapidly accelerate up the learning curve despite the you know, the genes that you're born with, yeah, or in spite of the genes you're born with in a lot of cases. So I think that there are a number of factors and they have a lot of interplay.

I mean, as you know that there's the inspiration, the drive, intrinsic motivation or reward or punishment extrinsic motivation of reward. But they're handful of things that I tend to highlight when I'm trying to explain to people why it's possible to say, as I did in my thirties, go from not knowing how to swim, I couldn't swim one lap to swimming say forty laps in a session within a

week to ten days. And it came down to looking at the assumptions in a given field, the so called best practices, and then for each of them, asking what if I had to eliminate this, or what if I did the opposite. So, for instance, a lot of people think of freestyle swimming as I did, which is swimming on top of the water. You kick really hard, you

pull to propel yourself through the water. The method that ended up solving all of my problems is called total immersion, and it flips all of that on its head and re examines the basic sort of flawed assumptions that underlie most swimming instruction. So they don't they have you kick as little as possible because it's an energy drain, energy sink, and they have you focus on alternating from your right side to your left, so you're not swimming on your

stomach or chest as a lot of people think. You're alternating almost as a boat or a vessel, from extended fuselage right to extended fuselage left. There are similarly to rock climbing in some ways, and everything is focused on effort minimization. And so they will come in and I'll say, all right, if you feel like you're expending a lot of effort, you're getting a good workout. You're doing it incorrectly.

And it was just such an incredible juxtaposition with everything I'd been shown, including from some very very high level performers. And so that then brings the second point, which is the best performers are not always the best teachers. And this is particularly true if they've been doing something for twenty thirty, forty fifty years in some cases because in the same way that if you or I or I

shouldn't speak for you. But if you take a lot of people listening to this podcast, their native English speakers, if you had them try to take the test of English as a foreign language, would they might flunk it because if you ask them, you know, what's the difference between anything and something? Quite quite quick, like, their minds will freeze. They've never actually had to consciously think about

what they've been doing. Yeah. Yeah. And similarly, you want to look for a teacher or someone you can emulate. They don't have to be a teacher per se, someone who's who has made the most progress in a period of say six months or twelve months. And so, for instance, if you're trying to learn to dance, there's a woman who recorded her dance improvement over a year in a one or two minute trailer, and you could try to

reach out to someone like that. Or there was a I think it was a gent young guy from the UK who wanted to try to become one of the top table tends ping pong players in the UK in the span of the year, and he recorded the entire process. So who's going to have more in terms of insight on tight turnarounds, someone who's done that or someone who has been sort of following the textbook for twenty years,

And I would argue the former. So seeking those types of people out, which is very very easy because you can spend a little bit of time on Google. I just search for, you know, controversial such and such player, controversial such and such coach, and that will give you the leads that will lead to all sorts of other

all sorts of other gold mines. And I think that also there's a misunderstanding from a lot of people who say, harp on the ten thousand hour rule using as an excuse not even to try, and that is they view learning or skill acquisition as a linear process, and so if you haven next and Y access, it's sort of cutting it right down the middle. Of a forty five degree angle, and I don't think of it that way, and I think a most people in the sciences don't.

I mean, and this applies to options training another thing too. But you have basically, let's just say it, correct me if I'm talking out my ass here, but a sigmoid function, right, So it looks like an s that's been by the ends and extended a bit. So you have this slow, very gradual ascent, then this hockey stick which shoots up into the sky, and then a point of diminishing returns where it's very slow. And that's say that that very

slow point is where I think you get. That's where a lot of intelligent grotwork is involved when trying to go from say the number five best cellist in such and such symphony to the first seage. Okay, that's a slog right there. I mean, you have to put in a ton of time for eaching incremental game, whereas my goal for people is to just say, look, it's commonly said you have to spend a lifetime learning language that's complete BS. I mean, you can become what most people

would consider conversationally fluent in almost any language. In my opinion, in six months, and absolutely, And I used to consider myself bad at languages and replicated that too many times for myself and for other people to think otherwise. You think a trick is anyone, Well, anyone is a big word, I would say the vast majority of people. And there are two things I say to that. So my job is to show people how to chop off that first point part of the sigmoid curve, or to get to

