Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  ✸ What is “vipassana” meditation?

  “It’s simply a method of paying exquisitely close and nonjudgmental attention to whatever you’re experiencing anyway.”

  TF: Many of the guests in this book listen to Sam’s guided meditations on SoundCloud or his site. Just search “Sam Harris guided meditations.” Per Sam: “People find it very helpful to have somebody’s voice reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds.”

  The Value of Intensive Meditation Retreats

  “In my case, [meditation] didn’t really become useful, which is to say it really didn’t become true meditation, until I had sat my first one or two intensive retreats. I remember the experience clearly. I’d been very disciplined and had been sitting an hour every day in the morning for a year before I sat my first 10-day retreat. I remember looking back over that year at some point, somewhere around the middle of my first 10-day vipassana retreat, and realizing that I had just been thinking with my legs crossed every hour that I had practiced that year. This is not to say that this will be true of all of you who are practicing meditation without ever having gone on a retreat, but it’s very likely true of many of you. . . . A silent retreat is a crucible where you can develop enough energy and attention to break through to another level. . . .”

  On the Power and Liability of Psychedelics

  In his fantastic and lengthy essay “Drugs and the Meaning of Life,” Sam wrote:

  “If she [my daughter] does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience . . . a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable.”

  I asked him about these lines in our conversation, and he added:

  “The caveat is that I have an increasingly healthy respect for what can go wrong on psychedelics, and wrong in a way that I think has lasting consequences. . . . I think they’re still indispensable for a lot of people. They certainly seem to have been indispensable for me. I don’t think I ever would have discovered meditation without having taken, in particular, MDMA, but mushrooms and LSD also played a role for me in unveiling an inner landscape that was worth exploring. . . .

  “The sense of being a self riding around in your head—this feeling that everyone calls ‘I’—is an illusion that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways. . . . It’s vulnerable to inquiry, and that inquiry can take many forms. The unique power and liability [of psychedelics] is that they are guaranteed to work in some way. . . .

  “[Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s] point was, well, if you teach someone to meditate or to do yoga, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that something is going to happen. They could spend a week doing it. They could spend a year doing it. Who knows what’s going to happen? They may just get bored and wander away, not knowing that there was a there there. If I give you 5 grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and tell you to sit on that couch for an hour, you are guaranteed to have a radical transformation of your experience. It doesn’t matter who you are. A freight train of significance is going to come bearing down on you, and we just have to watch the clock, to know when it’s going to happen. . . .

  “If you have a good experience, you’re going to realize that human life can be unutterably sublime—that it’s possible to feel at home in the universe in a way that you couldn’t have previously imagined. But if you have a bad experience—and the bad experiences are every bit as bad as the good experiences are good—you will have this harrowing encounter with madness. It’s as pathological as it is in any lunatic who’s wandering the streets, raving to himself and completely cut off from others. You can have that experience, and hopefully it goes away, and in virtually every case, it does go away. But it’s still rough, and it still has consequences. Some of those consequences are good. I happen to think that it gives you a basis for compassion, in particular for people who are suffering mental illness, that you couldn’t otherwise have.”

  Using the Sky for Meditation

  Look at the sky while meditating. “Often my meditation is in the afternoon. I often try to do it outside. If you know anything about Dzogchen, you know that Dzogchen yogis often use the sky as kind of a support for practice. You meditate with your eyes open looking at a clear sky or any place where you can see the horizon. I like to practice that way. I don’t always get a chance to do it, but I find that it clears the head in a very useful way.”

  more in Audio

  Listen to episode #87 of The Tim Ferriss Show (fourhourworkweek.com/87) for Sam’s thoughts on the following:

  What books would you recommend everyone read? (6:55)

  A thought experiment worth experiencing: The Trolley Problem (55:25)

  * * *

  Caroline Paul

  Caroline Paul (TW: @carowriter, carolinepaul.com) is the author of four published books. Her latest is the New York Times bestseller The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. Once a young scaredy-cat, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted. She has since competed on the U.S. National Luge Team in Olympic trials and fought fires as one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco, where she was part of the Rescue 2 group. Rescue 2 members not only fight fires; they are also called upon for scuba dive searches (i.e., for bodies), rope and rappelling rescues, hazardous material calls, and the most severe car and train accidents.

  Behind the Scenes

  Caroline has an identical twin who was a TV superstar on Baywatch.

  Caroline incorporated a lot of Charles Poliquin’s (page 74) techniques into her weight lifting training, after she met him through Canadian Olympic luger Andre Benoit.

  “Secrets Are a Buffer to Intimacy”

  “My dad was superconservative. He voted for Nixon. He still believed that Nixon was a great president up until his death. He definitely was a true-blue Republican. I didn’t tell him [I was gay] for a long time, until my sister said, ‘Why are you keeping secrets? Secrets are a buffer to intimacy.’ I said, ‘No, he doesn’t need to know,’ and she said, ‘It’s a part of your life he’s not hearing about, and you’re keeping from him. Even though he might not realize it, that is keeping a distance. You need to tell him.’

