Podcast Blog #8: Guy Raz and Tim Ferriss (How I Built This, from NPR)

Jan 28

From Busboy to Bestseller — How Tim Ferriss overcame depression and rejection to find success as an entrepreneur and writer

Are you an obsessive list maker or note taker? Have you ever wanted something so badly, but continued to face rejection? Been so low that you thought you’d never achieve your dreams but persevered to make it happen?

That’s the story of Tim Ferriss, the New York Times bestselling author best known for “The 4-Hour Workweek”. At multiple stages of his life, Tim faced rejection for the things he wanted most — to get the job he thought would propel him forward in life, and later to publish his book. But in both cases, his relentless drive to achieve success propelled him forward.

Read my podcast blog below for detailed takeaways of Guy Raz’s interview with Tim Ferriss:

Overcoming life’s first obstacles — health issues and bullies (6:20) Tim was born in 1977 and grew up in Eastern Long Island (New York). There, he had a unique perspective on the world. On a daily basis, he saw the contrast between people like his parents and neighbors who worked at farms and shops around town and the wealthy people who vacationed on Long Island. He didn’t realize how strange it was to have that stark contrast in one place. This contrast sparked the beginning of his life as someone who was deeply observant of his surroundings.

Tim had severe allergies and respiratory issues as a kid as a result of being born premature. Until puberty, he was always the slowest, smallest kid in every grade, resulting in lots of bullying. That was, until 6th grade.

What changed? On the last day of 5th grade, sitting in the front of the class, Tim was the last kid in the room before summer break. He had a terrible sunburn, so the bullies thought it would be funny to walk in and slap his sunburnt back. Tim held it together until they walked away, then started crying. His teacher who saw it comforted him by saying “one day you’ll show ‘em”. Tim went to camp that summer and grew 5 inches and gained 40 pounds of muscle. He came back to school and 6th grade was his year of joyful vengeance.

Growing up, Tim’s parents didn’t have a ton of money, but they consistently told Tim and his brother “we always have a budget for books”.

At 15, a year in Japan changes the trajectory of Tim’s life (10:15) At age 15, Tim did a year as an exchange student in Japan. That year changed how he looked at the world. He had never spent extended time outside of the US before and arrived speaking only very basic Japanese. He was the sole American in a school of a thousand Japanese students. With this experience, he saw how many rules we follow in the US are actually just social constructs.

As a result of this experience, Tim went on to major in East Asian Studies at Princeton. But when he got there, he faced a worsening obstacle in his life — depression. The depression had started earlier in high school, but the symptoms worsened in college with extreme fatigue and a feeling of hopelessness.

In college, he decided that if he was going to struggle with this for the rest of his life, there was no point in continuing, and he began planning suicide. Tim put in a request for a book on suicide from the library and back then, when the book was ready to be picked up you got a postcard telling you about it. But, Tim had never changed his address at the library to his dorm address, so the postcard accidentally went to his parents house. Tim’s mom called him to ask about it, but she made clear if he killed himself it would not just affect him, but the people who cared about him. That led him to course correct.

26 rejections before finally landing his dream first job (17:30) One of the most inspiring moments for Tim in college was a class on high-tech entrepreneurship. In that class, he heard from the CEO of TrueSan Networks, a data storage company in San Francisco that Tim decided he wanted to work for. He pitched himself personally to the CEO, but was rejected over and over again by email, until the CEO realized Tim would never stop emailing. So he gave him a job in sales.

But why data storage? On the surface it sounds boring. But Tim’s interest didn’t have anything to do with the industry. He was intrigued that the CEO had gotten where he was but wasn’t much older than Tim. Someone had given Tim the advice to look for a growing industry, and if you can join early you'll learn a tremendous amount. While the company ended up going under as part of the dot com crash, Tim successfully learned as much as he could in his time there. When it was clear the company was going under and Tim’s job would be gone imminently, he began brainstorming his next step.

To find inspiration, Tim looked at his own consuming habits and found he was spending hundreds of dollars per month on sports supplements. He was not price sensitive as it was spent on his training in kickboxing and Jujutsu. Then, he decided to look into starting a company that would “scratch his own itch”. So, before he was fired from TrueSan but knew it was on the ropes, he started using empty conference rooms during lunch hour to make calls to manufacturers, biochemists, and other partners to figure out how to start this supplement business. Tim ultimately made a smart drug to improve reaction speed in both sports and generally attentiveness. His first customers were his coworkers — as he got them to commit to bottles up front so he could afford manufacturing.

