by Alex Banayan
As summer rolled by, the gift cards arrived, but a response from Tim Ferriss did not. I found the email address of Ferriss’ assistant and sent her a note. But there was no reply. So I sent a follow-up. Still nothing.
I didn’t want to bother César by asking for more help, and soon enough, I wouldn’t have to. Late one night, while clearing my inbox, a newsletter caught my eye:
Evernote Conference: Register Now | The Evernote Trunk Conference will feature bestselling authors Tim Ferriss and Guy Kawasaki, and sessions for developers and users.
The event was being held in San Francisco. If I can meet Tim Ferriss and tell him about the mission in person, I’m sure he’ll say yes to an interview.
I used my Price Is Right money to book my plane ticket. I was so excited I even went to Niketown and bought a jet-black duffel bag for my travels. I packed it up the morning of the conference, and as I was running out the door, I grabbed a DonorsChoose gift card from the top of the stack, slipped it in my pocket, and took off.
* * *
The conference hall in San Francisco was packed. As far as I could see, there were hundreds of young people in hoodies searching for seats. I looked closer and saw that many of them had The 4-Hour Workweek clutched under their arms. My insides twisted as reality set in: I wasn’t the only one here trying to approach Tim Ferriss.
Perhaps 99 percent of the world hasn’t heard his name. But to a certain niche, and probably everyone at this event, Tim Ferriss is bigger than Oprah Winfrey.
Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I paced the aisles, searching for a chair with the closest path to approach Ferriss after his speech. There was an open seat beside the stairs that led to the stage, on the far right. After I sat, the lights dimmed, the event began—and Tim Ferriss stepped on stage from the far left.
My eyes frantically scanned the room again. I moved to the back of the conference hall to get a better vantage point, and then I spotted it: a bathroom beside the left side of the stage.
I crept toward the men’s room and slipped into a stall. Crouching next to the toilet, I pressed my ear against the tile wall, listening to Ferriss’ speech so I could time my exit. I continued crouching, the smell of urine stinging my nostrils. Five minutes went by…ten…finally, thirty minutes later, I heard applause.
I raced out the bathroom door, and there he was, two feet in front of me, all alone. Once again, at the worst possible time, The Flinch wired my mouth shut. Desperate to break its hold, I reached into my pocket and shoved the gift card right at Ferriss’ face.
“Oh,” he said, stepping back. He glanced at the card. “Awesome! How do you know DonorsChoose? I’m on their advisory board.”
Ah, you don’t say.
The Flinch released its grip and I told Ferriss about the mission. I said I hoped to interview everyone from Bill Gates and Lady Gaga to Larry King and Tim Ferriss.
“Very funny,” he said at the mention of his name.
“I’m serious.” I reached into my other pocket and pulled out printouts of the emails I’d sent him. “I’ve been emailing your assistant about it for weeks.”
Ferriss looked at the emails and laughed, and we ended up talking about the mission for the next few minutes. At the end, he squeezed my shoulder and told me it sounded great. He couldn’t have been nicer. He said he’d get back to me in a few days.
But after I got home, days turned into weeks, and there was no word from Tim Ferriss.
What I wasn’t aware of was that Ferriss had replied to my original interview request a month earlier, telling the DonorsChoose CEO, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I guess the CEO didn’t have the heart to break the news to me, so I wouldn’t learn this until years later.
I continued emailing Ferriss’ assistant, hoping to get an answer. Business books claimed persistence is the key to success, so I kept writing email after email, sending a total of thirty-one messages. When brief emails didn’t get a response, I sent a nine-paragraph message. I wrote another telling Ferriss’ assistant that doing an interview with me “would be one of the best investments of an hour Tim’s ever made.” I tried to remain upbeat and grateful, ending every email with “Thanks in advance!” But no matter how thoughtfully I tried to word my messages, they fell flat. Eventually I received an email from Ferriss’ right-hand man saying his boss wouldn’t be doing the interview anytime soon, if at all.
I couldn’t understand where I’d gone wrong. Ferriss had squeezed my shoulder. I had my Inside Man.
If I can’t get to Tim Ferriss, how the hell am I going to get to Bill Gates?
I continued emailing Ferriss’ assistant, hoping something would change. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Ferriss said yes. And not only did he say yes, but he wanted to do the interview by phone the next day. I practically leapt into the air, yelling, “Persistence! It works!”
Much later, when it was far too late, I found out the real reason Ferriss said yes. He had called the CEO of DonorsChoose, asking what the hell was wrong with me. Thankfully, the executive’s response was that, while I was rough around the edges, my heart was in the right place. And that led Ferriss to say okay. But I didn’t know that, so I became completely convinced that, no matter my problem, persistence would be my answer.
* * *
Less than twenty-four hours later, I was on the phone with Tim Ferriss. My notepad was full of questions, and not surprisingly, the first one was about persistence. I’d read a brief mention in The 4-Hour Workweek that Ferriss got his first job out of college by emailing the CEO of a start-up over and over until he got a position. I wanted to know the full story.
