5: What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?

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Continuing on through the questions from Tim Ferriss in his book “Tribe of Mentors” (see all of the questions here), we’re on to question number five:

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.)

The first response that I’ll share is from Adam Robinson, who said:

The “problem” with meditation—I thought—was that it wasn’t “practical.” And worse, the time I spent meditating was time that I could have spent analyzing the world. But I eventually reframed meditation as a way to relinquish control of my conscious mind so that my more powerful unconscious mind could take over, and my analysis of the world would improve.

Next are some thoughts from Adam Fisher, related to coaching and mentoring:

The best investment I have made over the last year is a performance coach. I always believed in the concept of a coach, but I was slow to embrace it as part of my life for whatever reason. I strongly believe world-class performers need coaching. I suppose mentors function in this role for many, but coaches, in my opinion, are different. (Coaches) focus on you first. Mentors rightly focus on themselves first and you second. Lastly, a good coach builds regimens designed to make you better, (versus simply) providing advice, as a mentor would.

Lastly is Ben Silberman encouraging people to un-serialize their lives:

I feel like a lot of people in Silicon Valley serialize their lives. They think, “First I’ll do college. Then I’ll do a startup. Then I’ll make money. Then I’ll do X.” There’s some truth in that (approach), but most of the most important stuff has to be parallel-processed, like your relationships and your health, because you can’t make up the time by doing more of it later. You can’t neglect your wife for four years and then say, “Okay, now it’s my wife years.” Relationships don’t work that way, and neither does your health or your fitness. . . . Figuring out a system, so that the stuff you need to do all the time happens, even while you might be placing disproportionate focus on one thing, is pretty important. Otherwise, you’ll be setting yourself up to be lonely and unhealthy in your future.

For me, one of the best investments that I’ve made is this blogging ritual. Forcing myself to read, discover the benefits in books, and then try to figure out they’ll improve my life as been wildly helpful to me. I hope you’re seeing some value in these posts as well.

What would you consider to be your best investment?

4: If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would you say?

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Today I’m on to the fourth question (see all of the question here) that Tim Ferriss asked people in “Tribe of Mentors”, which was:

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it—metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to millions or billions—what would it say and why? It could be a few words or a paragraph. (If helpful, it can be someone else’s quote: Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?)

This one had a ton of fantastic answers, so here we go.

First was Steven Pressfield, arguing against the question itself:

I would not have a billboard, and I would take down every billboard that everybody else has put up.

The next one I noticed was from Bozoma Saint John, and it’s similar to the answer I would likely give:

Hands down, it would be “Be the change you want to see in the world.” We spend far too much time complaining about the way things are, and forget that we have the power to change anything and everything.

I loved what Ben Stiller had to say:

“BE HERE NOW” (something I am constantly trying to do, though not always successfully). Because life is short, and we only have the current moment. Our memories are precious but they are the past, and the future is not here now.

Peter Attia opted to share a quote from Bertrand Russell:

Well, assuming it’s a big billboard, I’d lobby for the following: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”—Bertrand Russell

The last is a quote from Jocko Willink about how freedom requires discipline:

“Discipline equals freedom.” Everyone wants freedom. We want to be physically free and mentally free. We want to be financially free and we want more free time. But where does that freedom come from? How do we get it? The answer is the opposite of freedom. The answer is discipline. You want more free time? Follow a more disciplined time-management system. You want financial freedom? Implement long-term financial discipline in your life. Do you want to be physically free to move how you want, and to be free from many health issues caused by poor lifestyle choices? Then you have to have the discipline to eat healthy food and consistently work out. We all want freedom. Discipline is the only way to get it.

Ultimately, my choice would be a combination of what Bozoma Saint John said above and what Robert Carnes said in his post about this where he simply said “Be kind, please”.

I’d tweak it a bit to say “Be a good human”, which is mostly the same but implies a bit of sonder with it.

What would you put on your billboard?

3: How has a failure set you up for later success?

