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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is a friend Leo ba bada ba ba U Ta on Twitter at Zen underscore habits Zen habits dotnet. He is founder of Zen habits a website dedicated to finding Simplicity and mindfulness in the daily. Chaos of Our Lives Zen habits has more than 2 million readers. That is a lot and Time Magazine has named it one of its top 25 blogs.
And top 50 websites Leo we could talk for many hours. This is just a round one, but welcome to the show. It's nice to have you on
finally. Yeah, it's great to be here. It's a huge honor honestly, and I
figured for people who don't have contacts we could start at the beginning or I should say maybe just the beginning of a transition of sorts and I'd like to flash back to more than 10 years ago. And I want you to correct the timing if I'm not getting it just right but
around 2005 prior to Zen habits the phenomenon prior to the best-selling books aren't all of that. Could you paint a picture of where you were what you were doing your circumstances and situation at the
time that was definitely a difficult period in my life and really it feels like a whole different lifetime ago different person, but 2005. I was married with a huge family mixed family five kids with one more on the way.
In a job I didn't like I was overweight. I was a smoker sedentary kept trying to change a lot of these habits was a big procrastinator very deeply in debt and really not being able to pay my bills and just really felt stuck and felt really bad about myself, which I think a lot of people can relate to some aspect of that story. It was just really tough for me having to provide for people but not being able to make ends meet feeling terrible about myself as a father.
Not a good example and just feeling really discouraged about my ability to make any change stick in my life. So that's where I was in 2005
and geographically. Oh, yeah at the time
I was in the island of Guam which is where we're from me and my family so
we start there. This is almost like a screenplay we start there and what happens over the subsequent.
And fall of years or the catalyst so to speak for some of your successful changes what what actually happened that was the impetus or the spark. So to speak for some of the subsequent
changes, you know, that people say sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can climb out of it. So I hit a number of really deep low points from myself. One of them was as I talked about debt just not being able to put food on
The table for my family and I remember one heartbreaking moment of that depth was when I had to break open my kids piggy bank to be able to put some like milk and cereal on the table. And so that was a real dark point where I felt like a failure as a father smoking as well. My wife was pregnant. So she quit smoking while she was pregnant, but I knew that she was going to start again as soon as she gave birth, so I had to quit in order to set an example for her. But I also knew that my kids were much more likely.
The smoke and so I had to quit for them as well. And there were just a number of points where I just felt Despair and like a failure and I felt like I had to save my life. And so I think that was the realization was like I am killing myself in a lot of different ways and I'm failing myself and failing my family. That was the most heartbreaking part was that I was failing My Wife and Kids and so from that like heartbreak and feeling of despair.
And like I was killing myself, I realized I had to reach for a Lifeline I had to do something to save my life and my family as well. And so I decided I couldn't change all of these things at once. I was trying to multiple times so I decided to just change one thing and it was smoking so I committed to that in a really big way to a lot of different people to my daughter to my wife made a promise that really felt meaningful to me and I did a bunch of research.
Found out a bunch of different techniques and tried them all. That's when I tried meditation as a replacement for smoking for stress. So I started meditating I started running because I needed to do something when I felt like I needed to smoke and so I finally actually made the smoking habit stick that I'd quit smoking for the first time in my life. I had tried like seven times before and that felt like a huge success and so I felt so much encouragement from that. I felt like I
Take on the rest of the things and so one thing at a time. I started changing everything about my life. I started eating healthier. I started running more ran a 5k. I committed to running a marathon. That's how optimistic I was after running the 5K. I started waking up earlier started writing after wanting to write for years procrastinating less my wife and I made a plan to get out of debt and one small debt at a time. We started paying them off until like a year later my entire life.
This change I lost 30 pounds in a year. My whole life was different and I ran a marathon at the end of 2006 and I felt like such a huge success and I had learned a bunch of things that change those habits along the way one after the other. I applied the same ideas to changing those habits. And that's when I started Zen habits to share all of those things that I've been learning. Let's zoom
in on a few aspects of this sure he kept her it sounds like you know on some level almost
A Cinderella Story, right like everything was wrong and then 12 months later. You were able to address so much of it and let's double-click on the smoking because I know that it seems to have been a huge point of Leverage and also a proof of concept and also a proof of confidence in a sense for you and you mentioned you know, you'd attempted to quit seven times
before. Yeah, and I'd
love for you to expand on what made the
Attempt successful like why did this attempt succeed when the others had
failed? It was such a pivotal moment in my life some really glad you're zooming in on this one a number of things change. But the first one was that I had a very meaningful reason something that that mattered to me. And again, I mentioned my wife and my kids making a promise to my daughter I think before that it was only promises to myself which I never really keep or I didn't at that time.
I didn't trust myself to keep those promises and so making a promise to someone else and really feeling like this was for something that mattered saving their lives as well as mine. So I really got clear on that and felt it in my heart and that really started everything else because it motivated me to make a big commitment. I joined a form online. So I had some social accountability social accountability was turned out to be a big one not only for this but for all future habits I learned about triggers.
So what are the things that triggered me to smoke? I really zoomed in on those things Stress and Anxiety and feeling bad about myself and being overwhelmed all of these things. Really I got clear that they were the things that caused me to smoke or triggered me to want to smoke. I also learned to just recognize when I had the urge and then sit with that urge. So as a form of meditation is just sitting with the physical sensation of needing to smoke with out needing
eating to actually smoke. So I learned to separate the urge from the action before that whenever the urge happened I had to take action. It felt like a command like there was no choice and there was no separation between them. But when I learn to separate the two I learned that the urge is just a feeling in my body that I could sit with and it would rise and get really strong and feel incredibly urgent but then it would pass and so learning that actually unlocked so much for me because I learned that none of the urges that I knew.
That I thought I needed to act on we're actually commands but they were just feelings in the body. So that liberated me a lot. I learned about rewards I learned about all kinds of motivations. One of the other big one was a dip in the habit. So there's a time with every habit that we feel great, you know, everything's going great. And then at some point we hit this dip that feels like we can't do it and so we want to give up so
Our usual pattern when we get hit by this it's like getting punched in the face is like, okay, that's enough. I don't want to do this anymore. And so we get really discouraged and I learned that if you have a plan for when you get punched in the face and you practice with that the dip doesn't have to be the end of the story. It's just a part of it is
the practicing just a rehearsal of sorts or anticipation that the dip will come or is there another way to prepare yourself for that punch in the face?
Is it yelling? It happens roughly X period of time after you start how have you done that successfully?
Well knowing that it's going to happen is a big one and then preparing for it because usually what happens is we think is not going to happen this time is going to be different and then when it happens, we're like crap like it happened and so like that must mean there's something wrong with me. And so knowing that it's going to happen that it's just a part of the process is a really big one because it allows you to be mentally in the place where you can Embrace this
And then the other part of it is practicing what you're going to do beforehand. So if you know it's going to happen and you know how it's going to feel because it's happened a number of times before you can say. Oh I'm in it and then you have a plan and you mentally rehearse this beforehand and you can practice with it in smaller version. So I highly recommend practicing anytime you get like a micro discouragement is practicing with that. So giving yourself some compassion having some kind of a way to pull.
