Tim Ferriss quotes: my all-time favorite Tim Ferriss tidbits.
“Simple works, complex fails.”
“People don’t want to be millionaires – they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy.”
“The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.”
“It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming.”
“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
“Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.”
“Weirdness is why we adore our friends. Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.”
“Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.”
“Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.”
“Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”
“If you want an average, successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: (1) become the best at one specific thing, or (2) become very good (as in, top 25%) at two or more things.”
“Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend the more you have.”
“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”
“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”
“Someday is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
“The fishing is the best where the fewest go.”
“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom. It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.”
“Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it.”
“Problems are gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest opportunities.”
“Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple – many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.”
“It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.”
“People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”
“Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.”
“Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.”
“If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”
“Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive.”
“When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.”
“Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.”
“Doing less is not being lazy. Don’t give in to a culture that values personal sacrifice over personal productivity.”
“Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and a stimulus for growth.”
“Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.”
“The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present, using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”
“Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.”
“One million in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows.”
“If you are insecure, guess what. The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”
“Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.”
“By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.”
“Life is too short to be small.”
“Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.”
“To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.”
“Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.”
“You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is one word: accept.”
“Many a false step was made by standing still.”
“What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months, if you had a gun against your head?”
“The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.”
“For all their b*tching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.”
“Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more ‘pretty goods’ until no one else has your mix.”
“You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”
“It just so happens, paradoxically, that you can make more money – a lot more money – by doing half of what you are doing now.”
“When you complain, nobody wants to help you.”
“The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.”
“People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.”
“Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.”
“My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.”
“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
“If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.”
“Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.”
“Focus on being productive, not busy.”
“Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash.”
“Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.”
“Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.”
“As a builder, as an entrepreneur, how can you create something for someone else if you don’t even have enough glancing familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?”
“Losers have goals; winners have systems.”
“Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.”
“If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.”
“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect.”
“Money doesn’t change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.”
“I’ve seen the promised land, and there is good news. You can have it all.”
Word-for-word, nobody shares more wisdom than Tim Ferriss. This was my favorite quotes article by far. If you enjoyed it, check out my Tony Robbins write-up next.
