Tim Ferriss tells Jack Canfield how he won a kickboxing championship in eight weeks by exploiting the rules: the ring had no ropes, and three push-outs meant a TKO. He cut 20 pounds for weigh-in, then rehydrated to 193 to fight. The lesson: question what everyone assumes is fixed, magnify your strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.
Questions this video answers
About eight weeks away.
Approximately 24 hours before competition.
Cut from 185 lb to 165 lb (20 lb cut), then rehydrated to 193 lb.
Chapters
I want to go back to minimum effective dose for a minute. And I interviewed you for my book the Success Principles. And you told a story about how I think you were at Princeton at the time. I think you'd been overseas in Japan for a year, came back and a friend said he was going to go to a kickboxing championship and would you come and be in the audience just to be his buddy. And you went, well, when is it? I think I want to do it. He said, well, have you ever done kickboxing before? I think you'd done judo or something. But he said, no, I haven't done that, but. But I can learn. First of all, again, it was that just, I'm gonna study it, I'm gonna figure it out, I'm gonna apply myself. And you went full in. I'm all in. Like in Hold', em, Texas hold', Em, you know. But the minimum effective dose thing I think applies to that story as well. Can you kind of recount that story for.
Absolutely. So I was talking to my buddy Albert, who had been the national team captain for Chinese kickboxing, and it happened exactly as you explained. And he sent me the details and I think it was via fax, this is back in the day email, just getting started. And it was something like eight weeks away. So I very clearly could not beat people at their own game. But I read through the rules very, very closely and I asked myself the question, what are the inbuilt assumptions here? How are other people going to be competing? And there were a few things that struck me. The first was that if you push someone out of the ring, I think it was three times in one round, you won by tko. And the ring was just like a boxing ring, but it had no ropes. So that immediately stuck out as a way that I could multiply my strengths, meaning wrestling to fight people who were far superior at striking. Kickboxing, Right. Kicking and boxing. Secondly, weigh ins were two days, excuse me, about 24 hours before competition. And I had become very good at cutting weight through wrestling. And I knew that was also an area where I would have more experience. So those two things combined, I cut from 185 to 165, so 20 pounds and then rehydrated to 193 and ended up competing against guys who were 165 pounds at 193. And it was just hysterical to get on the platform. And these guys would start looking around to see if they were on the right platform. And then technically speaking, I couldn't have felt better. And I focused on my wrestling. And so I was able to just fly through the national championships. Never got hurt, never got even scratched. And even in the finals against somebody who knocked out every single opponent. Because I went in there not asking how do I fix my weaknesses, but how do I magnify my strengths? And I think that's very critically important, whether it's in business, whether it's in physical performance, competition. Certainly you need to look at that, and it's not being unethical. It's looking at something that everyone else has seen and seeing something that they don't. And I think a really good example of that is something called the Fosbury flop, which most people have never heard of.
I have. I was a high jumper in high school.
All right, so Dick Fosberry, you know the story. This must have been in the 60s, I suppose. He was the first person to go over the high jump bar backwards. And it was a scandal. People threw their hands up and laughed and mocked. And then, lo and behold, he wins the gold medal. Not so many laughs. And now, of course, everyone's using it. And at the time, it was a huge controversy, but it was an evolution of the sport. So I think, whether it's a business model, whether it's your body, how can you force evolution on yourself or on something else, an organization? And I think that the way you do that is by testing assumptions.
Now, one of the things you talk about in terms of goal setting, when you set a goal for your physical body or whatever it is, weight loss, strength gain, whatever, talk about the goal needs to be measurable in specific numerical terms and actionable. And I never. The actionable part, that was new to me. I've always heard about smart goals. They'd be measurable and believable and so forth. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Absolutely. So the actionable piece is critical. People tend to obsess on areas that may be outside of their realm of expertise, like, let's say, cholesterol.