If out of that state and so for me just having someone to talk to as a big one screwing this up. I can't do this having someone else to encourage me and then I eventually learned to encourage myself. So there's lots of different things we can do to encourage ourselves and then just learning to like write it out was part of it is because it just it'll go it'll pass and then another thing that I learned this is not right away, but I learned it multiple habits into it is actually that period is one of the
Deepest periods of learning that we can have and so if we can learn to see it in that light where oh, I can learn a lot about myself in this period it doesn't have to be a negative thing when the dip happens is like oh, this is actually when I learn what I'm all about. This is how I learn what the negative thought patterns are that happen for me are and how to deal with those. So it's actually a really rich area and most of us don't want to be in it. But if we learned though, this is where the growth
Really happens then it doesn't have to be anything that we need to get out of right away. There were I'm going to ask you
about your physical movement not even running sense, but actually the relocation sense. Mmm, you've had a number of moves that I want to talk about how those choices were made before we get there just a couple of things that came to mind as you're expanding on on everything you just mentioned the first is that the dip happens in so many areas. It happens in physical training.
Often in the form. I tell if some type it happens in skill acquisition with say language learning very predictably there will be a period where you try to take on more complex grammar and you take steps backwards that feel like you're failing if you aren't anticipating that as something predictable and the embracing I can't remember the athlete who said this to me, but embracing the suck is concerned Jim Detmer. Who's
Previous podcast guest and very wise practical guy has put it to me that when you have those moments and I'm not by any stretch of the imagination always excellent at seeing things this way when I'm in the midst of it, but he said view this as a pop quiz from the universe like the universe SI. Oh, yeah, you've been training and doing all these things mindfulness meditation breathing practices for stressful moments. Like here's your fucking stressful moment.
Yeah. Let's see.
How you handle it hot shot. Like you've been doing all this supposed practice in the safe confines of your living room.
Let's see how you operate in the real world and that has been a helpful not always miraculous reframe, but certainly helpful. So if we talk about or if we look at your moving you left Guam and then you've moved a number of times since could you speak to why you and your family?
Left Guam and what has driven your decisions to move? Because a lot of people as we record this this is late September 2020 or moving. Mmm are many people choosing to move for many different reasons and I would just love to know more about what the insights and drivers were for
you we moved in 2010 from Guam to San Francisco and that time we were a family of six kids.
It's so family of eight and we were in a really comfortable place in Guam. We had so much family around us a huge Network and I knew that we could just go on that way and be fine, but I also knew that it was comfortable and the kids were going to be trained in comfort and that they would then get stuck in that because that's what had happened for me. So I wanted us to move out of our comfort zone into a new place and experience that together where I could help them.
With that mind shift and see the world and be able to like basically have access to the world and then have choice they could go back to Guam where we love Guam or they could pretty much move anywhere in the world. It was a hard thing because first of all, it's just heart wrenching to say goodbye to so many people that we love we sold everything we moved with like a backpack each to San Francisco new almost no one there. I met you there. That was pretty great. We basically were in a place where it was just completely
Foreign to us the kids had never seen a homeless person before or anyone using drugs. They got quite used to that over the years we were there and so actually it was really hard because they didn't want to be there and I felt like I was maybe making mistake so it taught me a lot about how I question myself in those hard moments, but I really taught them a lot about their first reaction, you know, not liking it is not always right because they look back on it and say, oh I'm so
Glad that you made that choice, but I didn't want to do it. I was really unhappy for a while. And so it really taught them a lot about how we react to these kinds of
things. Let's talk about the family a little bit more in that move to San Francisco.
Yeah to a lot of
folks listening they're going to think of themselves. Holy smokes six kids. And how many just as a bit of backstory how many of those kids were home schooled?
Oh, yeah, so well
We're a blended Brady Bunch family just to make that clear. So I have to for my ex-wife my wife has two from her previous marriage and then we came together and had two more so we have three boys and three girls and it's a very blended family. So my to for my ex-wife went to regular school and then the other four were all home schooled. In fact, we do a version of it, as you know called unschooling. We still have two teenagers in the house. Now who are being unschooled and then we have two adults who went through it.
Dance cooling process who are you know, basically doing the same thing but as adults, all right, we're going to we're going to dig
into that. I want to talk about unschooling before we get to that just so I don't lose my train of thought when you move to San Francisco at the time presumably you and you and your wife discuss. This decisions were made at the time. The kids did not feel like this was perhaps the right decision. How do you think
About making decisions for the betterment of the family, even when or perhaps especially when not everyone is in agreement when you may face that type of blowback or resistance. How did you think about it or how do you think about
it? We went through a process. So doing anything like this with other people you can just make a unilateral decision. So we went through a process with them back when we were in Guam and we had a whole discussion about the reasons why
I think they really were only like 50 percent convinced but they agreed to it. So that was kind of the idea was we asked them to agree to like this kind of Adventure mindset to try something new to explore things that they didn't know and I think they were hesitant but they agreed to it a piece of me knew that they were resisting this and so part of it is just kind of talking about the adventure and the excitement and all these new things that would
Able to explore together and so they're like, okay. Well, maybe I can do this discomfort stuff if there is a good reason for it. So there is that but also part of me knew that I had to guide them to be able to deal with all of the negative stuff because that everything comes with a cost and so they were going to be heartbroken to say goodbye to people and I knew that was actually a good thing for them is to learn how to deal with that even though it was painful and really it's the same process as you talked about what how I think about this. It's the same.
Process that I think about for myself when I make these decisions, like I know I'm going to go through discomfort. There's a part of me the little kid in me that doesn't want to do the hard stuff that wants to just be in comfort and there's a adult part of me that has to guide the little boy Leo that doesn't want to do it. And so that adult has to kind of give compassion and reassurance. But also that's the part that needs to make the decisions when I'm in the like little boy Leo state of mind. I
Let myself make decisions at that place because I know that that one wants to hide or run and when my kids are in that state of mind to I usually don't let us make a decision at that place. We work through that and then when they get to a place where they're not wanting to shut down, that's when we make a group decision. So that's the same exact process for myself. We're going
to come back to unschooling but I think that a lot of people present company included would be very interested to look at.
The early years of Zen habits because it seems like when did Zen habits start? When was the site
launched January 2007?
Okay, January 2007 in some respects people must remember that 2007 to 2009 was was a golden era of blogging is very competitive very similar to podcasting now in some respects Vlogs are still very very powerful but hugely competitive many many entrance so to speak
New blogs options for readers but it seems like in a relatively short period of time. Let's just say 18 to 24 months that is inhabited really become in the eyes of many a behemoth a real force to be reckoned with how did that happen? What can you point to if any decisions or particular posts or anything at all that helped to put sand habits on the map.