that hockey stick as quickly as possible. Now, when they hit that hockey stick, are they maybe the best in the world. No, they're going to be functionally fluent and you can get though, I think the top five percent in the general population and almost any skill in six to twelve months. I've just seen too many examples. And there are two things I say to that. Number one is specific the language learning. Based on everything I've seen and research that I've read, I think adults can learn

languages far faster than children. The reason that they typically don't is because they have mortgages and jobs and obligations and a choice. It's an option whether they choose to s you or not. And if you take a kid and throw them into a kindergarten in a different language. What choice do they have A and B they've no O their obligations. So it's more a function of logistics than mental capacity. That's number one. And Hakata has done some very research. There's a book called in other Words,

which is a little old. I think everything I've seen in working with a lot of tech startups would reinforce this. Sorry, I'm getting on my soapbox chair because I get all amped up. The second thing is, yeah. The second thing is that it's very dangerous to focus on averages and exclude the outliers when it comes to examining peak performance.

And so they'll say, well, on average, people in the top five percent sleep x number of hours per night, and do this, and do this, But the average is can be very misleading, and in the way that you know, if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average networth is you know, fifteen million dollars there or something like that.

And that I remember reading a story by or was it an anecdote about Warren Buffett, and he was being sort of harangued by a bunch of efficient market theorists who say, like the markets incorporated all the information that's available therefore, blah blah blah, And you say well, and they would argue, they're like, well, look, mister Buffett, we

don't believe in stock picking. And if you had ten thousand orangue tanks flipping quarters, eventually, just by sheer chance and probability, you would have ten who seem to be master coin flippers to get heads all the time, and they would go off and write books about how to flip coins and make tons of money doing that. And that was intended to kill Buffet's argument. And he said, well, fine,

that's true. He said, but if there's one small place in Omaha that seems to manufacture these magical coin flipping and rangu tanks over and over and over, and if you find a concentration in a peculiar fashion, you should research that. And you can find these kind of mutant factories for all sorts of skills. I mean, whether it's chess, whether it's jiu jitsu, like the school that's co owned by a mutual friend of ours, Josh Waitskin with Marcelo Garcia,

ten time world champion. You can find these factories tennis, they're they're all out there. You just have to track them down. Yeah. So I saw an interview did a while ago, and you you mentioned that you're really interested in the education space, and then you made a call. You said, if anyone you know, I want to talk to more educators. I want to be in this morm. What if I can help you at all with that world,

that's the world I inhabit. You know, I'm more than happy to help you, because you know, there's so many deep implications for what you're doing for curriculum and teacher training, and I wonder if you entered that space at all, and if you ever thought about actually creating like a you know, some sort of like teacher training curriculum that really can help students learn better and enjoy learning. I,

first of all, thank you. I appreciate the offer. Secondly, I have looked very deeply, and there are a few observations that I've made and a few experiments and initiatives that I've focused on. So I realized early on is that I am good at curriculum, I am bad at

politics and fixing. Certain aspects of public education in the United States are as much a political issue, if not more a political issue, and have a lot to do with paychecks and maintaining the statuschool in a lot of ways than it has to do with improving education for kids or adults in the US. Now that han't been said.

What I decided to do, living in Silicon Valley as I do, and having a lot of involvement with tech startups, decided to focus on trying to use my platform as an Archimede's lever for a couple of startups that I think are developing solutions that are highly scalable. So, for instance, there's one called dual Lingo. I was one of the

first investors of dual Lingo. Dual Lingo offers free language learning tools and they're very effective, and it was co created by co founded by Luis von On out of Carnegie Mellen, who was a computer science professor and was the creator of recapture. So the capture more intelligent capture fields where you have two fields and everyone's seeing these where it's like fill this out to prove it not a robot. And the first one they know the answer to is so it's like X, Y B hashtag or whatever,

and you fill that out. The next one is actually taken out of a book that has been hard to transcribe that a machine can't read, and so it was used for transcribing books. So it had this altruistic purpose which is very cool and that it would use obviously, it would look at the responses to say a thousand people who saw the same image, and you would get

the right answer. So dual Lingo at this point is educating more people helping them learn foreign languages for free than the entire US public school system K at least the K through twelve, So it's it's been a very good investment of time and energy. So it's it's a

