“Don’t believe everything that you think” & 37 other transformative lifehacks

This +700-page, $16 book is a summarization of the +200 interviews that Tim Ferriss has done on his podcast.

In this review, I'm going to do more than just summarize the summarization; I've been living a Tim Ferriss kind of lifestyle for well over a decade now and I'm going to add my own edifying experiences and insights to some of the passages of the book.

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You may think...

I don't need to read this book. I'll just listen to the podcast.

As I discussed in the High Leverage Information Diet, podcasts themselves are a pretty limited medium for learning...

• With listening to podcasts, your listening comprehension is pretty low because you're almost always doing something else at the same time (Commuting, working, at the gym, etc). With reading, the only thing you are doing is reading, your attention is not divided. Reading is one of the better ways to absorb knowledge; this is why wealthy, successful people are consistently really well-read.

• With reading you can meter your absorption of knowledge, speed read sections on stuff you already understand well, or take your time on something new you want to understand.

• Tim's interviews are long, often over 2 hours. Some of the interviews are quite technical as well, they'll spend a lot of time having a granular discussion of weight lifting techniques or risk quantification of startup investment.

• Also, the podcast has ads and sponsors, which aren't really annoying but I'd much rather spend $15 on a book than listen to hundreds of advertisements.

• The book summarizes each interview, so it's a great companion to the podcast. After reading the book I went and listened to the podcast interviews that I found particularly interesting.

I hope to see more podcasts doing the same thing! In fact, I'm considering doing the same thing myself because I'm aware that few people are going to go through and watch the +600 videos I've done and +800 articles. Update: Check out my memoir and lifehacking manifesto, How to Be Cross Eyed...

If you're bored of the tired problem>generalization>platitude>strategy formula that most self-help books follow you'll enjoy this memoir of adventures, failures, and unexpected successes across three continents. I'll share with you some powerful tools for transformation - biohacking, smart drugs, flowstate, red pill mindset, and tantric sex - with which I've managed to pack several lifetimes' worth of peak experiences into a single decade.

An information diet/highlighting hack

I've got a bit of a system for devouring content-rich, dense books like this, I highlight in three different colors

• Yellow - Anything useful I want to remember - might get added to my SuperMemo mnemonic flashcard collection

• Blue - Anything I want to research or look up videos or podcasts on later

• Red - Anything that strikes me as beautiful language or is cleverly worded.

Meditation

Unsurprisingly...

More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice.

Or

“cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive.”
(p. 149)

That's a pretty good definition of mindfulness!

I believe there is a minimum effective dose for meditation, and it’s around 7 days.
(p. 152)
With “Just Note Gone” we train the mind to notice that something previously experienced is no more. For example, at the end of a breath, notice that the breath is over. Gone. As a sound fades away, notice when it is over. Gone. At the end of a thought, notice that the thought is over. Gone. At the end of an experience of emotion— joy, anger, sadness, or anything else— notice it is over. Gone.
(p. 156)

It's said that this is the meditation technique you might want to do if you're ever tortured (I do it when I'm getting an arduous deep-tissue massage!)

Loving-Kindness Meditation

to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy.
(p. 158)
I tend to do a single 3- to 5-minute session at night, thinking of three people I want to be happy, often two current friends and one old friend I haven’t seen in years.
(p. 159)

This is an intermittent meditation method, you do it for just seconds every hour and it has a real antidepressant effect. My reminder is to just do it every time I go to the bathroom which is about once an hour because I drink a lot of water and tea.

One woman reported:

Happiest day in 7 years. And what did it take to achieve that? It took 10 seconds of secretly wishing for two other people to be happy for 8 repetitions, a total of 80 seconds of thinking.
(p. 158)

Men vs Women

He notes that substantially more men end up at Transcendental Meditation (TM), and substantially more women end up at vipassana.
(p. 150)

Which I like because it's politically incorrect; saying that men and women prefer different types of meditation - because our minds differ fundamentally...

On a tangent; I've always wished I could be in a woman's mind for just a day ...
Women, in general, are more impulsive and make decisions more emotionally but at the same time I think are more introspective - more self-reflective.
So I imagine that being in a woman's mind is kind of like being constantly pulled in different directions by my emotions and being anxious all the time that I was going to make a bad decision on a whim and that life was going to go badly for me.
Maybe some female commenters can tell me if that is pretty accurate or if I'm way off.