Yeah. It really did happen in a matter of months and tired of
That wants to just say like I stumbled upon something just out of pure luck. And then another part is said well, no, you worked your ass off Leo. So give yourself some credit. Yeah, so I started it really just to block about a lot of the things. I've been learning and changes that I was making and so really started partly as accountability. I got some early responses from some readers. There was only a handful in the beginning that really encouraged me and it got me excited and I remember maybe two
and a half months into it a point where I said, oh my God, like I really want to do this all the time and I had a day job at the time. What was your day job if I may ask. Yeah. I was working for the government and Gamma at the time. I think it was the Guam legislature. I was helping with veterans from the legislature. So it didn't take up all my attention. Let's just say that it was the kind of job where a lot of people will play like Solitaire for like a quarter of the day and I realized like I didn't want to do that. And so I just used all of my spare time even
When I was like supposed to be doing other work just doing blogging a switch is flipped where I was so passionate about it and I realized like oh, this could be my calling and so I had never had that before this idea that the something could be my calling. I was always kind of like just do something for the paycheck and when I had that switch flipped, I went on this crazy like hyperdrive where like I was writing a post every day for isn't habits. I also started freelancing for
or other blogs where I was writing one post a week for them. So for five different ones, so it's five posts a week for those paid blogs and then I would do guest post for other blogs and I was doing about five of those a week and so it was like 15 to 20 blog posts a week. How do you
choose the five Outlets or blog posts objects? Did you select those?
Well, I was already doing freelance writing for magazines and Guam and so I decided instead of writing for those which
Wasn't inspired to write for that right for the online ones, even if the pay was less if I looked for a Blog strategically that first of all, they were paying people Freelancers and second Their audience had some kind of overlap with mine. So they you know, there was productivity there was mostly self improvement type stuff so similar audiences and the effect that I had and I kind of realized this early on when I started making the switch the effect was that if you're reading about self-improvement there.
Is a good chance that I would you would come across me? Because all of these self-improvement blogs that were paying me I was there every week and then a bunch of other blogs that we're doing self-improvement would allow me to be a guest poster. And so if you're reading this blog about self-improvement, you probably came across Leo's and habits. If you were within this certain kind of sphere it was almost like I was everywhere and that was kind of crazy that I could do that at the time. But yeah, I actually had people write to me and say man you are just
On every blog that I read. And of course I was on every blog in the world, but for this particular type of person that I was trying to reach I was on almost every blog that they were reading.
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Now I'm trying to step into my mental time machine and go back to say 2007 to 2009. I want to say that at the time there would have been some powerhouses to reckon with in the productivity space Lifehacker 40 holders. Were there any particular Outlets that looking back and doing it 80/20 analysis of sorts that really seemed to help you reach.
Call mass for any number of reasons, it's hard to remember. I remember the first time that I got linked to from a bigger block. It was a Blog called dumb little man. I think they're still around but they had so many more readers and I had like 20 or something like that and somehow they had read my blog and links to it. And I remember looking at the stats and it just spiked up into the thousands and it was just like as mind-blowing thing which linked to or what was it was like 20 productivity.
T hacks or something like that. I definitely wrote a lot of Link bait type headlines at the time. I tried to put real wisdom real like useful stuff in there. But I played around with a bunch of types of titles for the post that were attention-grabbing and eventually I moved away from that because it just didn't feel very good. But definitely was doing a lot of it at the time just experimenting I want to just basically try any things. I didn't know it would work or not. So I tried everything that was the kind of like I said hyperdrive that I went into is I basically tried
Single thing because I didn't know what worked and then by the end of 2007. I figured out the things that worked and the ones that didn't and so I stopped doing the ones that didn't feel in alignment with me and then really just focus on the important stuff. I think that's the case when we try anything that we don't know how to do it. We try like everything possible and then we narrow it down to it actually does matter by the way. I want to say that 2007 when Zen habits took off is when I met you online, we never met in person that you're but you had come up with for our work.
Week, which was just this Powerhouse of a book and you were starting out with your blog as well. And I was also coming out with a book which I didn't know how to do and you're coming with a Blog which you were new to and so we kind of crossed paths at that point where I was good at blogging and not good at books. You are good at books and not good at blogging and eventually you got really good at blogging like your blog just took off and so it's just that really cool to see you rise up in that space just because I think
You set your mind to you're going to be really good at
appreciate you saying that but it was it was really fun to have those early interactions and just like you in the very beginning. I did a lot of experimentation with all sorts of clickbait EA titles and headlines and blog roles of various types and I actually threw as much as I could against the wall and it's very true that you have to throw a lot against the wall to know what works but I would add to that you need to throw.
Throw a lot against the wall to determine what works for you because if you're experimenting in a new medium, you really don't know what you're going to enjoy and you don't know what you'll be good at and I think those are very closely related in the sense that your powers on tends to be some degree of inherent skill or predilection towards a certain format. That's true with podcasting to that predilection or enjoyment then gives you the stamina to
Outlast and compete so I think that both of those are extremely important ingredients and if I think back to one of the inflection points for instance for my blog, it's very clearly getting on the front page of dig DG the first time with my geek to freak post which is about building muscle.
I remember that one controversial
post and the amount of traffic that that brought was just unimaginable.
Obul Reddy. We're there other particular posts of yours that you recall or projects right Zen to done mind. As one that I'm wondering if that kind of grabbed people in a way or if that type of writing grab two people in a way that brought you dedicated readers. Is there anything at all that comes to mind is having done a lot of heavy lifting?
Yeah. And by the way dig was a big one for me too. I got in the front.
Give dig a bunch of times and that was those were like the early days of social media Reddit was also getting big and there was a bookmarking site called delicious or if you got on their front page, you'll also get a bunch of traffic. So I remember that you're like bringing back all these early Memories the ones that really worked for me were around productivity and motivation habit change and then the other one that was a big surprise to me. Actually. I didn't think anyone would be interested in it was Simplicity and that's when I said that luck.
It was a big factor because there were a lot of productivity and motivation blogs at the time there weren't that many that blogged about habits at the time but there were a lot around productivity motivation. So mine wouldn't have stood out if it were just about that but I brought an element to everything that I wrote about of simplicity. So my blog was a lot about simplifying your life, but I realized like, oh, it doesn't have to be a just about simplifying your possessions. I could write about simple productivity and
Simple motivation and so I brought Simplicity that lends to almost everything that I wrote about and that turned out to be a distinguisher for me that I just kind of looked upon but again you throw everything against the wall. So Simplicity was something that I thought I was only interested in and not a lot of other people were so I wrote about it because I liked it but I thought that wasn't going to resonate I had to write about productivity and motivation and it turns out that I tapped into a nerve that people really crave Simplicity and
their lives when they're feeling overwhelmed and chaotic and just overloaded with all the stuff all the emails and messages and everything that we have Simplicity struck a nerve that I wasn't expecting to strike. That was the one surprise for me that year of many surprises. That was the biggest one and I still feel really lucky that I wrote about that and tapped into this like Zeitgeist of the time.