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The third question to tackle from “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss (you can see all of the questions here) is this one:

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

There were two great answers that I highlighted from the book.

First, from Janna Levin, quoting Albert Einstein:

A friend warns, “Einstein, you have be careful. Your famous name will be on these papers.” Einstein laughs. “My name is on plenty of wrong papers,” he says.

The other is from Anna Holmes:

I am a complete failure at the politics of the workplace. Probably because I just don’t have the stomach for it. I like collaborative environments where people who work hard and do good work get rewarded for it, no matter who they are. I hate machinations and behind-the-scenes strategizing and bullshit.

While I’d love to come up with an insightful idea to go with those, I have to simply agree with Anna. I’m not good at playing politics in any arena, and I’m ok with that. I know it can cost me at times, but I’d much rather just play things straight.

What failure have you gone through that has turned out to be a benefit?

2: What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life?

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Today we’re going to dig into the second question (here are all of the questions) from Tim Ferriss’ book “Tribe of Mentors”, which is:

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? My readers love specifics like brand and model, where you found it, etc.

While a good number of people answered the question in the book, none stood out to me enough to deserve a highlight. However, I was inspired to read this book by Robert Carnes, who shared his answers earlier this year. For this one, Robert said:

I’ve suffered from knee joint pain nearly my entire life, especially anytime I exercise. A few years back, I bought a sports ice pack and a compression sleeve that fits on my knee.

Together, these significantly cut down my knee pain after I work out. They cost me less than $30 total and have literally saved me headaches. It’s an important reminder to take care of yourself.

For me, it’s the Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, which generally costs just under $90. Between the old 2S model and the newer 3S, I’ve now purchased this mouse 12 times! Some for me on my various computers, and another for pretty much everyone at our company. It’s a solid mouse, with smooth tracking, solid battery life, and it feels great in the hand. There’s nothing magic about it, but it’s just a great mouse.

What purchase have you recently made for under $100 that we all need to know about?

1: What is the book you’ve given most as a gift, and why?

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Digging into the first question posed by Tim Ferriss in “Tribe of Mentors” (here are all of his questions), he asks:

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

This one elicited a lot of great responses from the people that supplied answers to him. Here are some of the best that I found in the book.

From actor Terry Crews:

The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I have read hundreds of personal development books, but this is the one that clearly showed me how to visualize, contemplate, and focus on what it was I truly wanted. It revealed to me that we only get what we desire most, and to apply myself with a laserlike focus upon a goal, task, or project. That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be”—and this process is immediate. Although it takes time for these desires to manifest in our material world, you must see the thing you desire as completed, finished, and real, now. The better you can do this, the more you can accomplish. I have bought several copies of this book and distributed it to family and friends. I also reread it probably once a month to keep my vision clear.

From Naval Ravikant:

Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.

From Dustin Moskovitz:

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. Though most people will typically blame other people or circumstances in their life when they are unhappy, Buddhists believe that we are the cause of our own suffering. We can’t control the fact that bad things are going to happen, but it’s how we react to them that really matters, and that we can learn to control.

Quite a few of them mentioned “Man’s Search for Meaning“, including Jimmy Fallon:

If I gave one to an adult, it would be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I read it while spending ten days in the ICU of Bellevue hospital trying to reattach my finger from a ring avulsion accident in my kitchen. It talks about the meaning of life, and I believe you come out a better person from reading it. The lines I took from it are: “There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.” It also reinforced the belief, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. If you read it, you’ll get more from it.

I also noticed that Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” was in there a lot, including these notes from Ashton Kutcher:

The brainy book I seem to be sharing or talking about the most lately is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The more that I study people and the way systems work, the more I realize that it’s all made up. It’s easy to spout philosophies, or quote books, well-known people, or doctrines as if they are somehow of more credence than others, but the deeper you dig, the more you realize we are all just standing on piles of collective fiction. This book does a great job of illustrating that point.

