“[If you] go on the Internet, there are 20 recipes for pound cake. I go with the one that even describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know they have gone through it. The person who writes a recipe that says, ‘Grease the cake pan’ [without specifying the size]? You know they haven’t made it. It’s a tip-off right away that something is wrong.”
✸ *What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve made?
“The best thing I ever did, besides getting sober 25 years ago, was shelving my restaurant career in 2002, selling my shares in my restaurant, and working for free for a local radio station, magazine, and TV station in an effort to create my own media syllabus. I wanted to create a product with a massive platform, and try to make a difference in the world, and I couldn’t do it without becoming a 40-year-old intern, learning everything I needed, and rebooting my career.”
“Cynicism is a disease that robs people of the gift of life.”
Spirit animal: Sloth
* * *
Rainn Wilson
Rainn Wilson (FB/IG/TW: @rainnwilson, soulpancake.com) is best known for playing Dwight Schrute on NBC’s Emmy-winning TV show The Office. He has also acted in Super, Cooties, Juno, Monsters vs. Aliens, and The Rocker, among other movies. He co-founded SoulPancake, a media company that seeks to tackle life’s big questions. He’s a board member of the Mona Foundation and co-founded Lidè Haiti, an educational initiative in rural Haiti that empowers young, at-risk women through the arts. He is the author of The Bassoon King.
Behind the Scenes
For those of you who’d love to kick me in the face, Rainn saved you the trouble. Just search “Rainn Wilson kicking Tim Ferriss in the face.” Long story.
✸ What advice would you give your 30-year-old self?
“At 30, I was a starving New York theater actor, just going around trying to get acting work, and barely making $17 grand a year doing theater. I did a bunch of side jobs. I was a ‘man with a van’—I had a moving company. I think what I would talk to myself about is, ‘You have to believe in your capacity.’ You have to believe that your capacity is greater than you could probably imagine. To me, this is a kind of divine question. God has given us talents and faculties, and it’s up to us to discover them, expand them to their maximum, and use them for maximum service in the world. I had a lot more capacity at 30 than I thought. I thought of myself as, ‘Well, I could get some acting work and maybe I could do an occasional guest spot on Law and Order and make enough money to just get by as an actor, so I don’t have to drive this damn moving van.’ That was the extent of where my imagination was for myself. So I would just say, ‘Believe in yourself more deeply. You’re bigger than that. Dream bigger,’ I would say.”
Getting to “Normal”
This was extremely refreshing to hear from Rainn, as I often feel the same:
“I’m in my head a lot, and it kind of sucks. . . . So there are certain tools that I have to use to get by. I’ve learned in my life that there are certain things I have to do to just be out of my head and get to normal. I’m not talking about being really supereffective. Just to get to normal, I have to do meditation, I have to do some exercise. If I can get into nature, great. If I can play some tennis, better, and acting is that same way. Acting, rehearsing, playing characters, these are the things that get me out of my head and out of analyzing every goddamn thing that comes down the pike and leaves me miserable and making really bad choices.”
On Being the Best Version of Yourself
As Oscar Wilde is thought to have said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken”:
“I was cast in a Broadway show when I was about 29 or 30 years old. It was my first Broadway show, and I sucked. I bombed. Again, I was very in my head. I was very stuck, cerebral, and stiff. I couldn’t get out of it, and I tried and I tried, but I was just terrible at the part.
“But after I finished that show, I thought: ‘You know what, fuck it. I’m never doing that again. . . . I can’t. Life is too short. I’m too miserable, and I’ve got to be me as an actor. I have to bring who I really am as a human to my acting. So I’m offbeat and I’m odd. I’m a weirdo. I buy shirts at the thrift store, and this is who I am, and this is who I have to be.’ It really changed me as an actor and as an artist. . . . I never would have had the success that I had in L.A. and on TV and film in doing odd characters if I hadn’t gone through that terrible, terrible ordeal.”
✸ Any final thoughts?
“I don’t want to sound like a pretentious asshole, but I would ask people to dig deeper. We can make the world a better place. We can ask more of ourselves. We can do more for others. I think that our life is a journey. . . . Dig deep on your journey and the world will benefit from it.”
“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”
Spirit animal: Owl
* * *
Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant (TW: @naval, startupboy.com) is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He previously co-founded Vast.com and Epinions, which went public as part of Shopping.com. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many “unicorn” mega-successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS. He is probably the person I call most for startup-related advice.
Back Story
Naval was raised poor in an immigrant family: “We came to this country [from India] when I was 9 and my brother was 11. We had very little. My mother raised us as a single mom in a studio apartment. She worked a menial job by day and then she went to school at night, so we were latchkey kids. . . . A lot of growing up was watching the ideal American lifestyle, but from the other side of the windowpane, with my nose pressed against the glass, saying, ‘I want that, too. I want that for myself and my kids.’ I grew up with a very dark view of the world on the other side of the tracks. . . .”
Naval’s name roughly means “new man” in Sanskrit. His son is named Neo, which means “new” in Greek, is an anagram for “one” (Naval pointed this out to me), and, of course, is well featured in The Matrix.
Many years ago, Naval and I first met because he saw me hitting on his then-girlfriend (unbeknownst to me) at a coffee shop in San Francisco. He sauntered up with a huge grin and introduced himself.
His brother Kamal is the person who convinced me to “retire” from early tech investing (page 384).
Successful and Happy—Different Cohorts?
“If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.”
Handling Conflict
“The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict. . . . All of the value in life, including in relationships, comes from compound interest. People who regularly fight with others will eventually fight with you. I’m not interested in anything that’s unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.”