How would you suggest people think about simplification? I'm sure many people listening would
Like to simplify the listen to your story of each family member with a backpack and they don't know how to go from zero to 60. So to speak and given that you've so much practice applying Simplicity to different areas if you were and I know you don't necessarily do this, but if you were doing sort of maybe you do you tell me but sort of one-on-one high-end Consulting someone's and I want to find my life. What would you say to them or do with them
by the way? I do do one-on-one coaching.
I didn't do that until a couple years ago, but now I do the place to start is how things got not simple in the first place because you can get rid of like 90% of your stuff and simplify your day and then I'll be done with you as a consultant and consider that a huge success and then I come back in 3 months and things are back to their complicated things. So like how did we get here in the first place? I think is really important to look at and the reason why we have so much stuff and we have so much debt and we
take on so much in our lives is really because of uncertainty and anxiety you notice this year as we record this we're in the middle of a pandemic is the most anxiety that people have felt in a long time probably since like War times and the Great Depression and so as that has gone up people started ordering things online more one of the things that people start to reach for and so like we got so many Amazon packages because we couldn't go anywhere and release
That anxiety and so that was a way for people to release that and so that's always been true is that we always have gone to getting more stuff as a way to feel control in our lives or security or like I have some kind of protection against the chaos of this world. And so I think that's the place to look is like, how did you get there? What are the mindset and the thought process is that trigger you to having so much in your life and this also applies to having too many commitments and too many goals and projects and meet.
Some things like that. How do we fill our lives up so much and then we can start to look at the underlying stuff and dealing with the uncertainty and anxiety because the external stuff is only symptoms and I'm not someone who just likes to treat symptoms, but the symptoms are fun to treat you. If it's just you can't just do that.
Got it. Let's look at the commitments and non-physical.
Forms of clutter because I least selfishly for myself feel pretty good about possessions and material accumulation, but the commitments and projects are perhaps unexpectedly to some listening are an area where at least as a stress response in times of acute stress. I will often overcome it myself. I think as a way to not do whatever is coming to the surface. What would your
Be to someone who wants to become.
Better at saying no or simply someone who wants to reverse the trend of
over-committing. I love that you're bringing this up because it really strikes to the core of what I've been digging into in the last few years, which is uncertainty and anxiety. But in terms of over commitment, I would say it's really good actually to make an external commitment that I want to only have this much in my life. That's really the place to start so we don't necessarily have to start underneath we start externally, I know I just I'm
Predicting what I just said, but it really helps to see the stuff underlying if you say okay. I commit to only doing one project at a time or three projects at a time or I commit to taking completely Saturdays Sundays off and Friday afternoons, you know something like that where you commit to something externally which is a limitation and then what happens is you see yourself rebelling against that when things feel really uncertain it's the urge to undo that commitment that we start to work with. So the underlying
lying part of it is like, oh, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety. We actually don't usually notice when we're feeling anxiety. We just start to go automatically to our ways of reacting to that anxiety which like you said. I think a lot of people listening can probably relate to what you just said, which is we go and take on a bunch of stuff we go and do a bunch of things or for other people would be like Netflix or YouTube. So Comfort things is when common response procrastinating on a lot of things is another common one, but for people like me and you who are doers
Go out and do a bunch of things and that's our way of feeling more in control when things are feeling out of control. So if you have a commitment externally to only do a certain number of things and you notice like oh I've broken that commitment and the last week then you can start to see like, oh there's something under that that is coming up. There's anxiety here and that that allows you to bring awareness to the anxiety and then to start to work with that in a way that doesn't break the commitment. And so if you have that kind of external thing that holds you
you in that commitment and I really like having accountability. So like you commit to a group of close friends that you're only going to do a certain number of projects that kind of thing or have a certain number of meetings or my meetings are only going to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something like that. Then it really helps you to like highlight all the times when you're trying to rebel against that
what are some of the rules constraints forms of accountability that you have found.
Fall in your own life. I've tried like as you can imagine. I've tried everything and it changes over time as some of them get easy after a while. And so I take on something else to adjust to the level that I'm at right now. So like right now I realize that I was filling up almost every single day 7 days a week with zoom calls first. It was like there was only going to be uncertain days and then it started to fill up every other time. So I started first of all having weekends off no calls and weekends, which meant I had to move.
Things away from that and then I started doing no calls on Friday so I can still work on Fridays but no calls and then I started taking I decided I was going to take December's and June's off of coaching people and then also doing meetings each step along the way I had to make some shifts and then I had to watch myself rebel against that which I have actually recently started filling up Fridays, even though I'm like, oh it's just this one time. So if I'm going to get to do a podcast with Tim Ferriss, oh, that's okay, right because that's a
Deal but nothing else and then once you start to do that, you start to see yourself doing it a bunch of other times after you've let you kind of open up the floodgates.
No, I'm the snake in the tree. You got to be careful.
Yeah Tim's on a blur. I'd love to talk
a better here rather a bit about Zen Buddhism. So Zen Buddhism for a lot of people I think is more than anything.
A unclear and confusing and you have recommended in for instance in my last book trog mentors recommended a few books related to Zen Buddhism. Zen mind beginner's Mind by shooting news is and also what is Zen subtitle Plain Talk for a beginner's Mind by Norman Fischer. Yeah. If is CH ER, are you still finding Zen Buddhism to be helpful in your life? And if so,
Why how would you describe it and its impact in your life? It's
such an interesting topic because in some ways if you start to dive into it, it does become really confusing and actually don't recommend Zen mind beginner's mind as the first book. It is a great book. It's got so much wisdom in it. But when you start to read it doesn't make a lot of sense. So if you read one book to start with that, what is Zen by Norman Fischer is a great intro, but also if you don't dive into it and you just have this like idea of what Zen is people think of it as
Like calm and tranquility and simplicity and in some ways it is it does work with that kind of stuff. So when I started I had that idea like, oh it's going to be just mindfulness and simplicity and calm and then I started diving into it and I had that same response which is like I don't understand what this is about it all I don't know what they're talking about. And if you go to like a Zen temple and like meditate with them, there's a bunch of chanting and it feels really off-putting and confusing so I completely acknowledge is a lot of
Confusion that comes up around it and that's just because it's like this old tradition where they have their ways of doing things. I do find it really useful. I'm I study with a zen teacher and I am setting the precepts which are you know, like, you know don't intoxicate yourself and don't abuse sex and that kind of stuff. So I study with these precepts as a way to deepen into the practice and I'm planning to take some vows in the near future. So as something that I am diving
Deeper into and the reason why I find it so helpful is not because I need to be like the some like Zen monk some zen master anything like that. But because it is a way of practice that allows you to open up in the middle of the most difficult stuff that you could face the dip that we talked about earlier the uncertainty and anxiety that we talked about that's coming up this year and allows you just to be completely open in the middle of that.
That embracing the suck that you talked about. It's even like realizing the suck isn't even suck. It's actually just life allows you to open up in the middle of Life some of the hardest stuff and be completely open and relaxed and present with it and it's just a completely different way of being than what we're usually taught and it's not something that you can just do in a week. You have to actually practice with it for a long time practice can be discouraging. It can be something that we shy away from because we're busy.