“It wasn’t just one-two-three and then you’re hired,” Ferriss told me.
Toward the end of his senior year in college, Ferriss did his final project on that start-up in an attempt to build a relationship with its CEO, who’d been a guest speaker in one of his classes. But when he mustered the courage to ask for a job, he was turned down. Ferriss sent the CEO more emails. After the CEO said no a dozen times, Ferriss decided it was time for a Hail Mary. He emailed the CEO saying that he’d “be in the neighborhood” next week—even though he was in New York and the CEO lived in San Francisco—and said it’d be great to stop by. “All right,” the CEO wrote back. “I can meet you on Tuesday.”
Ferriss got a standby ticket, flew to California, and arrived at the start-up’s office early for his meeting. One of the other executives asked him, “So you’re not going to stop bothering us until we give you a job, huh?”
“Sure,” Ferriss told him, “if you want to put it that way.”
He got the job—and, naturally, in sales.
“It’s important to note,” Ferriss told me, “that I was never rude. I also didn’t push the density. It’s not like I emailed him six times a week.”
Ferriss’ tone shifted, as if he was hinting at something, though embarrassingly, I couldn’t figure it out. But I could sense something was off because his tone was making my head snap back as if I was getting punched.
“Where do you think that fine line is?” I asked.
“If you sense someone getting annoyed, you need to back off.” Jab. “You need to be polite and deferential and recognize that, if you’re emailing someone like that, you should have your hat in hand.” Jab. “There’s a fine line between being persistent and being a hassle.” Uppercut.
If I had more experience interviewing, I would’ve dug deeper to uncover what Ferriss was trying to tell me. Instead I just fled to safer ground, looking down at my notepad in search of a different topic.
“How did you gain credibility before you were a well-known author?”
“Well, volunteering for the right organizations is an easy way to get some credible association,” Ferriss said.
His tone lightened and I relaxed. Ferriss explained that when he was an entry-level employee, he volunteered at the Silicon Va
lley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs where he produced large events, giving him a credible reason to email successful people. Rather than saying, “Hi, I’m Tim Ferriss, recent college graduate,” he could say, “I’m Tim Ferriss, an event producer with the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs.” That legitimacy made a big difference.
“A second step would be writing for or being featured in known publications,” he continued. “And that could be as easy as doing a Q and A with someone—interviewing them and publishing the answers online.”
In other words, Ferriss didn’t build credibility out of thin air, but borrowed it by associating himself with well-known organizations and publications. The phrase “Borrowed Credibility” stuck in my mind.
When Ferriss began writing The 4-Hour Workweek, he said, he had no prior experience in publishing, so he cold-emailed authors asking for advice. He said it worked well, so I asked for cold-email tactics.
“The general composition of my emails,” Ferriss said, “when I’m emailing a busy person, is:
Dear So-and-So,
I know you’re really busy and that you get a lot of emails, so this will only take sixty seconds to read.
[Here is where you say who you are: add one or two lines that establish your credibility.]
[Here is where you ask your very specific question.]
I totally understand if you’re too busy to respond, but even a one- or two-line reply would really make my day.
All the best,
Tim
Ferriss was giving me exactly the kind of advice I craved. He told me to never email someone and ask to “jump on the phone,” “get coffee,” or “pick your brain.”
“Put your question right in the email,” he said. “It might be as simple as, ‘I’d like to discuss a relationship of some type that could take this-and-this form. Would you be willing to discuss it? I think a phone call might be faster, but if you prefer, I could throw a couple of questions your way via email.’
“And never write lines like, ‘This is perfect for you,’ or ‘You’ll love this because I know this-and-this about you.’ Don’t use superlative or exaggerated words because”—he let out an almost mocking laugh—“they don’t know you and they’ll assume, quite fairly, it’s hard for you to determine if something’s perfect for them.
“I’d also not end with something like, ‘Thanks in advance!’ It’s annoying and entitled. Do the opposite and say, ‘I know you’re super busy, so if you can’t respond, I totally understand.’
“And certainly, watch your frequency of emailing. Don’t email a lot. It really”—he let out a heavy breath—“does not make people happy.”
I wasn’t self-aware enough to see that Ferriss was trying to save me from myself. Over a year later, when I was rummaging through old emails, I came across the messages I’d sent Ferriss’ assistant. Only then did I realize how much of an idiot I’d been.
“All right, man,” Ferriss said as our conversation wrapped up. “I’ve got to go.” He said goodbye and hung up.
A part of me wishes I could go back in time and shake my teenage self and explain what just happened. If I’d learned my lesson then, things would have gone a lot differently when I found myself in Omaha with Warren Buffett.
CHAPTER SIX
Qi Time
Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Those words couldn’t have applied more to the business conference where I met César. One evening, I was feeling out of place as a student volunteer in a room full of executives when one of the speakers, Stefan Weitz, said hello to make me feel comfortable. He was a director at Microsoft and we talked for a while that night. I emailed him at the start of the summer about the mission, and when we had lunch, he insisted I add one more person to my list.
“Qi Lu.”