  “She was so right. I told him and was petrified. He was really sweet about it. He was shocked and then sort of struggled and said, ‘Well, I know some gay people.’ He started listing the gay people he knew. It was really cute.”

  Cooking at the Firehouse

  The firefighters of Rescue 2 had to take turns cooking food for the rest of the crew:

  “There were three tricks. [First] I remember once, I had a guy come up to me and say, ‘You just don’t put any love into this meal.’ I was so shocked that this big burly firefighter wanted love in his meal, and he was right, actually. I was so sullen about cooking that I didn’t. He was a little indignant about that. Now, I try to put love in my meals when I cook.

  “The second was to make it colorful. . . . It’s very hard for me to do. Everything was kind of gray. And the third was to have three set meals that you make.”

  Pride Can Be a Tool

  “For me, pride worked because my fear of failure was way greater than my fear of fire. I didn’t often feel fear of fire, to be totally frank. I’m not trying to pretend I’m so brave. It’s just that I had a bigger fear—humiliation, failure, letting down women. Pride can be a really great motivator.”

  ✸ A book to give every graduating college student?

  “I would say The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It’s a beautiful book by a writer who fought in Vietnam. That book actually got me back to reading. When you go to college, reading gets kicked out of you a little bit.”

  Putting Fear in Line

  In the 1990s, Caroline illegally climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, rising to ~760 feet on thin cables. She’d mentioned “putting fear in line” to me, and I asked her to dig into the spe
cifics.

  “I am not against fear. I think fear is definitely important. It’s there to keep us safe. But I do feel like some people give it too much priority. It’s one of the many things that we use to assess a situation. I am pro-bravery. That’s my paradigm.

  “Fear is just one of many things that are going on. For instance, when we climbed the bridge, which was five of us deciding we wanted to walk up that cable in the middle of the night. Please don’t do that, but we did. Talk about fear—you’re walking on a cable where you have to put one foot in front of the other until you’re basically as high as a 70-story building with nothing below you and . . . two thin wires on either side.

  “It’s just a walk, technically. Really, nothing’s going to happen unless some earthquake or catastrophic gust of wind hits. You’re going to be fine as long as you keep your mental state intact. In those situations, I look at all the emotions I’m feeling, which are anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun, and fear. Then I take fear and say, ‘Well, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this.’ I put it where it belongs. It’s like brick laying or making a stone wall. You fit the pieces together.”

  TIM: “Have you visualized the bricks? To someone who doesn’t have this practice, give a suggestion for an exercise—‘The next time you’re feeling fear, do this.’ What would you advise them to do?”

  CAROLINE: “I actually want someone to partition each emotion as if it’s a little separate block and then put it in a line. Once you assess your own skill and the situation, often things change. As long as you stop and really look, I think people’s lives will change kind of radically, especially for women. Women are very, very quick to say they’re scared. That’s something I really want to change.”

  Encouraging Girls

  On common parenting differences when raising sons and daughters:

  “With boys, there is an active encouragement—despite the possibility that they could get hurt—and guiding the son to do it, often on his own. When a daughter decides to do something that might have some risk involved, after cautioning her, the parents are much more likely to assist her in doing it. What is this telling girls? They’re fragile and they need our help. That is acculturated so early. So of course, by the time we’re women and in the workplace or relationships, that’s going to be a predominant paradigm for us: fear.”

  TIM: “For women who are listening and say to themselves, ‘My God. She’s totally right. I was raised in a bubble of sorts. I don’t want to have this default anymore. I want to condition myself to be able to contend with fear and put it in line.’ What would you say to them?”

  CAROLINE: “I would say it’s time to adopt a paradigm of bravery instead of a paradigm of fear. So, when you have a boy and a girl, or a man and a woman, facing the exact same situation, there will be two emotional reactions to it that are sort of opposite. The man will be trying to access his bravery, and the woman will be accessing her fear.”

  TIM: “This really underscores something important. Courage takes practice. It’s a skill you have to develop. I feel like a coward sometimes. We’re sitting here in my house and doing this interview, and on my coffee table is a quote on a piece of driftwood [from Anaïs Nin]. It says, ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’ I literally have this on my coffee table so I see it every single day.”

  Fragility Is Overrated

  “I hope no one gets injured, but injury is not as bad as people think. To not do something because you might get injured is a terrible reason not to do something. We can get injured in anything. Just getting into your car is very dangerous. I think we should just put that in its place. Girls are often told, ‘Oh, you could get hurt,’ and the specter of getting hurt takes on these huge proportions. For boys, that’s not emphasized. And yet, girls and boys are physically the same before puberty. They break the same, and they’re as able as each other, if not girls being more able at that time. The fact that girls are told and treated as if they’re more fragile doesn’t make sense at all. It primes them to be very over-cautious. . . .”