Yeah, and then when you notice yourself discourage, that's when you bring the practice to that. That's how I've been practicing with it lately. You
mentioned the precepts the bodhisattva precepts. It's right are open to sharing what vows you are considering taking
you brought the word bodhisattva. So The bodhisattva Vow in general is just I know you're familiar with it. But for those who aren't it's this idea that you're going to help all beings which is like this impossible, but it's like how the hell are you?
Help every single being on earth, right which is actually one of the amazing things is that you turn towards this thing that feels completely impossible and you ask yourself the question bringing curiosity to it. What would it be like to turn your heart open to helping all beings to this intention this really wholesome heartfelt intention to help people who are suffering in the world. And so that's what the bodhisattva vow is and it's about to rip basically uphold these 16 bodhisattva.
Oops, which I have not memorized if you quiz me right now, if you give me the pop quiz, I won't be able to list them off but they're all actually really the same vowel which is this thing to open up beyond our self concern which is where most of us are almost all the time is where in self-concern and like what is this person think of me? Will I be judged? Am I going to fail should I take on more all of these things are all about ourselves and there's nothing wrong with that. That's not a bad thing. But the bodhisattva
Val is about opening beyond that to all beings and it's this amazing way of being that you like are no longer only in South concern you still care about yourself, but that's not the thing that limits you and that's not where your mind is at and where your hearts coming from. It really actually is the most powerful thing. It's almost like when I talked about when I talked about quitting smoking is having some reason to do it other than yourself. I made the vow to my daughter and my
my wife it actually held me in the darkest Parts when I didn't want to do it when I was faced with discomfort or punched in the face like you if you have something that matters more than yourself you can actually go through the hardest discomfort and the same thing when I hit a marathon like at the point when I hit the wall in the marathon, why was I doing this? I had to have a reason other than my own Comfort because I was not feeling comfortable at the time. And so I had to have a reason to do it that
More important to me than my own comfort and that's what the body's help about is.
What was it in the case of the marathon
for you? It was my kids honestly, if you're going to ask me like a number of all my different motivations at 90% is time. It's my kids, but nowadays it's not just them but at that time that was the most accessible thing for me that was beyond myself was my wife and kids. It was so easy like looking at their faces to really care.
About them and their hearts and like being an inspiration to them and just to show you like how that actually did pay off a few years later. They did a birthday party for me where they celebrated me as like a superhero. They like had Super Dad and like this is how they saw me was this person who was larger than life and willing to be a hero it was so touching because that was what I wanted for them was to have this example who wasn't stuck in.
For its own who could go out of that for something that was more meaningful. That's what it was in for me when it came to the marathon was I'm doing this to show them that this could be done.
I'm looking at the bodhisattva precepts on Wikipedia. And of course you can go as deep as you want on this, but just to give people a flavor and I want you to correct me if this doesn't sound familiar, but I'm looking at the Brahma Jolla Sutra which has a list of 10 major and 48 minor body.
Something for everybody and what strikes me at least about these is there's some similarity to say the Ten Commandments right? There's in the Ten Commandments case Thou shalt not kill right but here's an addition to that and of course, these are all translations but not to kill or encourage others to kill and at the end of each of these there is or encourage others to X, right. He was false words and speech or encourage others to do so not to broadcast the misdeeds or faults of the Buddhist.
He not encourage others to do so not to Harbor anger encourage others to be angry and so on and so it is as you mentioned broader than just the sort of skin encapsulated ego that we refer to as I hmm by the wording at least that I'm seeing here in the precepts if we are going back to family and the family your kids being such a form of drive and motivation and accountability.
T I want to ensure that I don't miss unschooling. Okay, could you speak to how on God's green earth you had so many kids home schooled. And is it you and your wife doing the homeschooling? Do you have helped? I think for a lot of people who have kids right now. They have seen in some cases how woefully underprepared they are to assist with.
At home and there are certainly technical hurdles. But this is thing that has been forced upon by circumstance and sort of force majeure through pandemic quarantine and so on millions of people who have been completely unprepared. This is who I would love to hear from you. What unschooling looked like
can I speak? I do want to dive into that but I want to speak just briefly to something that you talked about in the previous section, which was the bodhisattva vows because you compare them to the Ten Commandments and
There's a big difference that I want to just touch on. They aren't rules or commitments so much as ways to kind of examine how you're practicing with this stuff. So like, you know Thou shalt not kill there's a similar precept to that and encouraging others as you said, but the difference is it's only a lens to examine. How are you practicing with the main intention of all of this stuff and it's not about making yourself wrong and judging ourselves, which is kind of where we usually come from in our Western society as like ways.
All kinds of ways to judge ourselves. And so that's something I just wanted to bring out as it's really just oh maybe I haven't killed anybody but have I done anything that is aggressive towards people and so looking at that and there's always deeper ways and there's even much deeper ways to go into these things. So I just wanted to kind of share that. This is the really only just practice tools for this this area. Okay unschooling, which is an amazing topic, but I have to start by saying
If you ask how angry God's green earth, my secret ingredient of course is not so secret as my wife. So she decided to quit her job as a teacher. So she had some background in education and then homeschool our kids and at the time we just did homeschooling which is like School in the house. So he had the same kind of classes same kind of lessons and books and everything. And so that's and to this day like she's down there right now doing that with them. So I definitely
A big part of their unschooling but I just have to say like we're actually really lucky that she gets to do that as a full-time thing. How
decision made I don't want to skip over that sure. I did that
happen. Well, we were inspired by my sister who is homeschooling her kids her two kids. That was one thing and then the other one was we realized for some of our kids who are in school school was not working out for them. Well, we had one son who very intelligent but he didn't conform well to the rules.
Of school and what we realized as we start to look into this stuff is at school in a lot of ways is very much about Conformity and follow the rules and you'll get along fine and it doesn't matter so much about you know, how much you've learned but more how especially in the early days of school like how much you can actually follow the rules and so he was learning a lot but it was not following the rules and so like one day he was he had read whatever it was supposed to be read in the in the class and was bored. And so he said he broke.
A novel that he was reading and started reading it and he got sent to the principal's office because of that and that was like our wake-up call is like, oh they don't care that much about him learning. It's more about him following the rules. And so that was one I was following the rules of versus learning and so we started to look at like is this possible for her to quit that was why we made the decision, but another thing that we learned along the way that I think is really important this day and age,
Is that unschooling we so we went away from the structure of schooling to the structure of homeschooling and then we tossed all of that out in favor of unschooling which is a way of learning as completely unstructured other than what the kid wants to structure for themselves. And so the idea behind unschooling is that you're learning in the same way that you and I do today Tim as adults like you and I have not stopped just because we're out of school we have
Up learning. We're actually probably learning more than we did when we were in school, but we're learning on our own terms because we are motivated by it at our own pace with our own structure. That's what unschooling is empowering the kids to actually decide for themselves what they care about what they want to learn and what that means is that they're not going to necessarily learn everything that everyone is quote unquote supposed to learn by the age of 13, but they would have learned a whole different set of things.
