How to Be So Productive It Feels ILLEGAL (No Time Management Needed) | Tim Ferriss

Hello, Believe Nation! I started the Mentor Me series to hang around people who've done a lot more than us, and hopefully some of their values, their way of thinking, their mindsets kind of seep into us to help us become the best version of ourselves. So today we're going to learn from Tim Ferriss on creating the 4-Hour Body. As always, if Tim says something that really, really deeply resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well.

The 4-Hour Body is really meant to be a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the human body, a hacker's guide to improving every facet of your physical appearance and performance, whether that's ultra-endurance, superhuman strength, rapid fat loss, sleep, sex, you name it, it covers it all. And for every chapter, I did experiments on myself and also tested all the science, the best science in the field, with as many as 200 test subjects. This video will show you some of the results and some of the findings.

So how did you How do you get from The 4-Hour Workweek to The 4-Hour Body?

So it seems like a complete non sequitur, but the reality is The 4-Hour Workweek just gave me permission to write this book, The 4-Hour Body, which is a much clearer reflection of my deepest obsession, which is physical tracking. So I've recorded just about every workout in all details since age 18 or so, including food logs, everything you can possibly imagine.

So just explain that in a little more detail. What does that mean? Every time you eat a meal, you write it down?

These days that's true.

In some cases that means that I would put, let's say, a medical device, an implant into my side and track my blood glucose 24/7 and correlate it to the foods that I eat. But if you were to visit my house, for example, there's very little about time management in my house, which is what most people associate me with. But my entire kitchen, my living room, it looks like an ER. I mean, I have medical devices, galvanic skin response meters. You name it.

Why?

Because looking at the data, if I gather the data and look at the patterns, I can figure out which meals make me fat. I can figure out which meals I should eat before working out to hit personal records. And by deconstructing things in the same way that people associate me with The 4-Hour Workweek and deconstructing work, you can do things like, my father, for example, 65 years old, he lost close to 90 pounds of fat, gained about 30 pounds of muscle, and did it with very, very small changes. So the book is really intended to be A Hacker's Guide to the Human Body.

Why is the body so important to you?

Because it is either the force multiplier for performance, it can either be the greatest performance enhancer or the greatest handicap. And there's an anecdote that I'm fond of telling that was told to me by a friend of mine about Richard Branson. So he was visiting Richard Branson on Necker Island and at some point there was a group of 20 people, potential icons in business, and one of the questions came up, how do you how do you become most productive? And Richard Branson sat back, thought for a second, and he said, workout.

His answer was workout.

So he started every day by swimming around Necker Island. And he said, by working out, I gain an additional 3 to 4 productive hours per day. And I think that in Silicon Valley, where we are right now, and elsewhere, there are a lot of people who have accepted this partial completeness. They're kick-ass as an employee or as a CEO. They're incredibly good at everything except for something physically related. And they just accept that being overweight or being too skinny or being slow, whatever it might be, is genetically fixed. And in most cases, it's not fixed at all. So I'd like to provide the tools for people to change those things very quickly. And that was one of the goals of the book. And I remember very early on in "The 4-Hour Workweek," what triggered my conviction that I had to write this was an interview with Clive Thompson of Wired. And we were joking around. In the preamble before the interview, and I said that the two fears of modern man could be boiled down to too much email and getting fat. And I think that's pretty accurate. But people view getting fat as completely unavoidable, and I don't think it's true.

So the guiding tenet for all of this is whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it's time to pause and reflect. So the best way, meaning the most effective way, the most efficient way, is seldom what you find in best practices that are widely known. This is es true for ultra-endurance running 50, 100 kilometers, 100 miles, as it is for language learning. I'm going to cover just 4 first principles, because it would take far too long to go through the various tactics and details. But these principles are guiding principles that are very flexible, and they can certainly be applied not only to changing your physical body, which is the bedrock of everything else. So as a force multiplier, you can even either improve your performance everywhere else—business, relationships—by improving your body, Or you can do the opposite. These can also be applied, like I said, to your startups or to your companies. The minimum effective dose in the context of exercise and diet is treating both of those things like a drug. So if someone prescribes you a drug, you're given a specific dose for a specific outcome.