lateral approach. The second is called no red Ink, which is very interesting that people should check out, and it's it's flown under the radar, but it's intended to help teachers and teaching well number one students to learn English and English grammar and writing more effectively, which is notoriously difficult to teach and very time consuming to correct. And it's it's a very sleek, elegant solution to a long

standing problem. And they're they're they're correcting millions and millions and millions of sentences out of time now and that has some huge implications for other areas of education and expediting the entire process, helping to automatically create content that

appeals to the interests in the students. You know, they would select I'm interested in Justin Bieber, the Lakers, this, this, and this, and it would help generate content or find content that they're interested in, and that's what they write about, you know, as opposed to you know, Mary chases Bob with the dog or some something like that. So I have mostly focused on technology as an exponentially growing and developing tool for really scaling things effectively. At some point

I'll probably tackle some of the political issues. But quite frankly, that's not my that's not my superpower. I'm too impatient and undiplomatic, I think. But you're not impatient, you're interested. You're an interesting combination of traits in one human So so you yeah, so you're like, I mean, I write about it. I write I call creative people messy mind I say creative people have messy minds because they have this ability to inhabit seemingly contradictory traits in one and

one thing, and they're actually really creative. People are really good at quickly switching between different personality dimensions. Right, So you're you said you're impatient, but you're you're you're impatient the sense that in you're existentially impatient. So this is what I'm seeing, is that you're existentially impatient. Doesn't I would call you in patient. I would call you existentially

in patient. You realize you have one life and you want to maximize this life that you live in, and you're you're probably maximizing this life more than probably anyone on this plant right now try what is done. But you're but at the same time, you mean, you do have great reflection and in the sense that you really follow feedback, so you really can take feedback quickly and

use that too. Do it. And but I don't see I don't think like everyone has the same uh not everyone's there yet where they're able to really learn from feedback as well. What do you think are some of the obstacles or blocks, maybe in mindset blocks they're stopping people from acquiring feedback so well and then moving forward in their skill development. Is that a fair question? That's very good, Yeah, question. I think There are, of course

different types of feedback. So there's self generated feedback where for instance, you record workouts or blood glucose measurements or what. You start to spot trends and associations and you can go, oh my god. I didn't realize. As I realized a few days ago, I've been eating fewer than thirty grams of carbs per day for a while to measure keytone,

concentration in the blood and whatnot. But if you have for me personally, my carbohydrate tolerance is such that if I consume, say, kombucha that has eight grams carbohydrates even once in two or three days, will it will screw up my metabolic objectives for like three or four days. Right. The only way I figured that out, though, is by tracking and writing things down. So the first thing would be know thyself. And the way you do that is

by determining what measurables you're going to follow. Right, So if you're trying to learn to surf, you're trying to learn to swim, like, what are the numbers that you're tracking? And you can make these up, but you can also borrow measurements. So in swimming, I didn't have any measurement until Total Gin. And you know, I have this new

TV show that's in Faris experiment. We did an entire episode on swimming, and since I already had learned how to swim, we took someone who couldn't even really put her head underwater and tried to make her into a open ocean long distance swimmer freestyle in three or four days,

which was which was very intense. But the measurement there that you use is strokes per lap, and that tells you how efficient you are, so you try to go from say thirty strokes per lap down to twenty, down to fifteen, and it's an indicator of energy conservation and efficiency. So similarly, you know you could find these measurables and

choose objectives that way. So that's tracking. In terms of accepting feedback from other people, you need to find teachers who can give you the why and not just the how. So it's very typical. For instance, I refuse to learn the alphabet until first and I was spent soap by my Kindergary teacher, which I was not happy about. My mom was even less happy about because she was like, learn the dan and alphabet because I tell you so, And that didn't work for me. So I dug in

my heels and I resisted. And I think a lot of people have had this kind of experience with teachers or coaches and positions of authority where you're like, well, wait a second, like no, I want to understand why. And you're a seven year old talking to a forty year old and they want to punch you in the face and they don't give you anything. So it's important to find people who are willing to sit down and

explain them why. So Josh Waitskin and for those who don't know his names, the inspiration for searching for Bobby Fischer the book and the movie, considered a chess prodigy.