And the really important thing is that actually learning can be incredibly fun that they learned how to face uncertainty. They learn how to motivate themselves and create their own structure. They learned that it's okay to give up on learning something if you found something else that you're more passionate about. They also learn how to hold themselves into learning something when they are feeling discouraged about it. So there's like a whole set of meta-learning that is available to unschoolers. That isn't given to regular
There's and I wanted to say like you're not making a bad decision. If you're sending your kids to school and you're not a bad person if you're a teacher or a bad parent, so I don't judge anybody. Who does that but school by its nature is someone making the decisions for the kids. So they it takes away all of the decision-making for them. It takes away the uncertainty of their learning path because someone else has laid it out for you. So you feel like okay. This is laid out for me. So I'm just going to follow it and then you get to college in the same thing as there's a path laid.
It out for you and then you get out of college and then you're like now what do I do? Because there's no path laid out for you as an adult. And so what happens to most people is that they get out of the schooling thing and they look for another thing to replace that. How can I go to a place where someone else has made the decisions for me and I can have the certainty of following someone else's path that they've laid out and as you know as an entrepreneur the most rich kind of learning areas are where someone has not laid the path out for you and you have to make
Decisions for yourself and you constantly question whether you're doing it, right and that's what unschooling is really in a nutshell. Do you
feel in that case that you are preparing them for entrepreneurship predominantly because I would imagine I want to hear you speak to this just because I'm speculating but that in the process of unschooling your kids you are providing them with a lot of adaptability but probably handicapping their ability to
to travel a more traditional path afterwards to say colleges. Is that is that not the case I would just love to hear how you think about some of the trade-offs? Yeah are and
well first of all it is I don't know if it's handicapping them. They definitely it is a little bit harder to get into college but there's plenty of homeschoolers and unschoolers who get into college is is definitely a path my kids so far have not chosen that the ones who were unschooled but it's definitely a path and it's not that difficult it just you have to put a little bit of extra.
Effort because it's not all laid out for you. So I would say that's one thing just to make sure that's clear. There's actually books written on how to get into college as a as a nun schooler. But the entrepreneur thing I do want to speak to that because my favorite person to talk to this about is people like you who are entrepreneurs or creative types authors, you know, anyone who's done anything that deals with uncertainty and discomfort and knows what that's like any kind of leader anyone running a non-profit those people get it. So as I
Art to talk about like oh having to figure out your own path. The people who have had to do that for themselves. They instinctively get it. They already know what that's like and then if they have a kid or they're about to have a kid, but their kids aren't in school yet. They haven't made that decision yet. That's the perfect time that's like the golden Zone to reach someone if they're not return or creative type or leader of some kind and they have a kid or about to who's not in school yet. It's absolutely preparation for any kind of Uncharted Territory.
If you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you're going to be any kind of leader in any kind of organization where you're not being told what to do, but you have to figure stuff out and deal with the uncertainty of that. This self-doubt unschooling is like incredible preparation for that and it is constantly filled with uncertainty self-doubt people judging you and not getting you which is exactly the path of an entrepreneur and yeah constantly having to deal with all of that stuff and discouragement motivations.
Structure all of the exact same stuff that you and I deal with on a daily basis. That's what an unschoolers starts his do from day one and they're not going to be good at it at first and so it's great to have someone who's there to guide them but they get trained in it by the time they get to be 18. They can definitely figure out their path to college there, but they can also realize like actually I don't need college for most professions, right? I don't need less. I'm going to be like a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. I can actually do without college. So there's the
college kind of route as well. Are there any
resources that you would recommend for people who would like to learn more about home schooling and unschooling and common pitfalls best practices?
Yeah. There's there's a bunch of books. I'm totally out of date to be honest. So there's some radical stuff about just completely like liberating. There's one called teenage Liberation handbook, which I highly recommend as an author named Alfie Kohn KO.
Hn something like that. He's actually also pretty radical. I would actually lean towards anything that talks about unschooling rather than homeschooling. It's a important distinction unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. So it is at home, but it's really about all the stuff that I talked about choosing your own path and dealing with it. I wouldn't recommend any book that's focused on homeschooling itself because they're usually about how to do school in the home.
Let's talk more about charting the unknown. All right, and this is
Unknown to me may be known to you but I am looking at a quote from a Fast Company piece that you wrote in 2015 about the constant tension and struggle between contentment and self-improvement. And here's the paragraph for the last eight years. I've had an internal struggle between wanting to improve myself and wanting to be content to be honest. I haven't completely figured it out how to resolve that struggle but I'm working on it. What is the root of this struggle while when I started Zen habits more than eight years ago. I've been working for more than a year on changing all my habits with lots of success. All of those changes were
My dissatisfaction with myself I'd had a lot of success the dissatisfaction never went away. So this is dated of course means five years ago or even a bit more and I just love to hear from you as I've also observed your writing shift from productivity, which we could in some sense pair with self-improvement to tossing out productivity and thinking about Simplicity and many other subjects. Are there any particular?
Articular changes in your life habits new beliefs anything that has had the greatest impact on your contentment or a large impact on your contentment.
I think the thing that I did it was I kept digging deeper. Like I was never content to use that word with just like the surface level stuff which is where I started and there's nothing wrong with that stuff that productivity and all the systems.
Oh, that's kind of stuff. I think is amazing and there's always deeper levels and so for me, it's like oh what why am I not content? I got my life under control. I got my debt under control habits and everything like that, but there's still something that I'm not satisfied with and so I started to dig into that and I think what I hit upon was this underlying uncertainty about myself. Am I good enough is kind of the question that feeling of inadequacy that a lot of us.
Us will feel and there's nothing wrong with that feeling. I think that's something that kind of gets bread into us by our society. It's just becomes part of our world. Like I'm not enough and the world is constantly giving us messages of that and we give ourselves that message. So I learned to like kind of sit with that that feeling and I realized it was just a feeling it wasn't actually the end of the world and then I learned to like tap into self-compassion and I think that was a huge one for me was learning to be compassionate for myself.
I may pause you just for a second. What did that look like in practice?
Yeah, that was a hard one for me because first it was more of a mental intellectual exercise. Just kind of let myself off the hook. I'm not such a bad person and just reassuring talk. It actually came when I started practicing more not only with meditation but with heart-centered meditations like meta, I'm sure you're familiar with that one loving kindness meditation. And so I started practicing with that and that one is for those unfamiliar.
ER with it is basically this thing where you kind of picture someone else or a group of people and you start to wish an end to their suffering for example, or which happiness upon them and it's just a lovely little meditation, right? So you start thinking these thoughts like may they be happy when you think about your loved ones in pain and suffering and may they be happy think about other people in the world who are suffering may they be happy. It's just a really beautiful meditation. But what I learned is I kept practicing
Sing with us was there is a feeling in my heart that would be generated of loving kindness. And that's really the main point of that is not so much like this thought process of loving kindness, but heart feeling which is really hard to describe until you start to practice it and then you start to realize like oh, yeah, that's the same thing that I feel instantly when someone who I care about is actually in pain. I really want them to not be in pain, right? So this is like human thing, but you can actually conjure it up.