My list

I thought about this question for a while, and settled on these four:

  • Think Again by Adam Grant, one of my favorite books from the past few years.
  • The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker, which I’ve shared on here quite a few times.
  • Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller, easily the book I’ve given away the most copies of.
  • Getting Things Done by David Allen. It impacted me 20 years ago, and it ultimately helped me get my life organized to the point to be able to start a business.

What book(s) would you add to this list?

The Sunday Summary: Defending opinions, Coca-Cola ingredients, and the Tribe of Mentors

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, February 19: You don’t need to defend your opinion
As Mónica Guzmán says, “Your opinion is not a final answer. It’s a snapshot of where your mind is right now. It’s not something you have to defend.”

Tue, February 20: Why doesn’t Coca-Cola advertise their ingredients?
David Ogilvy explains a time when he made this mistake while advertising for a brand of whiskey: “Writing advertising for any kind of liquor is an extremely subtle art. I once tried using rational facts to argue the consumer into choosing a brand of whiskey. It didn’t work. You don’t catch Coca Cola advertising that Coke contains 50 per cent more cola berries.”

Wed, February 21: Social media isn’t the problem
Despite what you might hear on the news and in politics, social media isn’t the problem for teens that they say it is.

Thu, February 22: Why We Sleep
Some thoughts from the book “Why We Sleep”.

Fri, February 23: Interruptions with unbalanced scale
Spam causes many issues, but the unbalanced scale of it (one person can interrupt thousands of others) make it particularly bad.

Sat, February 24: The best from “Tribe of Mentors”
I recently finished reading “Tribe of Mentors” and will be sharing posts on each of the 11 questions found in the book. The questions (and the answers that he shared) were quite insightful.

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The best from “Tribe of Mentors”

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Back in 2017, Tim Ferriss put together a fantastic book titled “Tribe of Mentors“. I say that he “put together” rather than “wrote” the book, because 95% of the content of the book are answers to questions that he collected from other people.

All told, Tim asked 11 questions to roughly 130 people and shared the results in the book. Here are the questions that he asked:

  1. What book have you given most as a gift, and why?
  2. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory?
  3. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
  4. If you could have a billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why?
  5. What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve ever made?
  6. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
  7. What new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
  8. What advice would you give to a driven college student? What advice should they ignore?
  9. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
  10. What have you become better at saying no to?
  11. What do you do when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused?

Not everyone answered all of the questions, but most answered at least two or three. As I was reading through the book I highlighted any answers that stood out to me, and I’ll be sharing those over the coming days and weeks.

Some of the questions provided me a ton of highlights, such as #1 and #4, and some provided me with none, like #2 and #6. Most were somewhere in-between, with three or four answers that I found to be very insightful.

In the meantime, I encourage you to pick up the book and give a go. It’s a long book (624 pages printed, or just shy of 19 hours on Audible), but it goes quickly. With 130+ separate chapters, it’s easy to pop in and out as time allows. Enjoy!

Interruptions with unbalanced scale

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When it comes to spam, unbalanced scale is a rapidly increasing problem. It’s bad enough when one person reaches out directly to you with an unsolicited offer, but when that one person can quickly send out hundreds or thousands of those offers, things fall apart quickly.

It goes back to a post from nearly a decade ago by Seth Godin that I’ve shared many times on here:

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.

I think we can all recognize how problematic it’s been for the last decade, but it continues to get worse.

First, we have marketing groups that continue to share “great tips” on how to evade spam filters and flood our email boxes with more and more garbage.

Second, there are AI tools that are anxious to contribute to this as well. One example (and I won’t share where it’s from), promises to “create intelligent campaigns that send LinkedIn connection invitations, automatically view, follow and endorse profiles, and send InMails and messages. All automated, personalized and with custom time delays.” Ugh.

Scaling has been a problem for years, and it looks like it’ll be getting worse. The good side is that real human connections, particularly in person, are going to get increasingly valuable as all of this gets worse, and I encourage you to lean into those types of interactions and relationships.