So in the TV episode where I was combining learning chess and jiu jitsu in the same week, which turned out to be a lot to bite off and very injury rich for the jiu jitsu, Josh would say, he would explain why he's teaching in reverse, right, so instead of starting with openers like almost everyone does, he's starting with king and pawn versus king to teach deep principles. And he would say, and Josh has said this, but like, look,

we're creating smaller circles. What I mean by that is we're taking the micro, something very small that you can grasp, right, not too many pieces. We're looking at king and pawn versus king to teach you deep powerful principles like opposition and so on. So Josh is great at explaining the why, and then you can bear almost anyhow if you can bear his training regimen. Oh oh yeah, well, especially with the jiu jitsu. I mean you have to have a certain degree of choke tolerance for that. But I think

there's the why and then. But feedback for me is really Peter Drucker, the management theorists, very famous business mind and writer, said what gets measured gets managed, and I think that's true. So until you start measuring, and it can almost be arbitrary, it will affect your behavior. And I remember there's a study done. You might be failiared with to study, blanking on the researchers, but they were looking at whether turning the lights up or down in

offices increased work productivity. And what they found was whatever any change they made improved productivity because people knew they were being monitored. And you, yeah, there we go. Okay, so the author in effect good, I can thank you. I needed a label. So it's very similar if I tell someone, look, I'm going to give you a bottle of pills and they're called placebo magic and they're full of you know whatever, sawdust. I'm not suggesting people who

saw this obviously, but it's inert. And I say, you're going to take one of these before every meal, chances are they'll probably lose weight because they're just going to be forced, as with a pattern, trapped to become more conscious of what they do. And that's why if you want to lose weight and you're like, I don't want to try a diet, just take a picture of every meal you have and send it to your fittest friend and it's like, hey, you're getting you're getting things from

me now. Yeah, the flash diet, so to speak, works really well. It's a great idea. You know, I think about positive psychology, and a major tenant of positivechology is not you know, achievement is one part of a pillar, you know, of the perma model. You also have positive experience, positive emotions and relationships. Positive relationships are important, engagement and

meaning in life, all these things are important. And so you got you hinted that when you taught, when you have talked about successes not just being achievement but also appreciation, am I right? Yeah, yeah, And so I think it dovetails really nicely with some of the principles of positive psychology. I think to live a life of well being, not just hedonistic well being, which is, but really a deeper sense of well being, there needs to be more more

than just achievement. So I'd love to I'll have to rive off that a bit. Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. And I think that I think that for particularly type A personalities, they like to pat themselves on the back for achievement. But that's that's almost hardwired, that's your default.

I think that's the easy part and the hard part that I've tried to focus on increasingly because it is not my natural instinct or sort of reflex, is to pause and appreciate what you've accomplished, or what you've done, or the things you have in your life, the health of your friend's family, et cetera, in a very conscious way, because achievement without appreciation, on a personal level least, is

pretty close to meaningless. And I know money does not fix that because it's it's too high up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Money money can only really they check off the boxes at the lower end. And I know people in an SF who have hundreds of millions of dollars who are miserable, and I think partially the drive that allowed them to make that much money is something that prevents them from living in the prisons the present state.

They're constantly planning for the next big thing, the next big thing, the next big thing, and they always feel like they're losing. Yeah, this is part of the human condition. I mean, whether it's uh Man search for meaning in Victor Frankel for looking at a lot of the tech icons of today, the challenges are that the people face are very similar, and so I I have I have the habit of using a it's called the five minute journal, but it's effectively a journal with a component that is

listing things you are grateful for. And it sounds perhaps very self healthy. It is, there's there's there's a lot of data to port this practice in terms of self reported well being, and I find that really, I mean, three minutes in the morning and three minutes at night is enough to have a not just a non trivial but I mean a significant impact on my quality of life and sense of well being and feeling of being unrushed,

which is kind of ultimate luxury in my mind. And it's also a reason why I read a lot of stoic philosophy, and I really feel like it's a good operating system for living in high stress environments while keeping things in perspective and not overly emotionally responding to things like a reactive animal. Now do I always get that right? No, not at all. I mean, I'm a bull in a china shop, I think most of the time. So we all make mistakes, but hopefully each day a little bit fewer.

