Timothy Ferriss's Quotes

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.

There's an entire generation of male strength and endurance athletes, even recreational lifters, who have never gotten off the ephedrine-caffeine-aspirin stack. The process of getting off stimulants is really horrible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You don't have to travel, but I find extended travel to be a helpful tool for reexamining yourself and the constraints you've artificially placed on your life. It's easy to believe everything has to be done one way if you're always in one place around the same people.

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

For most people, life would be boring without meaningful work.

I didn't even like white wine. Then I tasted it and bought a case. It was the first case of any wine I'd ever bought.

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

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

I work hard, but in spurts.

I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.

In a digital world, there are numerous technologies that we are attached to that create infinite interruption.

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.

People really do think they have to choose between high stress and high reward jobs, and low stress and low reward jobs.

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

The biggest misconception about work is that you need to spend the majority of your time doing it.

The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.

What I don't like is snark for snark's sake. If you are going to make fun of me, at least be witty while doing it.

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

World barista champions use the AeroPress to make coffee on the folding tray tables of airplanes.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate.

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.