Up. And so I learned to do that through this meditation and I start to notice when I am feeling inadequate or like there's something wrong with me or I'm not doing enough or I got through my day really busy. But I never I still didn't do enough. There is always this feeling of not being enough that I had and I started to give my self compassion when I start to recognize that this kind of loving kindness compassion in my heart and so it's just like almost like this pouring out of this loving feeling towards my
Self towards my own wounds which sounds very kind of Wu and like I think there's people who won't resonate with that but actually was a really powerful thing when I started to practice that for myself because we don't do that. We are not trained in that as a society
and by practice with that show up as you say being really hard on yourself. And before you go in to dinner with your family just taking 3 minutes with your eyes closed to do a loving kindness self-talk meditation, or did it look,
Like something else
I think of it more like this Salve that I just put on a wound anytime. I'm feeling it act up, you know, so I have like all these wounds from like childhood and so forth. And so yeah when I feel like oh, I'm not enough or there's something wrong with me or I'm just judging myself and it kind of stuck in one of those kinds of thought patterns. It really just feels like a wound in my heart and so like I just noticed that I'm like, oh, I'm feeling some anxiety right now. Can I give myself some compassion? Oh, I'm
Laying really down about myself and how much how little I've done this week or how addicted I've gotten to something. And so I'll just give myself compassion. It's really anytime anything difficult is showing up frustration anxiety fear self-doubts and anger things like that. So yeah, you're feeling frustration with someone you can point your finger at them and really focus on them, but you could also notice you're feeling hurt and just give yourself some compassion and that really helps with that frustration and you can't really be like, oh
Open-hearted and open-minded towards this person who you're frustrated with until you've given yourself some compassion first and dealt with your own pain.
Yeah, that's strikes that strikes me as very true certainly with a lot of my reactive Behavior over the last few decades and I want also recommend for people who are interested in meta M ETA or loving meditation. It really can have a very pronounced very fast effect on your state and one book.
That gave a great description of this there are many but is Joy on demand written by paying 10. So see Hade - Emmy NG last name t a n who created a massively successful course internal to Google that time called search within yourself. I believe and the book contains some really fantastic descriptions and prescriptions for loving kindness meditation. So I just wanted to share
r that for people who might want to yeah explore.
There's another one just to mention another resource because I know your listeners love resources Tara Brach think you're familiar with her work. I am yeah radical acceptance. That's what it is. She's awesome Relic work. It's a great book. Yeah. It's
also one of the key books in the quiver which like a lot of things as a very generic kind of seemingly hand-wavy squishy title with a lot of very practical tactical. Yeah.
Within I'm looking at some of the notes in front of me Leo. This is a might seem like a left turn but it's it's of interest to me because we've been speaking somewhat broadly. I mean specifically about your experience, but broadly in terms of say gender experience where this is everything we're talking about applies to everyone at least to the extent that I can tell in 2018. You went through training with a men's group that's deep into masculine practice.
Has and seem to relate to the sort of masculine and feminine polarity work David data and here I'm just taking you know, John Wineland. Can you speak to why you did that training and some of the things that you took away
from it? Why did I do it? I think there was a part of me that would collapse in the middle of discomfort. So let's just say an argument with my wife or pain from like a family member.
Or something like that, and I said, I would collapse in the middle of that not physically but like my heart would close and I'd be so discouraged and and just frustrated with him. And so I like was looking for something to work with that with and I did a workshop with John Wineland who is a disciple of David data, but he's also branched out and then his own work. And so I actually think he's like really an incredible teacher for this kind of stuff and we did some practices there.
Their mindfulness type practices that were quite incredible and so I decided to just dive deep with him and I went into a nine month program with John and just to be clear the polarity work here. There's there's a they talk about energy of the masculine and The Feminine and this is not necessarily gendered every single person in this framework has both masculine and feminine energy and us and so this is really about practicing leadership of our own emotions.
In order to be able to provide leadership for let's say our families or in our relationship. So the leadership is the masculine where you're providing structure and Consciousness and able to be with all of our pain and emotions and all the stuff that comes up which would be considered feminine all of our emotions all change all destructive and creative energy is the feminine and all of us and so the masculine and all of us is the Consciousness and structure and Stillness and so learning to
practice in this way was a really profound thing for me that allowed me to practice with my own inner like wounded self and my own emotions, but then be able to do that for my kids for my wife for all my other loved ones and for my readers and the coaching clients that I work with and the groups that I work with so be able to hold space for them was really important to do this practice because the practice is not just knowing it intellectually, but it's actually getting it in like your nervous system so that you've trained in it.
For a number of months and in fact, it's the lifetime practice so that when someone shows up as a coaching client, for example, who is completely complaining about you instead of complaining about them back. You just kind of hold space for them with complete Consciousness and love and you don't need to collapse. Could you give an
example of one framework or concept or concrete practice that you took from that training?
One of the best ones? This is the most like I know people like you and me love practical.
Technical stuff that comes from Deep stuff, right? So that one of the best ones that I use tactically on a daily basis, it's part meditation then part trying to make a decision. So let's say I have a lot of things on my plate and I have to decide. Okay, what do I need to do today? And it could really could be anything and I'm feeling pulled in a lot of directions. So I think a lot of people can relate to that. What I'll do is I'll drop into it's like a little mini meditation where my Consciousness goes like wide like almost as like
Why does the universe right so like really open mind and really deep Consciousness? So you go into a state like that and it can really with practice. It could really take two seconds to get into that state and then in that state and again, I want to give complete credit to John Wineland for these practices in this state. I drop in the question what is life calling me to do and you can interpret that in a lot of different ways life. God your inner heart your intuition.
Here it is. But in that state of wide-open consciousness, we're no longer in our place of self concern and what what comes up for me is usually just one thing and it's really clear. I'll do that at the beginning of a day is just drop in that question. What is life calling me to do and it's just one thing and then I'll just do that and I might after that ask the same question and just do that and one after the other just ask that question and is usually the most important thing. It's not the most urgent or the thing that I'm most afraid.
Read about but it's actually just the most important thing.
Have you had any answers pop up that were surprising or particularly unexpected for you? Yeah, go get anything completely out of left
field. Yeah, sometimes I think like, oh, it's this fire that I need to put out eat
nachos now and like
that. No, not yet. I'm sure that will come up. Actually I have had some where it's like. Oh you need to take some rest and I like thought I had to go do a bunch of things because I was feeling very overwhelmed.
Like no you need to rest. So maybe the nachos would have been a good part of it. But another one that surprised me is you need to go and apologize to somebody like someone came up in the middle of that. I'm like, oh I hurt them and unintentionally of course, but I did hurt them and I need to go and make amends. And so sometimes that comes up and I'm like, oh shoot like I didn't even think of that until I ask that question. Well Leo, I
want to give readers plenty to chew on but not too much to chew on I think we've covered.