How do you define appreciation? Are you talking about it? There's all sorts of kinds of appreciation. You can appreciate others other people, right, you can appreciateiate, you know the fact, there's just lots of different shades of appreciation. What do you mean when you use the word When I use the word, I'm so glad you asked, because I'm so nitpicky with with definitions. So this this is a to be perfectly frank. I think I use it a lot without defining it very clearly, So let me think about

the context in which I use it. Success is another really dangerous word that's really in happiness those are also really I use the word really squirre, the age use the W word. Well, yeah, so for for appreciation, I think for me it is it is simply recognition, recognizing the value of what you have, and that that would be my attempt, my stab at a definition. But I mean when I write things down, it's literally that. And

when I write these things down. I actually got this advice from from Tony Robbins, who I I that guy is a he's an impressive specimen. I got to say that there's a lot of that guy is a showerhouse. So yeah, when he when he puts together these lists for himself, give me a great piece of advice, which was, you could write down the big things, so to speak, which are you know, I'm grateful for the health of my mom and dad, right, I'm grateful for film the blank.

But he said, I always put in one thing that is very fleeting and seemingly small, like the two clouds of looking at past the eucalyptus trees outside my window that I'm looking at right now. And I was like, oh, that's smart. That's really smart to train yourself to be more observant of tiny details because the small things are the big things, and if you don't notice the small things, I think that you can have a feeling of being lost, even if you're killing it, even if you're you know,

slanging dragons and hitting on runs. So that's us how I try to think about it. Mindfulness is obviously can be helpful for that, right, huge, huge, And if you know meditation is a dirty word to you, which it was for me for a very long time, then start with with guided meditations. You can use an app like Headspace or Calm, or you could go to Semharis dot org. You know, make it easy, you know, rig the games

you can win in the beginning. Yeah, I'm going to definitely promote your show, which just next week, Am I right? It's coming out next week? Yeah, yeah, launches on the twenty eighth, on Tuesday, So that's kind of the big day, right, we'll get this episode out immediately. I'm very respectful of your time. Taylors wants to ask you one question. A big fan of yours. This is my executive producer, Taylor

Christ Talk to you, Tim, so cool? Yeah you too, right, So, something I love so much about your writing is how it focuses people in on what it means to live a good life. You know, I think sitting down with your books gets people to reflect on their values, on their goals, on their priorities, and just how to live a more philosophically satisfying existence. And it's kind of appropriate.

We were just talking about this, really, Tim, I'm wondering just what would it mean for you, for Tim Ferris, who have lived a good life, if you were to take a bird's eye view and look back and point it maybe two or three things you've done and just say, like, you know, I did all right, I did okay seconds

and thirty no, no, and thirty seconds last. So I've thought about this and actually took a seminar that focused on a lot of falute and stuff like Aristotle and you know, the Stokes and whatnot, but trying to define the good luck? What does that mean? And I think for me it would come down to and this is going to sound cheesy, but it's hard not to sound cheesy when you're trying to give an overarching answer to this, But I would say to have loved, been loved, and

to have never stopped learning. I think if I checked those three boxes, especially the first of the third, then things will turn out just fine. And it's the order is important. The loving, the act of of loving others and sort of wrapping gratitude into that and all the layers that that includes, I think radiates outward and topples a lot of dominoes that satisfy a lot of needs and ultimately enhance this performance and all things in the Achievement booket So yeah, to love, be loved, and never

stop learning. And then in terms of three things I've done, man hopefully the next three things I do, I suppose, but I want to convince people that to get superhuman results, all you need is a better set of questions and a better toolkit. And I've just seen hundreds and thousands of examples now where, for instance, before our Body comes out and people are like, oh my god, that stuff's crazy, that's insane, Like I can't do that. Only that's Tim Ferriss.

That's why he can do it. And every in every single chapter, whether it's the breath holding, vertical jump, ultra endurance, fat loss, muscle gain, any of that stuff, I have reader examples that have far out stript what I've done. And that is my goal. My goal is to hopefully, you know, by the time I leave this planet, create thousands or tens of thousands or more of master world class learners who in turn can be teachers and pass that skill set and disseminate that to more and more people.

I think that's how you get I think that's how you get problem solvers and innovators who can really solve and create some interesting things. So that's that's what I'm aiming for, you know, one book and TV show at a time. I love it. I wish you all the best him and the thanks. I hope. I hope educators listen to your message just as much as business leaders do. So me too, Me too, man. So we'll grab some wine or something and sham on that when we meet

in person. That would be fun. I'd love that. All the best to you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add our rating and review of the podcast on iTunes.

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