Tribe of Mentors

Highlights

• “What you seek is seeking you.” —RUMI.
• “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” —MARCEL PROUST
• many others . . . What would this look like if it were easy? “This” could be anything. That morning, it was answering a laundry list of big questions. What would this look like if it were easy? is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question. It’s easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you’re not redlining, you’re not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the process.
• questions. John Dewey’s dictum that “a problem well put is half-solved” applies.
• Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. After all, conscious thinking is largely asking and answering questions in your own head. If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.
• “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” Substitute “master learner” for “novel,” and you have my philosophy of life. Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.
• For the curious and impatient among you, here are a few books (of many) that came up a lot:   Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger   If you’d like to see all of the recommended books in one place, including a list of the top 20 most recommended from this book and Tools of Titans, you can find all the goodies at tim.blog/booklist
• I have a piece of driftwood. Its sole purpose is to display a quote by Anaïs Nin, which I see every day: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
• It’s a short reminder that success can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take.
• The most fulfilled and effective people I know—world-famous creatives, billionaires, thought leaders, and more—look at their life’s journey as perhaps 25 percent finding themselves and 75 percent creating themselves.
• What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? Paul Stamets’ Host Defense MyCommunity mushroom complex is the most incredible immunity supplement I have ever taken (and I have taken a lot of them!). No matter how much I travel, how many hands I shake, or how exhausted I am, I don’t get sick as long as I take the supplement diligently.
• The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
• Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you’re writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.
• former Navy SEAL, Richard Machowicz: “Not Dead, Can’t Quit.”
• In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? My biggest shift came after listening to a successful CEO talk about his philosophy for hiring people. When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1–10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose 7. It immediately dawned on me how many invitations I was receiving that I would rate as a 7—speeches, weddings, coffees, even dates. If I thought something was a 7, there was a good chance I felt obligated to do it. But if I have to decide between a 6 or an 8, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.
• “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” –Steve Jobs
• “What you seek is seeking you.” –Rumi
• The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I have read hundreds of personal development books, but this is the one that clearly showed me how to visualize, contemplate, and focus on what it was I truly wanted. It revealed to me that we only get what we desire most, and to apply myself with a laserlike focus upon a goal, task, or project. That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be”—and this process is immediate. Although it takes time for these desires to manifest in our material world, you must see the thing you desire as completed, finished, and real, now. The better you can do this, the more you can accomplish. I have bought several copies of this book and distributed it to family and friends. I also reread it probably once a month to keep my vision clear.
• David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart.
• “Busy is a decision.” Debbie Millman
• A book that has influenced my life and one that I keep going back to over and over is the anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century.
• I try to obey this message I got in a Chinese fortune cookie (which I have since taped to my laptop): “Avoid compulsively making things worse.”
• “Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.” Naval Ravikant
• Total Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti. A rationalist’s guide to the perils of the human mind. The “spiritual” book that I keep returning to.
• Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.
• Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. I’m lucky that I didn’t get everything I wanted in my life, or I’d be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town. Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult. Almost getting into the wrong marriage helped me recognize and enter the right one. Falling sick made me focus on my health. It goes on and on. Inside suffering is the seed of change.
• “Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
• What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? Advice: Follow your intellectual curiosity over whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well. Do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time. Ignore: The news. Complainers, angry people, high-conflict people. Anyone trying to scare you about a danger that isn’t clear and present. Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know. Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair. Play the hand that you’re dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death.
• What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait.
• In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? I say no to nearly everything. I make a lot fewer short-term compromises. I aspire to only work with people who I can work with forever, to invest my time in activities that are a joy unto themselves, and to focus on the extremely long term. So I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation.
• Memento mori—“remember that you have to die.” All of this will go to nothing. Remember before you were born? Just like that.
• Two books that have greatly influenced my life are The Double Helix by James D. Watson and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
• “We spend far too much time complaining about the way things are, and forget that we have the power to change anything and everything.” Bozoma Saint John
• “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr
• “These individuals have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”
• I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was, etc. I ignored the conventional wisdom that online articles should be short, frequent, posted consistently—because I knew the Tims in that stadium didn’t care about those things—and instead focused on a single type of topic. And it worked. Four years later, many of those people who happen to like my type of writing have found me.
