Tim Ferriss (The 4 Hour Work Week): How Top Performers Start Their Mornings

His 4-Hour Workweek book was on the bestseller list for 7 consecutive years. His next books, The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef, became instant bestsellers. He's an angel investor and/or advisor to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, and Uber, among other companies. He's Tim Ferriss, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

A diversified identity in some fashion. I think this is important so that your self-worth isn't only associated with your startup. That But that's probably a controversial recommendation. What that means is you should actually spend time involved with other skills. So in San Francisco, for instance, many startup founders I know who are very efficient and effective have their startup, rock climbing, they get outside, they do a few things so that if one goes well, they can, they can remain optimistic each week. Which is very difficult if you're only directed at your startup.

I only invest in things that I understand. And things that I use or would use myself. This is really, really, really important. Anytime I step outside of that is usually when the universe kicks me in the nuts really hard and I lose my money. I think it's, it's critical to, as an entrepreneur, scratch your own itch. It increases the odds of success or the probability of success. And then as an investor, I look for people who are scratching their own itch. When you're thinking about a product launch, first thing I would ask is, is it the right time to do a product launch? So if your product isn't figured out, if you can't fill the orders, now is not the right time to be on TechCrunch, in my opinion, or in any other major media outlet. Once you're in a major media outlet, they're not gonna cover you again for some period of time, or ever. If you're in the business section of the New York Times, they're not gonna cover you 4 weeks later when your product is better and you're ready. So make sure that you pick your timing.

A few things.

So there's Paid exposure and unpaid exposure. I like to focus on unpaid because it makes you, it forces you to make better decisions in the beginning. So I would read, as I always say, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, 1,000 True Fans written by Kevin Kelly. I would also read bestselling book PR and Publicity, I think it is, by Rick Frischman, F-R-I-S-H-M-A-N. All of the techniques apply to more than books. And learn to tell the story. What are you focusing on? Are you using yourself to tell the story and then the product is associated? Is it a trend piece? Are you trying to tie what you're doing into a greater trend, which is a very effective way of getting media? In which case, you're gonna need other examples. You need to get comfortable bringing in sort of cooperative competitors to create that trend piece. Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging. Only once you have figured that out would I say then you go out and you pay to acquire people. Because now if your messaging is off, it's costing you money.

You need to know what your unique strengths are and be willing to delegate. So I would say that the question of whether you should take a skill, learn it yourself, delegate it to someone else, or hire a new team member are determined by having a very accurate self-assessment and assessment of your team skills. Not only what you can do, but what you should be doing. That's very important. So if you're a startup CEO or founder and you have a team of, say, 2 to 10 people, as soon as you have funds to hire, you should not be focused on the things that you are bad at. Sounds very, very intuitive, but it's not because you might have enough time to do those things, but the question is, do you have the attention to dedicate to those things so they're not an interruption. Especially if you're a venture-backed startup and you're competing against other companies that also have a lot of funding, the game and the race goes to the swift, so you have to have a lot of velocity.

