Tim Ferriss on The Practicality of Pessimism: Stoicism as a Productivity System. Ep 20
In the video Tim Ferriss asks if defining your fears could be more important than defining your goals. I find Tim Ferriss fascinating and just got his book (the 4-Hour Workweek). I will provide a full review when I get done reading it. People think he is full of himself but I just see him as confident.
Key quotes:
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain
“Named must your fear be before banished it you can.” – Yoda
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action”- Benjamin Disraeli
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s possible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”- Niccolo Machiavelli
“Every time we choose safety, we reinforce fear.” – Cheri Huber
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 percent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.”
Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary
What I learned:
Everybody makes mistakes
So much of racing is failure
Failure is a byproduct of pushing the envelope
When you fail it isn’t necessarily looked at as a bad thing as long as you learn from it and make something positive out of it
Engineers for better or worse want to change things and advance
All the demands from Soichiro Honda were to take risks and fail. The idea is that you can fail 100 times as long as you succeed once. “Trial and Error” sums up Soichiro Honda’s ideas.
We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures
If you have a boss that is telling you to take a chance and if you make a mistake or fail, just try not to do it again and try to learn from that. That is a good thing.
Edison trying to do the light-bulb, he said I didn’t fail, it just didn’t work 10,000 times, it worked the 10,001st time so if you look at those 10,000 times were those failures?
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable. A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it: I turned the dial-up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older-sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business.
He was telling whomever he was talking with something about a thousand marbles. I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say. Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well, but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital, he continued; Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities. And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a thousand marbles. You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years. Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52, and I came up with 3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part. It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail, he went on, and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.
I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear. Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight. Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container.
I figure that if I make it until next Saturday, then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time. It was nice to meet you, Tom. I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75-year-old man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning! You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. C’mon, honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.
What brought this on? she asked with a smile. Oh, nothing special, It’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.
“Look at your past. Your past has determined where you are at this moment. What you do today will determine where you are tomorrow. Are you moving forward or standing still?” — Tom Hopkins
Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point.
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable. A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it: I turned the dial-up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older-sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business.