If you have less than that dose, you don't get the desired result.

More than that dose, and you have side effects. So striving to test by gathering data, which need not be complicated, what the minimum effective dose is. And that can be very, very little. So this is Tracy again at the bottom of a kettlebell swing. And she lost, like I said, 120 pounds. On the right-hand side, you have an example of what I would call a slow-carb meal. And a slow-carb meal, this has become popular among world-class tennis players, among others.

There's a big piece on it just in the last few days.

Really just eliminates white starches and carbohydrates for a period of 6 days out of every week. It also avoids fruit, which is very controversial because of fructose and how it's converted by the liver. In any case, losing 20 to 30 pounds in a given month, in the first month, is not unusual at all.

And that's primarily fat.

So here are a few sample MEDs, all right? Minimum effective doses. So 5 minutes, forget about 20 minutes. We're doing 1 set of kettlebell swings, 50 to 75 total repetitions with the maximum weight, 3 times per week, 5 minutes. The second, if you want to lose body fat, it's very, very easy to do. The only change you have to start with, and I always recommend starting with 1 change, is 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.

Really easy to remember.

You don't have to change anything else. Just change that. My dad went from roughly 5 pounds of average fat loss per month to almost 19 pounds just by making that change.

That's the only change.

So 30 grams could be a number of hard-boiled eggs. It could be whey protein as an example.

Oh, yes.

So the clitoris. Let's talk about the clitoris. 1 to 2 PM on the clitoris. This is the reason my book was pulled off the shelves of Costco, by the way, in the United States.

I have some very graphic sexual chapters.

I'll cover this very briefly, and then it can be homework. Men are pretty clumsy animals, so I like to offer this.

Clitoris from the male perspective, 1 to 2 o'clock is where it's going to be most sensitive.

All right? So just practice, please. It'll save everyone a lot of grief. 90 to 120 seconds of tension for most muscles. What does this mean? This means that rather than looking at changes in muscle—

and believe me, just about everything that you want to change related to your body is going to relate to muscle or fascia, which connect everything.

Slow cadence movement. So you take a weight that allows you to reach failure, where you can't move any further, between 90 and 120 seconds. That means 5 seconds up, much slower than this, 5 seconds down, with maximum weight to failure, once per week. That's it. That's all you need. It's like hitting a microwave 1 minute high for boiling water. That's it. You need the prescription. You don't necessarily need the how-to. And then lastly, about 1,200 words for conversational fluency. This can be applied to other things. All right? It could be applied to viral coefficients. It could be applied to many, many other things. But striving to find the minimum effective dose is very, very important to avoid any type of resource waste. The extremes inform the mean, not vice versa. On the left, you see garden shears. Has anyone here seen the movie Objectified? Anyone? Okay, we have a few people. I highly recommend that everyone else see this movie, Objectified. It was created by the filmmaker who produced Helvetica about the type font. It's a wonderful movie about design in everyday life. And Frog Design— I know we have Frog Design here— is featured at one point because a client comes in to discuss with them garden shears. And they say, well, a client might come in and say, our average user is a middle-aged woman, she is this height, this weight, this many years old. And the response from Frog Design was, we don't care about your average user. We want the extreme use cases. And if we can account for those extreme use cases, let's say, paraplegic, and then maybe a bodybuilder who can't brush his own teeth because his arms are too big, whatever those might be. Once you solve for those extreme use cases, the middle takes care of itself, all right, in many cases, but not vice versa. And an example from one of my experiments, I didn't have video of this because I was too occupied, but you can see a number of syringes there. I flew stem cell growth factor over from Israel, combined that with human growth hormone, actually technically IGF-1, along with many other things, including a base of my own blood.

This is very interesting.