• When it comes to my work “yes” list, I think about what I might call the Epitaph Test. When I find myself with an opportunity, I ask myself whether I’d be happy if my epitaph had something to do with this project. If the answer is a clear no, it probably means it’s not actually very important to me. Thinking about your epitaph, as morbid as it is, is a nice way to cut through all the noise and force yourself to look at your work from a super zoomed-out perspective, where you can see what really matters to you. So I try to make my “yes” list by thinking about the Epitaph Test, and potential time commitments outside of that definition fall on my “no” list.
• Make sure I’m spending enough high-quality time with the people I care about most with the question, “If I were on my deathbed today, would I be happy with the amount of time I spent with this person?” An alternative is thinking about other people’s deathbeds—“If X person were on their deathbed today, how would I feel about the amount of quality time I’ve spent with them?”
• “I used to resent obstacles along the path, thinking, ‘If only that hadn’t happened life would be so good.’ Then I suddenly realized, life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path.” Janna Levin
• “We need a new diversity—not one based on biological characteristics and identity politics but a diversity of opinion and worldviews.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Sam Barondes’ book Making Sense of People has had a big impact on my thinking, and I sometimes give a copy to people in the midst of hiring someone or even deciding whether to get engaged. As part of my role as an investor, I interview 400 to 500 people a year to decide whether to hire them or invest in their various startups or investment funds, and the most useful mental model I have found to help understand what makes people tick is the one Barondes describes in his book. The model is called the “Big Five” or OCEAN: open-minded, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic. The academics who developed the model clumped every English adjective that could be used to describe someone into categories and reduced them to as small a set of factors as they could. The Big Five is considered the equivalent of gravity in the academic literature on personality. There have been thousands of studies using it, and it’s considered much more statistically accurate than alternatives such as Myers-Briggs. The killer combination is high open-minded, high conscientious, low neurotic.
• What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches.
• “Integrity is the only path where you will never get lost.”
• The best advice I have seen comes from people who don’t try to tell me the answer . . . instead they give me a new approach to thinking about the question so that I can solve it better on my own. Most “bad” recommendations I could reduce to “I have been successful, so do it my way.” The best advice is more like, “I can’t answer your question, but this might be a good way for you to think about it.”
• “Diversity in counsel, unity in command.” –Cyrus the Great
• “I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” –Herbert Bayard Swope
• “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” –Marcus Aurelius
• There’s this dazzling short story by Ted Chiang called “Liking What You See”
• What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? Mother Dirt: It cured my acne and skin problems permanently. It’s a $49 spray with oxidizing bacteria that you use in place of soap, and it restores your skin to its natural balance. If I could buy this for every teenager in America, I would.
• “You can be a juicy ripe peach and there’ll still be someone who doesn’t like peaches.” Dita Von Teese
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: This text helped rid me of the nagging incompleteness in my understood connection between the successes and failings of ancient and modern civilizations. Power needs tools and circumstance. Neither need be earned.
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: The protagonist’s audacious self-confidence and refusal to compromise his artistic vision—which was to say, himself—was a fascinating thing to survey.
• “Grudges are for those who insist that they are owed something; forgiveness, however, is for those who are substantial enough to move on.” –Criss Jami
• “It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” –William of Ockham
• “Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.” –Robert J. Sawyer
• Next, not a book, but a movie. I’ve watched the Kurosawa classic Seven Samurai more than 100 times (really), and used to give DVD copies of the Criterion Collection remaster to young CEOs I mentored. I love the movie (and am generally a bit of a Japanophile), but I recommend it to new managers and CEOs especially because it is fundamentally about leadership: A small band of courageous leaders risks everything to organize a ragtag group in a fight for its life. Sound familiar? To me, this timeless story is a near-perfect metaphor for startups. What would Kambei Shimada do?
• “Learn more, know less.”