  TF: Two of my favorite lines from Caroline’s writing are from her New York Times Op-Ed piece titled “Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?”: “. . . By cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are woefully under-preparing them for life.”

  My Favorite Thought Exercise: Fear-Setting

  This chapter details my process of “fear-setting,” which I use constantly and schedule at least once per quarter. This is adapted from a chapter in The 4-Hour Workweek.

  Fear-Setting and Escaping Paralysis

  * * *

  “Many a false step was made by standing still.”

  —Fortune cookie

  “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”

  —Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  Twenty feet and closing.

  “Run! Ruuuuuuuuuun!” Hans didn’t speak Portuguese, but the meaning was clear enough—haul ass. His sneakers gripped firmly on the jagged rock, and he drove his chest forward toward 3,000 feet of nothing.

  He held his breath on the final step, and the panic drove him to near-unconsciousness. His vision blurred at the edges, closing to a single pinpoint of light, and then . . . he floated. The all-consuming celestial blue of the horizon hit his visual field an instant after he realized that the thermal updraft had caught him and the wings of the paraglider. Fear was behind him on the mountaintop, and thousands of feet above the resplendent green rainforest and pristine white beaches of Copacabana, Hans Keeling had seen the light.

  That was Sunday.

  On Monday, Hans returned to his law office in Century City, Los Angeles’s posh corporate haven, and promptly handed in his 3-week notice. For nearly 5 years, he had faced his alarm clock with the same dread: I have to do this for another 40 to 45 years? He had once slept under his desk at the office after a punishing half-done project, only to wake up and continue on it the next morning. That same morning, he had made himself a promise: Two more times and I’m out of here. Strike number three came the day before he left for his Brazilian vacation.

  We all make these promises to ourselves, and Hans had done it before as well, but things were now somehow different. He was different. He had realized something while arcing in slow circles toward the earth—risks weren’t that scary once you took them. His colleagues told him what he expected to hear: He was throwing it all away. He was an attorney on his way to the top—what the hell did he want?

  Hans didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he had tasted it. On the other hand, he did know what bored him to tears, and he was done with it. No more passing days as the living dead, no more dinners where his colleagues compared cars, riding on the sugar high of a new BMW purchase until someone bought a more expensive Mercedes. It was over.

  Immediately, a strange shift began—Hans felt, for the first time in a long time, at peace with himself and what he was doing. He had always been terrified of plane turbulence, as if he might die with the best inside of him, but now he could fly through a violent storm sleeping like a baby. Strange indeed.

  More than a year later, he was still getting unsolicited job offers from law firms, but by then had started Nexus Surf, a premier surf adventure company based in the tropical paradise of Florianopolis, Brazil. He had met his dream girl, a Carioca with caramel-colored skin named Tatiana, and spent most of his time relaxing under palm trees or treating clients to the best times of their lives.

  Is this what he had been so afraid of?

  These days, he often sees his former self in the underjoyed and overworked professionals he takes out on the waves. Waiting for the swell, the true emotions come out: “God, I wish I could do what you do.” His reply is always the same: “You can.”

  The setting sun reflects off the surface of the water, providing a Zen-like se
tting for a message he knows is true: It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause. He could pick up his law career exactly where he left off if he wanted to, but that is the furthest thing from his mind.

  As they paddle back to shore after an awesome session, his clients get a hold of themselves and regain their composure. They set foot on shore, and reality sinks its fangs in: “I would, but I can’t really throw it all away.”

  He has to laugh.

  The Power of Pessimism: Defining the Nightmare

  * * *

  “Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

  —Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister

  To do or not to do? To try or not to try? Most people will vote no, whether they consider themselves brave or not. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. For years, I set goals, made resolutions to change direction, and nothing came of either. I was just as insecure and scared as the rest of the world.

  The simple solution came to me accidentally in 2004. At that time, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I was completely miserable, worse than ever. I had no time and was working myself to death. I had started my own company, only to realize it would be nearly impossible to sell. Oops. I felt trapped and stupid at the same time. “I should be able to figure this out,” I thought. Why am I such an idiot? Why can’t I make this work?! Buckle up and stop being such a (insert expletive)! What’s wrong with me? The truth was, nothing was wrong with me.

  Critical mistakes made in the company’s infancy would never let me sell it. I could hire magic elves and connect my brain to a supercomputer—it didn’t matter. My little baby had some serious birth defects. (This turned out to be yet another self-imposed limitation and false construct. BrainQUICKEN was acquired by a private equity firm in 2009, which I discuss more in Real-World MBA on page 250.) The question then became, “How do I free myself from this Frankenstein while making it self-sustaining? How do I pry myself from the tentacles of workaholism and the fear that it would fall to pieces without my 15-hour days? How do I escape this self-made prison?” A trip, I decided. A sabbatical year around the world.