I had my blood taken out, and then it was spun in a special centrifuge to take out all of the growth factors, concentrated, and then used as a base for this cocktail. And then this was injected locally into sites of injury, whether that was dislocations I'd had, surgeries I had. And I was able to reverse about 95% of my so-called permanent injuries in the span of 6 months. I don't recommend that you do that, necessarily. But I did find that using prolotherapy, which is simply sugar water, in effect, dextrose in a saline solution, could achieve 9 out of 10 times the same effect. And that is something that I would encourage people who have, let's say, tennis elbow to actually look into. Tracking and loss aversion is more important than how-to. So, I recall once in Silicon Valley, a very good friend of mine, I won't mention him by name, but the CEO of a very well-known company said, "Look, I don't want the story, I'm really busy. He said, "Look, I just wanna lose abdominal fat. I want a six-pack. Give me the index card with the bullet points of what I need to do." Okay, sure. So I gave him the index card, and I did the same thing for about half a dozen CEOs, and the success rate was zero. The success rate was zero because giving a prescription, the how-to, isn't enough. You need to set yourself up from a behavioral psychological standpoint to failure-proof the change that you want. It's very easy to explain what I mean by that. Tracking will beat a prescription. So if you were to take, and this is very true if you look at the research of BJ Fogg at the Stanford Persuasion Lab as an example, or just about anywhere else. If you were to take two groups, all right? So here's Group A, right down the aisle, Group B. All right, Group A, you guys all get personal trainers, all right? But you have to wander into your local gym and find a personal trainer. And then Group B, all I want you to do, let's assume we're talking about fat loss, is Take your iPhone or your smartphone, take a photograph of every meal before you eat it, every snack before you eat it, every drink before you drink it. This group, I vote, will have more success, more compliance, and more ultimate fat loss. And tracking, when you look at it, is what to account for. And that's called the flash diet, which I'll cover in a second. Loss aversion is very important. We're very keen, at least in the United States, we like to focus on positive psychology and positive reinforcement, rewards. Game dynamics that reward us. And I would offer, at least if you look at the literature, that shame, humiliation, all of these things are very, very powerful.

In fact, more so than the first group, and you should use those.

It's a fact. Not liking it isn't going to change it, so you may as well leverage it to your advantage. And the way you can do that is by using bets. So let's say a small wager among 4 people, 5 people who each contribute money. That's how Tracy lost her 120 pounds. Or it could be Something as simple as a public display, public accountability, using a wiki for that. And I've seen this used for people who could never lose weight, never gain weight. Using that public accountability all of a sudden produces an incentive to change your behavior. If you don't do your job at your job, you get fired. If you don't do your job and you fail on a diet, typically nothing happens. So if anybody out there wants to design a gym, here's what I'd recommend. And this is based on Yale research. Is you charge everyone $400 a month. And then for every visit to the gym, they get $25 back. And if they don't hit their goals after 3 months, when they sign up, they give you photographs of themselves in their underwear. Like this. Like this. Like this. And you put them on the internet after 3 months if they don't hit their goals. That will be the fittest gym you have ever seen in your life. All right, so the general rules of behavioral change that I would encourage you to keep in mind, you can make them very complicated, but Looking at the data set and the data sets that I have, and we're talking about thousands of people over several years, these are the points that I would remember. Number 1 is make it conscious. You have to be conscious of decisions that you're making subconsciously if you want to change them. So the flash diet, which I mentioned, which has been studied at University of Wisconsin, it's been studied in London, is more effective than a food journal. And what's important to note is that people who use food journals lose 3 times as much weight as those who don't. And it's a hell of a lot easier just to take a photograph. There's a good application called DietSnaps that you could use to make it even easier. Before pictures, so if you look at the transformation challenges of the last 20 years, like the Body for Life Challenge, typically rewarding $1 million, Lamborghini, whatever it might be, the diet varies, the training varies, the winners almost always use before photographs to make the pain painful enough, all right? You don't have to make those public. You can put them on your refrigerator or your dog's forehead, wherever you'll see it frequently. Number 2 is make it a game. So Peter Drucker has said, very famous management theorist, "What gets measured gets managed." And I would certainly agree with that. 5 sessions, if you look at the Nike+ device, what they found is to make a behavior stick, you have to log 5 sessions. It doesn't matter if they're 5 minutes long or 5 hours long. So rig the game so you can win. If you're gonna go to the gym, you wanna make that habit, 5 sessions, keep them really short. 5 to 10 minutes, doesn't matter. Lastly, make it competitive, like I mentioned, and then make it small and temporary. So not only the MED, but a 2-week trial. That's how I got my dad started after he'd failed many other diets in the past. And last but not least, keep improvement relative. So it's about becoming the best you, you can become. In the process, creating data that can help many other people. It's not about being the best in the world, and in this case, the biggest guy in the world. So keep it relative. Small changes can have huge impacts. It doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just take it one step at a time and alles mit Maß und Ziel, measurement and objective. I'll leave you with that. Thank you.