The name was pronounced Chee Loo and I’d never heard of him. While I was grateful for Stefan’s help, I figured I hadn’t explained the mission well enough to him.
“The people I’m trying to talk to are, well, people my friends want to learn from, people everybody knows—”
“Trust me…” Stefan said, lifting his hand. “Qi Lu is someone you want to know.”
He set up the interview, and that’s how I found myself in Seattle, during the last week of summer, walking across the top floor of a Microsoft high-rise. It was a Saturday and the hallways were empty. Every desk was deserted. The lights were off in every office except one. At the end of the hall, a shadow behind the glass stood up and moved toward the door. Qi Lu opened it and bowed me in.
He was thin and in his mid-forties. Qi wore a T-shirt tucked into faded jeans, white socks with sandals. He shook my hand with both of his and told me to make myself comfortable. Instead of going back behind his desk, he pulled out a chair and sat beside me. The office was sparsely furnished. There was no art on the walls, no framed accolades. Amazing.
Qi Lu grew up in a rural village outside of Shanghai, China, with no running water or electricity. The village was so poor that people suffered deformities from malnutrition. There were hundreds of kids, but only one schoolteacher. At age twenty-seven, Qi Lu was making the most money he’d ever earned—seven dollars a month. Fast-forward twenty years: he’s president of online services at Microsoft.
* * *
I almost shook my head in disbelief. Barely able to think of a coherent question, I just threw my hands up and asked, “How did you do it?”
Qi smiled humbly and said that when he was a kid he wanted to be a shipbuilder. He was too scrawny to pass the weight requirement, which forced him to focus on his studies. He got into Fudan University, a top college in Shanghai, where he majored in computer science—and it was there he had a realization that changed his life.
He began thinking about time. Particularly, the amount of time he felt he wasted in bed. He was sleeping eight hours a night, but then he realized that one thing in life doesn’t change: whether you’re a rice farmer or the president of the United States, you only get twenty-four hours in a day.
“In some ways,” Qi said, “you can say God is fair to everybody. The question is: Will you use God’s gift the best you possibly can?”
He read about notable people in history who’d reengineered their sleep patterns and set out to create his own system. First he cut out one hour of sleep, then another, and another. At one point, he was down to a single hour a night. He forced himself awake with ice-cold showers, but he wasn’t able to sustain it. Eventually he found that the least sleep he could optimally function on was four hours a night. To this day, he hasn’t slept in since.
The consistency is part of his secret.
“It’s like driving a car,” Qi told me. “If you always drive at sixty-five miles per hour, it doesn’t wear and tear the car that much. But if you speed up and slam the brakes often, that wears the engine down.”
Qi wakes up every morning at four o’clock, goes on a five-mile run, and is in the office by six. He eats small meals throughout the day of mostly fruits and vegetables, which he packs in containers. He works eighteen hours a day, six days a week. And Stefan Weitz had told me that the word around Microsoft was that Qi works twice as fast as everyone else. They call it “Qi Time.”
Qi Time seemed like a fanatical, even unhealthy lifestyle. But when I thought about it through the lens of Qi’s circumstances, I saw it less as a quirky experiment and more as a means of survival. Think about it. With so many brilliant college students in China, how else could Qi have found an edge to break through? If you cut 8 hours of sleep down to 4, then multiply the saved time by 365 days, that equals 1,460 extra hours—or 2 additional months of productivity per year.
During his twenties, Qi spent the extra time he created writi
ng research papers and reading more books, striving toward his biggest dream of studying in the United States.
“In China,” he said, “if you wanted to go to the United States, you had to take two tests. The fees to take them were sixty dollars. My salary each month, I think, was equivalent to seven dollars.”
That was eight months’ salary just to take the entrance exams.
Qi didn’t lose hope, though, and all his hard work paid off on a Sunday night. He usually spent Sundays riding his bike to his village to visit his family, but it was pouring rain and the trip took hours, so Qi stayed in his dorm room. That evening, a friend came by to ask for help. A visiting professor from Carnegie Mellon University was about to give a lecture on model checking, but because of the rain, attendance was embarrassingly low. Qi agreed to help fill the seats, and during the lecture, he asked some questions. Afterward, the professor complimented Qi on the points he’d raised and wondered if he’d done any research on the topic.
Qi hadn’t just done some research—he’d published five papers. That’s the power of Qi Time. It enabled him to be the most prepared person in the room.
The professor asked to see the papers. Qi sprinted to his dorm room to fetch them. After the professor looked them over, he asked Qi if he’d be interested in studying in the United States.
Qi explained his financial constraints and the professor said he would waive the sixty-dollar qualification tests. Qi applied, and months later, a letter arrived. Carnegie Mellon offered him a full scholarship.
Every time I’d read about Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or other examples of meteoric success, I wondered how much their achievements were a result of seemingly miraculous coincidences. If it hadn’t rained that Sunday night, Qi would have been home with his family, wouldn’t have met the professor, and none of this would have happened. At the same time, there was nothing coincidental about Qi having published those five research papers. I asked Qi about luck, and he said he believes it isn’t completely random.