• think people assume that you have to weigh all feedback on your product (whether it’s a podcast, an app, etc.) equally. Not all feedback is created equal, and not all ideas from your users are good ones! Taking too much stock in feedback can change the vision for your own product, and suddenly it won’t feel like yours anymore.
• “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” –Joseph Campbell
• “There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.” –Seneca
• “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”
• “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop “Leaving One” by Ralph Angel “A Cat in an Empty Apartment” by Wisława Szymborska “Apples” by Deborah Digges “Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)” by Jack Gilbert “Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee “The Potter” by Peter Levitt “Black Dog, Red Dog” by Stephen Dobyns “The Word” by Mark Cox “Death” by Maurycy Szymel “This” by Czeslaw Milosz
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks,
• “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘why not?’”—Robert Kennedy
• “Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”—C. S. Lewis
• “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case you fail by default.”—J. K. Rowling
• “If I accept you as you are, I make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming I help you become that.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.”
• The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Mark my words, Abercrombie will go down in history as one of the greatest fantasy novelists of all time. He’s with Tolkien. These books are magical in how he creates a world out of nothing and characters so well drawn that you’ll think Joe takes trips to this magical place and interviews these people. On top of all that, Joe has a hilarious sense of humor.
• The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. It’s hard to describe the brilliance of this book. If you read it, keep in mind that it was written by an atheist.
• Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales. I read this book 13 years ago, and I still think about it almost every week. The title explains exactly what it is and it is fascinating. This book taught me not to take things for granted. It taught me what to do in stressful and simple situations I would find myself in, and how to evaluate them in a levelheaded way. It teaches you how things really are, as opposed to what you want them to be. And that is the difference between life and death (ominous!).
• “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” –Henry David Thoreau
• “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.” –Oscar Wilde
• Earplugs for sleeping. I’ve tried them all. Hearos Xtreme Protection NRR 33 work best and are the most comfortable. If you really want to go to extremes to also control light, Lonfrote Deep Molded Sleep Mask is the best for airplanes or anywhere else.
• “Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.” –Ralph Charell
• “Many a false step was made by standing still.” –Fortune cookie
• “As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” –Bill Gates
• I’ve read far and wide, consuming thousands of books. Five disparate books stand out from all the rest as the most influential, either in confirming my own intuitions or in suggesting promising avenues of inquiry in my quest to understand—or at least gain some control over—my unconscious thinking, to be able to tap into it on demand, and to direct it as far as possible. And those books are Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler, and, perhaps most of all, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
• Ernest Hemingway on Writing: The most potent little book of wisdom on the creative process that I have run into.
• Advice they should ignore: Follow the beaten path. Avoid risk. Play it safe. Wear a suit.
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
• “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”—Warren Buffett
• “Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”—George S. Patton
• “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”—Henry David Thoreau
• “Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.”—Warren Buffett
• “Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.”—Javier Pascual Salcedo
• “It is very important what not to do.”—Iggy Pop
• “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches.”—Andy Warhol
• “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”—Peter Drucker
• “Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers.”—Seneca the Younger
• “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”—Harry Truman
• “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”—Oscar Wilde
• If the ask is more than a week away, I almost always say no, regardless of what is it. Exceptions include family things I need to attend, and a conference or two I really want to speak at, but other than that, if the “yes” would tie me to something further than a week or so out, it’s almost always a no.
• I’ve simply realized that the further out the yes, the more I regret the moment when it comes due. Because there’s no cost now, it’s simply too easy to say yes about something deep in the future. Further, a future “yes” ultimately means that the past controls your schedule. By the time you get around to later, your calendar is already filled with prior engagements. That limits what’s possible in the moment. Few things bother me more than wanting to actually say yes to something today but being blocked by a previous yes I said weeks or months ago.
• “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” –Frederick Douglass
• “All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” –Niccolò Machiavelli
• translated by Witter Bynner. This book is close to the heart of my personal religious and moral philosophy, stressing the rightness of what is, if only we can accept it. Most people who know me have heard me quote from this book. “Seeing as how nothing is outside the vast, wide-meshed net of heaven, who is there to say just how it is cast?” “I find good people good, and I find bad people good, if I am good enough.”
• Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
• “The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.” –Rolf Potts
• “There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” –THICH NHAT HANH
• “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” –George Bernard Shaw
• “Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: While reading this classic poetic ode to America and possibilities (“I am multitude!”) my gasket blew, and I became seized with an unstoppable urge to travel. I set the book down and bought a ticket to Asia. I roamed there, off and on, for eight years. It was my university.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter: I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn’t alter my life at first. However, over the years, I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find these insights as my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens.
• The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon: Another book whose influence took time to establish itself in my view. Simon’s clarifying insight—that mind and intelligence can overcome any physical limitations, and are therefore the only scarce resource—has become a big idea that colors much of what I look at today.
• Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse: This small, short book provided me a vocabulary to think about the meaning of life—not just my life, but all life! It gave me a mathematical framework for my own spirituality. As it says, the game is to keep the game going forever, to rope all beings into playing infinite games versus finite (win-lose) games, and to realize that there is only one infinite game.
• “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” –Frank Wilczek
• “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”—Henry Ford
• Deuserband Original has been an amazing discovery for me. Especially when I spend long sessions in a chair, it feels great to stretch my arms and back, and it improves your posture.
• An orb of shungite stone. Its incredible protective and healing qualities—mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical—can be felt by even the most skeptical people. One benefit relevant for many of us today: it diffuses negative waves from electronics.
• “The things you own end up owning you.” –Chuck Palahniuk
• “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” –James Cameron
• “The great majority of that which gives you angst never happens, so you must evict it. Don’t let it live rent-free in your brain.”
• Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success, by Matthew Syed. Since reading this book, I’ve literally incorporated this approach to problem-solving into every day. I’ve always encouraged those around me not to be scared of failure because I believe it’s the most valuable learning tool.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Charles T. Munger. I’ve been enjoying Charlie Munger’s speeches online for years; this is the ultimate collection of the best of them. Watching Becoming Warren Buffett on a recent flight reminded me how much of a legend Charlie is.
• What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Good things come to those who wait.” If I’d listened to that, Spotify would never have become anything more than an idea. We had so many knock-backs in the early days. Bono once said to me, “Good things come to those who work their asses off and never give up.” That speaks to me much more.
• “Always ask: What am I missing? And listen to the answer.”
• “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” –Lao Tzu
• “If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” –Colonel David Hackworth
• “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” –Anaïs Nin
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins City of Thieves by David Benioff   I know that’s four books, but each one is worth talking about a bit. The Murakami book is the single best distillation of the kind of focus, commitment, and sense of mission it takes to become a great artist. He is ostensibly writing about his running life—and he is widely regarded as a great distance runner—but what he’s really talking about is how to strip away everything you don’t need in order to achieve your purpose. It’s a rigorous, inspiring book that challenges the reader to step up. It’s also gorgeously written nonfiction by, to me, the world’s best writer of fiction. The Artist’s Way contains the single best tool for becoming unblocked that I have ever come across [which is morning pages]. If you have the sense, deep inside you, that you are running away from your true purpose, this book will help you break through. Tony Robbins’ work has always been useful to me. That’s one of the reasons my creative partner, David Levien, and I executive produced I Am Not Your Guru, the documentary about Tony. This book was the first of his I read, and it asked me crucial questions about the stories I was telling myself that were limiting my growth. I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from a little Tony. And, lastly, City of Thieves by Benioff. This book is just a joy. Fiction has a real utility, and it’s one I think high achievers sometimes forget, and that is: fictions stirs you up inside, unsettles you, forces you to engage with that which isn’t easily solved. This book does all that and delights along the way. I’ve given it to 100 people. All of them thanked me and gave away a bunch themselves.
• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse
• One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism by Rodney Stark
• The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
• These are the fundamental guidebooks for understanding and helping civilization. The Decline book shows the consequences of believing romantic, tragic narratives of societies becoming degraded, while The Better Angels chronicles how humanity has in fact become less violent, less cruel, and more just with every passing millennium, century, and decade. One True God demonstrates how lethally competitive and regimented monotheistic religions inevitably become, while Finite and Infinite Games makes a thrilling case for getting beyond obsession with winning zero-sum outcomes and focusing on improving the games we play, infinitely.