Thank you guys for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know, what did you think of this video? What did you learn from it? What are you going to apply to your body to start making a difference? Leave it down in the comments. I'm going to join in the discussion. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about fruit and why you don't recommend it and also beans and why you do recommend it. Why do you guys like our beans?

Are you paleo? Paleo person? Semi? Okay. So the question was why do I recommend against consuming fruit? For the most part and why do I allow beans on the Slow Carb Diet. So the first, fruit. Fruit as it existed 100, 200 years ago is very different from fruit as it exists today. It's selectively bred and modified to have the highest level of fructose or fruit sugar possible. And fructose is problematic for fat loss specifically. So if you're not trying to lose fat, I have no particular problem with consuming fruit. But if you wanna get the best results possible from a fat loss program, fructose is converted to glycerol phosphate which is then converted to body fat very, very efficiently. It's like there's no more efficient pathway you could find just about. Same reason that high fructose corn syrup will make you really, really fat. Another note, same reason agave nectar will make make you very, very fat. It's 90% concentrated fructose. So looking at, again, from an evolutionary standpoint, the nutrient necessity of fruit. If you get it once a week, so I have the one day off, the cheat day or the binge day once per week on the Solarcrub diet, that's more than enough to satisfy any sweet tooth requirement as it relates to fruit. If you absolutely have to have fruit, and I'm experimenting with with fruit again in very moderate doses using primarily berries because it does have a fascinating effect on blood glucose. It flatlines your blood glucose. So, I do recommend fruit on your off day, having it in the beginning of the day such as grapefruit, which also includes naringenin which is interesting for extending the half-life of caffeine. But when you—

I implanted a Dexcom 7 device in my side.

It's a which is a continuous glucose monitor used by Type 1 diabetics. And I implanted it in my side to track my blood glucose 24/7 for about 3 weeks. And what I noticed is when you have this small amount of fruit in the morning, it allows you to keep your blood sugar below, I think it's 100 nanograms per deciliter, milligrams per deciliter. It allows you to keep it below this critical threshold for fat loss, which is pretty fascinating. But in general, I would say just stay away from fruit from what I've seen. And I haven't seen any deleterious health effects from that at all. Beans. So beans, if anyone here is a strict Paleo eater, beans and legumes are a big no-no. For that same reason peanuts are a big no-no. And cashews. I love cashews. But if you prepare beans properly, so if you're soaking them, let's say overnight, I simply haven't seen the digestive issues. That one would expect based on how strongly they are avoided on the Paleo diet. I just haven't seen the problems. So I do recommend lentils and other legumes and beans for the simple reason, among others, that if people are only consuming leafy vegetables or steamed vegetables and protein, they're almost always hypocaloric. And then they get irritable, they get headaches, and they quit. So that would be the main reason. I'm convinced someday I'll either be proven right or wrong, as I suppose is the case with everything. Lentils, there's some property in lentils that is just incred— it's a force multiplier for fat loss. I cannot figure out, I don't know what it is. I have my speculations, but lentils are amazing. Tastes pretty good too. So sleep, my opinions on sleep. My opinions on sleep depend on how many sessions of sleep you get per day. So most people in this room will be familiar with what's called monophasic sleep. Go to bed, wake up. You get one session of sleep. If you're doing that, or speaking from a personal basis, if I'm doing that, I like to get 9 to 10 hours of sleep. I sleep a lot. If, on the other hand, you're doing what's called polyphasic sleep, where you break it up into multiple segments per day, and that can be taken to an extreme in something called Uberman, which is, I believe, 2.5 hours of total sleep per day, which is comprised of 20-minute naps. Not terribly social, as you can imagine. That can be sustained, and there's a lot of debate about this. There are long articles online about why it's impossible. I can't divulge it yet, but I can say right now I'm using some, along with a few other groups, some pretty sophisticated equipment to demonstrate that it is possible. We're tracking people using EEGs while they sleep on Uberman. So it can be done. Should you do it? That's a separate question. For most people, it's gonna be completely untenable and unsustainable. But there are people like Matt Mullenweg, usually called the lead developer or one of the lead developers of WordPress. And while he was working on WordPress, he had his most productive year of coding, probably produced— I'm just speculating here— about 60% of the WordPress code in one year, and he was following Uberman. To most people, if you feel like you have to sleep 2 hours a day to get more done, I would I would say let's look at the time management first before we start cutting you back to 2 hours. But those would be my feelings.