A lot of ground. Is there anything else that you think we should explore on this conversation?
We've touched a number of times on uncertainty and anxiety and I want to just leave people with something here that I think is really important. So in this world right now that we're in as again as we record this we're in the middle of pandemic and lockdowns and frustrations with other people and in our country, it's the elections and racial protests and also wildfires if you're on my side of the country,
So there's just like a lot of uncertainty in the world and a lot of anxiety that comes from that uncertainty. And so I've been doing a lot of training around that and I think it's so important for us to become present with that uncertainty and anxiety. And what I've learned is that we can train in that it doesn't have to be a thing that shuts us down or gets us spinning out of control. What I've learned is first of all, we all have uncertainty
Every day of our lives and we have some habitual ways of responding to that, you know smoking and all the things that I've talked about procrastination eating nachos would be some good examples of that Netflix and YouTube and social media and email all the things that were familiar with. These are our habitual responses to uncertainty to a feeling of uncertainty in our heart of like I'm not sure how things are going and the way that we usually feel that is some kind of tug on our heart or almost like a
Elevator is dropping out from under our feet. It's this feeling of groundlessness. And again, we have habitual responses that we've been training ourselves in four years for a whole lives. And those aren't always helpful. Sometimes they are sometimes they're not but there are automatic and so we don't have choice because we have trained ourselves to do it automatically when uncertainty arises and right now you'll see yourself again. I mentioned going to Amazon and ordering a bunch of things going to Netflix or YouTube or whatever it is.
Is whatever thing that you go to you'll notice yourself doing it more now than ever before that's a highlight of your habitual response because the uncertainty is so intense. The anxieties is so intense in our lives right now. And so what I would say is that this is the best time to train this is the most important time to train because it's so in our faces that we can't avoid it and so why not turn towards it and welcome it and open up to it and practice with it.
And the practice that I have been training people in and training myself in I think is so helpful is to drop into the body when you're feeling it and then you notice you're feeling it because you're going to your habitual responses all of the things that I've mentioned drop into the body and drop your attention into bodily Sensations. So just notice what you're feeling in your chest and your stomach and your throat and usually it's somewhere around the chest area, you'll feel like a tightening or a tug.
Or a pain or an energy and the energy itself of uncertainty is not a problem. And what we can do is turn towards it mindfully and be with it with a curiosity when we have curiosity with as it's no longer something we need to run from or get rid of it's actually just completely fine. It's just an energy in our body and we can just be curious wanting to know more and being open with it. And if you train with it in this way and we have so many opportunities to train right now. It's a very very rich training ground.
Now you can actually learn to be completely comfortable with uncertainty and not need to run to habitual patterns and what that means is you're now in choice and you can still eat the nachos you can still do all of the usual things and that's nothing wrong with those but you also can decide to stay in the discomfort to do the hard thing to turn towards the thing you're turning away from to say sorry to someone all of those things are now available to you when you practice with it in this way. Yeah, this is
This is a practice that is certainly very present for me at the moment as if you can hear the the ice smashing in the background as
we for
recording. The only place that I have reliable Wi-Fi is in the Attic of a restaurant which seems to be in rush hour right now. So it's immediately present for me is how to not compulsively go into the thought loops and the default behaviors that we use as temporary pain.
Colors, yeah, and how we can learn to be more comfortable with the discomfort and certainly expect to have greater and greater need of that in the upcoming months with the not just unpredictability that is naturally occurring but the sort of engineered spectacle and theater of uncertainty. Yes, they would call it and the business context fear uncertainty and doubt. Yep. It's fun when people are selling
the food which is certainly the job of many political campaigns with respect to their and his fear uncertainty and doubt. So whether by choice or by force people will be or by chance people will be dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Are there any other approaches that you found particularly helpful or mantras any type of self talk anything at all, really that you found helpful for surfing the chaos that is
Of life and maybe more acutely now than ever for a lot of people a part of their daily or weekly experience.
There's a quote actually by chögyam trungpa who you might be familiar with. He's a Tibetan Buddhist master and he has this quote which is the bad news is that you're falling through the air with no parachute so you can feel ready like thing in the middle of this quote. You can feel the intense like groundlessness the intense anxiety that might arise but the second part of his quote is
is so the bad news is that you're falling through the air with no parachute. The good news is there's no ground below and I really love that quote because it just makes you realize you're not in danger, even though it feels completely groundless and you can relax in that kind of like visual picture. You can just relax in the middle of that and what I've found is available to us. If you can just relax with the uncertainty that's arising even anxiety is there's like an openness that's available to us. That's always there.
And it's just really liberating. And so what I've done is actually start to train myself. And now I train other people in it of setting myself these practice periods of like let's say an hour or half an hour of meaningful work that I normally would turn away from some big project. That's really meaningful to me. I'll set that as like my practice period where I'm intentionally inducing uncertainty in myself and I'll actually just set an intention the beginning the reason why I'm doing this the thing that I care about and then I'll let
myself practice with SNL notice that I'm trying to go towards my email and just sit with the uncertainty of it and then just go move towards the actual doing with this kind of openness. So I'll do it as a daily practice but also practice pretty much all the time whenever anxiety or uncertainty comes up and it just becomes like no big deal. So that's another phrase that really helps me as no big deal. It's just an energy of uncertainty. It's not a big deal. So those are the ways that I practice with the
Right. Now I love the the good news bad news. A rather bad
news bad news is you're falling through the air with no parachute goodness it
around. That's spectacular
Leo Leo about to finally on the podcast Twitter at Zen underscore
habits. And of course Zen habits dotnet all things Simplicity such a pleasure to have you in conversation and to be able to explore all these things. I always loved asking
Actions of friends who otherwise would feel like they're being interrogated in weird format, but it works. Is there anything else that you would like to to add or say or share with people before we wrap up anything that you would like people to take a look at or consider anything at all?
Well, I have to say to that. This is just a tremendous honor just really love the work you're doing in the world Tim. So thank you for having me on this. But yeah, the thing that I would leave people with is.
You know sometimes in this crazy world that we're in right now is we have the luxury of finding ourselves in it can be really difficult. Thanks. It can be so hard that's really hard to practice with it. So when you find yourself in that place where you're just wanting to shut down and curl up in a ball and like it's just too hard to practice within this way that I've just talked about just bring back that self-compassion that I just that we talked about earlier. It's just this is an important time to just take care of
Yourself give yourself some compassion. Give yourself a warm bath have some hot tea let yourself eat the nachos. It's okay. Yeah, it's such an important time to take care of ourselves. Yeah, the world will be hard
enough on you without you beating yourself up. That's right. Lady Luck or Fortune does not need your help flatulating you that's right. You have challenges and obstacles enough and good lessons. Good medicine for right now and everybody.
Of course, I will include links to everything we've discussed to Leo's work to resources on unschooling everything else the Zen precepts that we discussed at one point and much more will all be at Tim dot blog forward slash podcast and Leah, thank you. Once again, I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you, Tim and to everybody out there until next time. Thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few.
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