• “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” –Leo Tolstoy
• Third is The Dhammapada, containing the sayings of the Buddha. It teaches the importance of inner exploration if we are to see beyond the programmed prejudices and limitations of the egoic mind. In other words, if we are to see life clearly. It points to the impossibility of finding peace in the world outside of ourselves if we can’t locate it within, an insight my own experience has corroborated over and over again. In a sense, this brief text is the template for the many later spiritual and psychological writings that have influenced me and nourished my own growth.
• The Third Wave by futurist Alvin Toffler had an enormous impact on my life. It was his vision of a global electronic village that helped put me on the path to co-founding AOL. I read Toffler’s Third Wave as a senior in college and was mesmerized by the idea of connecting people through a digital medium. I knew it was inevitable and wanted to be a part of building that future.
• “It will never get easier than right now to recklessly pursue your passion. Do it.” Tommy Vietor
• “Don’t believe everything you think.” –BJ Miller, MD
• “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” –Chuck Palahniuk
• “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” –Albert Einstein
• “No society in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.” Sam Harris
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch greatly expanded my sense of the potential power of human knowledge, while Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence made me worry that machine knowledge could ruin everything. I strongly recommend both books. But if you just want to forget about the future and lose yourself in the book that forever changed how narrative nonfiction is written, read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
• in The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker,
• “Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” –Christopher Hitchens
• “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” –Albert Einstein
• “If you can’t laugh at it, you lose.”
• “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” –Helen Keller
• The Stars by H. A. Rey. I’ve always loved the night sky, but those old constellation charts made no sense to me as a kid. They were just a bunch of unintelligible squiggles labeled Ursa Major, Leo, Orion. But Rey redraws the lines between the stars so that Leo actually looks like a lion and Ursa Major like a big bear. Giving out this book is my small way of encouraging people to look up, make sense of the sky, and along the way experience an existential jolt.
• David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. It’s a remarkable argument for the power of knowledge—as not just a human capability but as a force that shapes the universe.
• Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice.
• “Obstacles are those terrible things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.”
• “All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.” –John Gunther
• “The acquisition of riches has been for many men, not an end, but a change, of troubles.” –Epicurus
• The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity by Daniel Reid. It’s a wealth of knowledge, almost like a personal health bible, about real-life things that you can put into practice to improve your physical, mental, and emotional health.
• “You cannot do anything great without aggressively courting your own limits.” Aisha Tyler
• love that Jack Canfield quote, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
• “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” –Sun Tzu
• My five steps to mastery: Choose a worthy and meaningful challenge. Seek a sensei or master teacher (like George Leonard) to help you establish the right path and priorities. Practice diligently, always striving to hone key skills and to progress incrementally toward new levels of competence. Love the plateau. All worthwhile progress occurs through brief, thrilling leaps forward followed by long stretches during which you feel you’re going nowhere. Though it seems as if we’re making no progress, we are turning new behaviors into habits. Learning continues at the cellular level . . . if you follow good practice principles. Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater skill to be developed.
• The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is another book that had a huge impact on me. After starting my first job at Oracle, I was promoted in 1990 to be the youngest vice president. I ended up in Larry Ellison’s old office, which he didn’t entirely clean out, leaving behind some 40 copies of The Mythical Man-Month.
• A third influential book is The Good Heart by the Dalai Lama. It was a very important book to me because, at the time I read it, I was looking at all of the different religions in the world. I was taken aback by this book, subtitled “A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus.”
• I’ve always admired Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s clarity of thought and how they manage to explain complex topics in simple terms. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger is one of my favorite examples.
• “You can do so much in ten minutes’ time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into ten-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.” –Ingvar Kamprad
• In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? Asking myself the question, “When I’m old, how much would I be willing to pay to travel back in time and relive the moment that I’m experiencing right now?”
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (full disclosure: I am married to her, but that puts me even more firmly on the hook, because my judgment would be even more discredited if this turned out to be an unworthy recommendation). It’s the best examination of the arguments about God’s existence, laid out as a nonfiction Appendix written by the protagonist, a psychologist of religion. It’s also funny, moving, and a dead-on satire of the foibles of academic and intellectual life today.