[Speaker] So as far as I can tell from the quick look through the book, it pretty much concentrates on what we would normally consider physical attributes. Do you have any research or anything interesting on minimum effective dose either for balance and coordination because I didn't see much there. And also mentally, nootropics or diet as opposed to mental—

[Speaker:EVAN_CARMICHAEL] Yeah, good question. So, have I found anything for the minimum effective dose for balance, agility, or mental performance like nootropics? So, I was as an undergrad first a neuroscience major primarily 'cause I wanted to focus on smart drugs. I've seen a lot. There are many different approaches you can take. As far as balance goes, there's quite a lot of debate in the pt and athletic training community about whether balance is a general skill you can train. Just like if there exists a general intelligence, usually people would segment it out into, for example, muscular symmetry So one of the fastest ways to improve general agility and balance I would say is by doing an assessment called the FMS, the Functional Movement Screen. And I'm sure there are people in SF who can do that. And that'll assess imbalances from left to right or cross— contralaterally. And when you fix those, it's pretty astounding. It's in the prehab chapter. But if you identify you using, for example, there's a movement called, or there are two movements called the chop and lift where you're using, generally speaking, a cable and you're doing this type chopping diagonal movement and then you're reversing it and going up. And so you test your four quadrants and you'll generally find that one quadrant is extremely weak, relatively speaking. And when you fix that, it's incredible how many aches and pains, how many problems, how many injuries just disappear. So I would say that from a functional standpoint, that would be one. If we're talking about equilibrium, I haven't found anything to be particularly effective for general balance. For mental performance, this is something that I really debated quite a lot because I'm a huge fan of cognitive enhancement. And I didn't improve, or I didn't include any chapters specifically on that because I found looking at the literature that improving physical Physical performance, what most people would divorce from their mind or brain, is actually the best way to improve cognitive performance. And there's a great book called Spark, which is written by a Harvard MD about— that looks at physical education and some very sophisticated programs for improving academic performance, specifically by making students perform at a certain heart rate immediately prior to their worst subjects. Really fascinating stuff. But if we're talking about drugs, I'm sure there are a few people in this audience who probably tried modafinil among others. So, Provigil, which is an anti-narcolepsy drug. There are a lot of drugs that will improve short-term memory, working memory, reaction speed. Vasopressin, which is an antidiuretic hormone that's used in, let's say, bedwetting in children in some cases, also can improve short-term memory. The reason that I have ended up staying away from many of these drugs is that I've realized in the course of doing all this research and all this testing that the brain is a very sensitive instrument. And the brain like— well, the body likes homeostasis. So, if you interrupt any of the feedback loops, you can cause some really significant long-term problems. That's certainly true if you look at, let's say, anabolics use. If you're using super physiological high dose, let's just say testosterone cypionate, then you can screw up your HPTA axis. And if you screw up your hypothalamus, boy, you're gonna have a lot of issues. So, I've ended up staying away from the smart drugs most recently. The exceptions would be yerba mate tea. I love yerba mate. And it contains a handful of stimulants that all have different pharmacokinetics. So, you end up getting this nice extended 3 to 4 hour buzz which is great for writing among other things. And the other I would say for mental performance would be hunger. So, when you are in a fasted state, whether that's through intermittent fasting or otherwise, you will experience a heightened level of cognitive function. And I think that does reflect back to evolutionary— from an evolutionary standpoint, if you're hunting and gathering, it's a good idea to have better visual acuity if you're really hungry and you need to find food, among other things. But that's somewhat speculation. Hopefully that helps.