Why did the manufacturers and chemists and coworkers agree to work with him at such a young age with no experience in this industry? In his sales role at TrueSan, Tim took copious notes of all of his calls to find out what openers and scripts worked best. This got the partners on the phone and willing to talk to him. Then, he turned to sympathy. He pulled at their heart strings, asking who gave them their first break in business and asking them to give him his first break. If it worked, he’d be a client of theirs for years. And it worked. BrainQUICKEN was born.

Inspiration from infomercials (33:23) As he worked to grow the business, Tim made an important realization about building his customer base. Lots of people in business try to advertise to everybody, thinking if they throw lots of darts at something, it is bound to land. But that wasn’t what Tim wanted to do.

Tim learned much of his advertising strategy from infomercials when he couldn’t fall asleep growing up in the 80s. He frequently ordered products or called their numbers to see what scripts and systems they used. He figured if these companies could afford to advertise all the time for months on end, something must be working to pay for those ads. He created a “swipe” file anytime he was persuaded to buy through some kind of ad, he’d save it as inspiration for his own business.

At BrainQUICKEN, Tim was driven to succeed because he really believed in the product. He says he wouldn’t have had the endurance to work so hard if he didn’t believe in the product. But his hard work alone still wasn’t enough to effectively grow. He hadn’t done much hiring aside from a virtual assistant — he relied mostly on contractors. But Tim was a bottleneck for decisions. 2004 was a breaking point, with Tim’s girlfriend breaking up with him because she never saw him. Tim realized the objective of the business wasn’t to have the most money he could, but to do the things with the money you valued and he wouldn’t have time to do that if he was working all hours of the day. So, he put in place guidelines for others to remove him as a bottleneck and even “fired” some of his most time-consuming retail customers.

Embracing spontaneity in travel (48:10) With his newfound time from unraveling himself from some of the decision making of the business, Tim traveled the world. He ventured from London to Ireland to Argentina. Whenever he discovered an interest or curiosity he followed it. For example, he picked up tango in Argentina and eventually went on to be a competitive and world-record-holding tango dancer. He took the same approach to tango as he had to sales training - watch videos, take notes, apply notes to practice, figure out what worked and what didn’t.

With this strategy of using notes and repetition to learn something totally new and out of his comfort zone, Tim thought he might have had good material for a book. He emailed Jack Canfield, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and asked if it was worth considering a book.

More rejection — but learning from it each time (58:25) Dozens of publishers that Tim pitched on his book said no. But with each time, the pitch got better. He Took notes and wrote post-mortems every time so the next pitch was always better than the last. Eventually, he got one to say yes.

The thesis of the book was that time is the most valuable thing you have. Freedom to choose what to do with your time. Time is a non-renewable resource, but money is renewable, you can always make more of it later. Whether you want to work 4 or 10 or 80 hours per week, there are certain tactics you can use to increase your per-hour output.

While he finally got someone to agree to publish the book, his marketing budget was slim. Blogs were dramatically increasing in importance and impact. So, he took the budget allocated for book launch and went to in-person events to try and put himself in the path of bloggers. He wanted to achieve a surround sound effect of choosing 4-5 outlets that everyone in the target demographic consumed on a regular basis and appear to be everywhere even though that wasn’t really the case.

Books hit the shelves — and fly off of them (66:42) A few months after the book was published, Tim’s editor called. Tim was exhausted, having just done a radio satellite tour all day, and was weary when talking to his editor. But that all changed when the editor told Tim he was a New York Times Bestseller. Eventually, the book spent four years on the bestseller list.

But with a successful book came requests for speaking engagements and events all over the country. This was a journey Tim didn’t necessarily sign up for when he decided to become an author. But he found himself saying yes to everything, even though it was wearing him down at every turn. So eventually, he stopped. He was afraid of being painted into a corner as the “4-Hour Workweek” guy with nothing else to say.

New domains focused on “figuring out the puzzle” (74:35) With the slow down of speaking engagements about the first book. Tim jumped into new domains. He wrote a new book on the 4-Hour Body that was driven to success by the growing trends in biohacking and diet tracking. This new book that was totally distinct from the business category of his first book gave him credibility with publishers to do what he wanted as long as it had to do with efficiency and effectiveness.

Tim is hardwired to enjoy figuring out the puzzle, being the human guinea pig who then puts together the Cliff Notes version for friends and readers. He does things just to see if they are possible. As you accomplish things believed to be impossible, it makes other things in your life seem doable when put into perspective.

Does Tim believe these are skills anyone could acquire? He believes in taking an approach to learning almost anyone could do. But is Tim’s success based on luck, or unique skill? While some try to lessen their ego by claiming luck, Tim believes it's a little bit of both.

89:22 | End