• “When your sparring partner scratches or head-butts you, you don’t then make a show of it, or protest, or view him with suspicion or as plotting against you. And yet you keep an eye on him, not as an enemy or with suspicion, but with a healthy avoidance. . . . You should act this way with all things in life. We should give a pass to many things with our fellow trainees. For, as I’ve said, it’s possible to avoid without suspicion or hate.” –Marcus Aurelius
• “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Stephanie McMahon
• “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.” –Seneca
• It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” –Charlie Munger
• “If you set a goal, it should meet these two conditions: 1) It matters; 2) You can influence the outcome.”—Peter Attia
• One of my favorite quotes is by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded.”
• “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”—Elbert Hubbard
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It is a quick read, just 140 pages or so, and it’s the simplicity that makes the book so powerful. Anytime I have a friend who wants to embark on the journey of introspection, that’s always where I start.
• Nine Gates is an 18-day intensive retreat broken into two nine-day sessions. If you’re drawn to a silent Vipassana retreat but hesitate because it sounds like torture (it does to me), consider Nine Gates instead. I suspect it gives you a similar awakening experience without the inactivity.
• books that have greatly influenced your life? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think it is the most prophetic book of the 20th century, and the most profound discussion of happiness in modern Western philosophy. It had a deep impact on my thinking about politics and happiness. And since, for me, the relationship between power and happiness is the most important question in history, Brave New World has also reshaped my understanding of history. Huxley wrote the book in 1931, with Communism and Fascism entrenched in Russia and Italy, Nazism on the rise in Germany, militaristic Japan embarking on its war of conquest in China, and the entire world gripped by the Great Depression. Yet Huxley managed to see through all these dark clouds and envision a future society without wars, famines, and plagues, enjoying uninterrupted peace, abundance, and health. It is a consumerist world, which gives completely free rein to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, and whose supreme value is happiness. It uses advanced biotechnology and social engineering to make sure that everyone is always content and no one has any reason to rebel. There is no need of a secret police, concentration camps, or a Ministry of Love à la Orwell’s 1984. Indeed, Huxley’s genius consists in showing that you could control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through violence and fear. When people read George Orwell’s 1984, it is clear that he is describing a frightening nightmare world, and the only question left open is “How do we avoid reaching such a terrible state?” Reading Brave New World is a far more disconcerting experience, because it is obvious that there must be something dreadfully wrong, but you are hard pressed to put your finger on it. The world is peaceful and prosperous, and everyone is supremely satisfied all the time. What could possibly be wrong with that? The truly amazing thing is that when Huxley wrote Brave New World back in 1931, both he and his readers knew perfectly well that he was describing a dangerous dystopia. Yet many readers today might easily mistake it for a utopia. Our consumerist society is actually geared to realizing Huxley’s vision. Today, happiness has become the supreme value, and we increasingly use biotechnology and social engineering to ensure maximum satisfaction to all citizen-customers. You want to know what could be wrong with that? Read the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, and John the Savage, who lived all his life on a native reservation in New Mexico, and who is the only man in London who still knows anything about Shakespeare or God.
• it is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40. So what should you focus on? My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.
• in the twenty-first century, you won’t be able to enjoy that luxury. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview, you will be left behind, and the world will fly by you. So people will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally balanced to sail through this never-ending storm, and to deal with very high levels of stress.
• “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. . . . Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” —Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers the true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.
• Several weeks ago, I came across this poem by Portia Nelson:   Autobiography in Five Short Chapters   Chapter One I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost . . . I am helpless.      It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.   Chapter Two I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in this same place.      But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.   Chapter Three I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in . . . it’s a habit . . .      but, my eyes are open.      I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.   Chapter Four I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.   Chapter Five I walk down another street.
• Links to all “most gifted” and “most recommended” books in Tribe of Mentors—tim.blog/booklist
• Links to all the “best under $100 purchase” answers from Tribe of Mentors—tim.blog/under100‍