You need to be able to sell. Whether it's Kickstarter, whether it's New York Times, whether it's your local newspaper, you need to be able to communicate effectively and sell, which is why when entrepreneurs ask me for books, to read outside of business books, I say On Writing Well, Bird by Bird, all books on writing, improving communication. David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on advertising. Study print ads where you have very little space. I think those are all very, very effective. The best entrepreneurs I've ever met are all good communicators. It's the one, perhaps one of the very few unifying factors. They're exceptional communicators. Practice is the only way to get better at communicating. And practicing speaking does not provide you, generally, with something to review later, which is why the written word is so powerful. Writing is thought crystallized on a piece of paper that can then be reviewed. It's very difficult to do that with speech, which is why I recommend people focus on honing their skills in writing. And take time to study good direct response ads. Take time to, for instance, maybe develop a swipe file. So one of the things that I did for years is anytime I bought something, I would identify the ad, the phone call, the print ad, the offer, whatever it was that made me decide to buy it, and I would either cut it out or record it, put it into Evernote, whatever it might be, and save it. So I had a record of everything that I bought and why I bought it. And then I could go back and review it and I'd be like, oh, looks like I fell for this, this, and this. Not in a bad way. It looks like this tipped me from eh or not interested to yeah, I'll spend $5, $50, $500, $5,000 on that. I save all that. Everything that works in sales has been done already. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. So just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide, you know, what was the trigger? What pushed me over the edge? And then just sell to people like you. That's what I do. It's really easy. People are like, who's your market? I'm like, well, you know, I'm a 30-something, SF-based, tech-savvy male, so why don't I just sell to those people? It makes it a lot easier than trying to guess. Ideas are worth nothing. I mean, ideas are really, they're not a dime a dozen. They're just nothing. All the good founders I know, even the bad founders can come up with ideas all day long. It doesn't mean anything. You have to be able to execute, and one of the sort of maxims that I was told once was, you know, your success will be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you're willing to have. So I often get asked if an entrepreneur should, say, start a business based on one of their passions, or if they should find the most attractive market opportunity and build a business out of that, whether they like it or not. I don't think it's either/or. I think you need both. I would say look at your own credit card statement. Identify where you spend an unusual percentage of your income. Where are you price insensitive?

Then how old are you?

What gender are you? Where do you live? And design a product that has all of those things intersecting.

It's, it's very easy to be seduced by doing things efficiently, trying to do a lot of things well, I don't believe that's the most important thing. The most important thing is picking the right things to do in the first place. And that's being effective versus just being efficient. So within a startup, its success I don't think is measured by how many things you can do at once. It's measured by how effectively you're able to pick the one or two things that are the highest priority. And there's always going to be a seduction to get distracted and focus on 20 things at once. And the most effective entrepreneurs I know are very good at focusing on one or two things and either eliminating the rest or delegating to other people or outsourcing it so it's not done within the team but it's actually to third parties.

First-time entrepreneurs tend to miscalculate— is everything. What I mean by that is optimism has a place, but I think even more so for the first-time entrepreneur, You need to be pragmatically pessimistic. What I mean by that is you need to define all the worst-case scenarios in terms of financial loss, time loss, etc. Look at what you will learn if that happens and accept and come to terms with that before you ever start. If you don't do that and you go straight into battling the world, trying to conquer the world with rose-colored glasses on, the first time you hit a major hiccup, you're gonna become really demoralized and you will quit. So optimism, all that rah rah rah, that's awesome, but you need to hope for the best and prepare for the worst before you ever get started. I always recommend that.

I think it's important to have at least 1 or 2 numbers that you track on a weekly basis. So that could be for web-based properties or services or products, it could be weekly Average uniques. What it is doesn't matter that much, but matters less than having a metric that you try to improve every week. You can have one or two of them, you really shouldn't have many more than that, I don't think. Could be conversion from sign-up to, let's say, first stage of sign-up to completion of sign-up. There are many different metrics that you can use, but I think that to keep the team focused, especially in a small company, it's very important to have one or two that you focus on a weekly basis.

I think failure would be a big piece, even though I view failure differently than I think many people. I view it as a feedback mechanism. But if you look at even, let's say, The 4-Hour Workweek, didn't start off called The 4-Hour Workweek. It was also turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers. And hopefully pretty soon it'll be celebrating 4 years unbroken on the New York Times bestseller list. And I like to, whenever possible, illustrate those failures because people will— everyone will face failure or mistakes, and those are the divergent points from which they can either go in a good direction or a bad direction. And I want to illustrate that oftentimes the finish line is only 100 feet from where you stand, but it might seem that it's 100 miles away.

Thank you guys for watching. I made this video because Chris7820 asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know what you think of Tim Ferriss as an entrepreneur and what your favorite Tim Ferriss book is. Mine is The 4-Hour Workweek. What's yours? Leave it below.