The Three Options You Always Have in Life
“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.”
The Five Chimps Theory
“There’s a theory that I call ‘the five chimps theory.’ In zoology, you can predict the mood and behavior patterns of any chimp by which five chimps they hang out with the most. Choose your
five chimps carefully.”
Lessons From Physics and the Russian Mob
“I learned [the importance of honesty] from a couple of different places. One is, when I grew up, I wanted to be a physicist and I idolized Richard Feynman. I read everything by him, technical and non-technical, that I could get my hands on. He said: ‘You must never, ever fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.’
“So the physics grounding is very important because in physics, you have to speak truth. You don’t compromise, you don’t negotiate with people, you don’t try and make them feel better. If your equation is wrong, it just won’t work. Truth is not determined by consensus or popularity—usually, it’s quite the opposite. So I think the science background is important. A second is, I grew up around some really rough-and-tumble kids in New York, some of whom were actually in the Russian mob. I once had an encounter where I watched one of them threaten to kill the other.
“The would-be victim went and hid, and then finally, he let the aggressor into his house after the aggressor promised him: ‘No, I’m not going to kill you.’ Honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other, they would take each other’s word for things. It went above everything. Even though it was honesty in a mob context, I realized how important that is in relationships.”
Honesty as Core Foundational Value
Here’s a brief story for comedic relief, and keep in mind that we both happily live in San Francisco.
TIM: “You never hesitate to say what’s on your mind. I can see how that might be misinterpreted by people who are used to polite, ‘uh-huh,’ nod-nod conversation. I remember once, you and I were both invited to a dinner, and there were a lot of people neither of us had met. You were standing in a group chatting over wine, and I showed up with this pretty unusual getup. I had on this turquoise long-sleeved shirt, which I never wore. I don’t know if you remember this.”
NAVAL: “I do not.”
TIM: “I had jeans on, and these brown, odd-looking dress shoes that kind of looked like bowling shoes. You looked at me, smiled, and asked, ‘Why are you dressed like a gay banker?’ Then, this woman that neither of us had ever met started defending me, and I was like, ‘Oh God, here we go. . . .’”
NAVAL: “The honesty thing is a core foundational value.”
TIM: “In fairness, I totally did.”
Embarrassed into Starting His First Company
“I was working at this tech company called @Home Network, and I told everybody around me—my boss, my coworkers, my friends—‘In Silicon Valley, all of these other people are starting companies. It looks like they can do it. I’m going to go start a company. I’m just here temporarily. I’m an entrepreneur.’ I told everybody, and I wasn’t meaning to actually trick myself into it. It wasn’t a deliberate, calculated thing.
“I was just venting, talking out loud, being overly honest. But I actually didn’t [start a company]. This was 1996. It was a much scarier, more difficult proposition to start a company then. Sure enough, everyone started coming up to me and saying, ‘What are you still doing here? I thought you were leaving to start a company?’ ‘Wow, you’re still here. That was a while ago that you said that.’ I was literally embarrassed into starting my own company.”
Now, Use That Technique on Purpose
“Tell your friends that you’re a happy person. Then you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.”
90% Fear, 10% Desire
“I find that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear-based. The other 10% are probably desire-based. There’s a great definition I read that says, ‘Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts,’ which means that enlightenment isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day.”
✸ Naval’s best $100 or less purchase?
“The teppanyaki grill. It’s a little tabletop grill [search “Presto 22-inch electric griddle”]. What I learned is that for food, the freshness and quality of the food going straight from the grill to your mouth is way more important than what you do with it. For example, in most recipes, we sauce the heck out of everything, we cream it, we overprepare it, and we overprocess it because it’s sitting under a heat lamp for 10 minutes.”
✸ What would you put on a billboard?
“I don’t know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I figured this out is: “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long, and then wondering why we’re unhappy. So, I like to stay aware of that because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that’s where I’ve chosen to be unhappy. I think that is an important one.”
TF: Naval first encountered a variation of the above bolded text on a now-extinct blog called Delusion Damage.
Naval’s Laws
The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them.
“These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.”
Be present above all else.
Desire is suffering (Buddha).
Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying).
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
99% of all effort is wasted.
Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett).
Truth is that which has predictive power.
Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”)
All greatness comes from suffering.
Love is given, not received.
Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle).
Mathematics is the language of nature.
Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.
A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out
“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.”
“Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”
“If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.”
“We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.”
“The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.”
“You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.”
“My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.”
“A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.”
Monkeys on a Spinning Rock
On why Naval no longer has a quest for immortality:
“If you study even the smallest bit of science, you will realize that, for all practical purposes, we are nothing. We’re basically monkeys o
n a small rock orbiting a small, backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse.
“This universe has been around for probably 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billion years afterwards. So your existence, my existence, is just infinitesimal. It is like a firefly blinking once in the night. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually you will fade, your works will fade, your children will fade, your thoughts will fade, this planet will fade, the sun will fade . . . it will all be gone.
“There are entire civilizations that we remember now with just one or two words like ‘Sumerian’ or ‘Mayan.’ Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No.
“If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then you [should realize] that this is such a short and precious life, it is really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or however long the universe is going to be around.”
* * *
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck (FB/TW: @glennbeck, glennbeck.com) hit rock bottom as an alcoholic in his 30s and restarted his life. Fast forward to 2014, Forbes named him to their annual Celebrity 100 Power List and pegged his earnings at $90 million for that year. This placed him ahead of people like Mark Burnett, Jimmy Fallon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Will Smith. Glenn’s platforms—including radio, television, digital (TheBlaze.com), publishing, etc.—receive somewhere between 30 and 50 million unique visitors per month.
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