Why We Sleep

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I just finished the book “Why We Sleep“, and while there weren’t any stunning findings in there, there were a lot of little things that I never knew before.

I’ve always considered sleep to be a “let your body rest, and your mind does some REM stuff too”, but it turns out the mind part of things (with both REM and NREM) are vitally important. The book makes the case that sleep is the most important thing you can do for your health, and it shares this great paragraph:

“AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?”

Health

In terms of health, these two statements sum up much of it:

“Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

“Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.”

Caffeine

While I’ve largely given up caffeine in my life, I’ve never really understood how it works. One big thing that caffeine does is to simply block the adenosine in your body (the “sleepiness chemical”), but it doesn’t get rid of it — it just holds it back for a while. From the book:

“For the entire time that caffeine is in your system, the sleepiness chemical it blocks (adenosine) nevertheless continues to build up. Your brain is not aware of this rising tide of sleep-encouraging adenosine, however, because the wall of caffeine you’ve created is holding it back from your perception. But once your liver dismantles that barricade of caffeine, you feel a vicious backlash: you are hit with the sleepiness you had experienced two or three hours ago before you drank that cup of coffee plus all the extra adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for caffeine to leave.”

Older Adults

Older adults tend to sleep less than younger adults, because they don’t need as much sleep, right? Nope.

“That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth. Older adults appear to need just as much sleep as they do in midlife, but are simply less able to generate that (still necessary) sleep.”

ADHD

According to the author, more than half of ADHD cases in children are really just issues of lack of sleep.

“We estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications. A major public health awareness campaign by governments—perhaps without influence from pharmaceutical lobbying groups—is needed on this issue.”

You get used to not sleeping enough, and that’s not a good thing

I’ll leave us with this one. People that lack enough sleep will have issues with energy and alertness, but over time you get used to living that way. A bit more sleep could make a huge difference to so many of us!

“Similarly problematic is baseline resetting. With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.”

It’s a fantastic book and I encourage you to check it out. If you’ve already read it, what are some of the things that stood out to you?

Social media isn’t the problem

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The last decade has seen a lot of concern over the effect of social media on teens. Most recently is the U.S. government attempting to pass KOSA (the “Kids Online Safety Act”), which is unlikely to actually help very much.

While there are certainly some concerns to be dealt with, social media by teens is generally a positive thing.

Here are some studies that unpack teen use of social media.

Pew Research says:
“Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms”

From the Surgeon General:
“Social media can provide benefits for some youth by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests. It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression. The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth. These relationships can afford opportunities to have positive interactions with more diverse peer groups than are available to them offline and can provide important social support to youth. The buffering effects against stress that online social support from peers may provide can be especially important for youth who are often marginalized, including racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities.”

The American Psychological Association:
“Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives. In most cases, the effects of social media are dependent on adolescents’ own personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances—intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions that are afforded within many social media platforms. In other words, the effects of social media likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ preexisting strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.”

A study from the University of Oxford, which covered nearly a million people from 72 countries across 12 years:
“The largest independent scientific study ever conducted investigating the spread of Facebook across the globe found no evidence that the social media platform’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.”

It’s important to note that most of these studies showed things like “no evidence of harm”, and not that social media was necessarily good for everyone. Social media has some substantial problems for some people, and we shouldn’t just sit back and see how things shake out.

However, the idea of “we need to do something” is misplaced and is a foolish position to take. Bills like KOSA will only make things worse, even though they (seemingly) come from a place of good intent. It’s worth studying to see what the real issues are, and find effective ways to improve outcomes for everyone.

Fearmongering

The more we yell that “social media is bad for teens”, or things like “watch out for razor blades in Halloween candy”, or the completely made-up stats about sex trafficking (like this or this), the more the real work gets pushed aside. I’m not saying to ignore these issues (well, except for maybe the completely made-up Halloween candy stuff), but trying to scare people with made-up stats and stories only serves to make things worse.

Let’s focus on the real numbers and the real issues, and then we might finally get somewhere.