Jedi Mind Tricks

When you’re starting a company or a new venture, there are two relevant branding questions: How do I build a powerful, indelible brand and how do I keep it from imprisoning me in a very narrow niche forever?

Fear and stress make people make bad decisions. At the same time, life sometimes involves real risks, and it’s important not to navigate them blind. As an investor and a “human guinea pig”, Tim Ferriss has taken some major risks over the course of his career, yet he considers himself quite conservative. How does he mitigate risk? How does he manage fear and stress? Like everything else Tim does, there’s a system to it.

In this lesson, best-selling author Tim Ferriss details the ways in which a small start-up can become a global success on a low budget by utilizing the customers themselves as a research and marketing tool.

Procrastination is a near-universal problem, but it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one who has trouble getting things done. And when you feel like that, getting things done only gets harder. A dedicated life hacker himself and frequent podcast interviewer of super-accomplished people, Tim Ferriss has some concrete tips to offer for escaping the procrastination quicksand: Keep tasks small and defined, rig the game in your favor, and embrace positive constraints.

Zen masters call it “know-nothing mind”: a state of openness and clarity without preconceptions—one that doesn’t foreclose on possibility. In his podcast conversations with “titans” of health, wealth, and wisdom, Tim Ferriss noticed a similar tendency: great achievers have the capacity to ask the questions others are afraid or unable to ask. They’re willing to risk looking foolish by asking “stupid” questions whose answers aren’t obvious to them—for example, why banks would give mortg...

Curiosity is the stuff of intelligence. So good thinking means asking good questions. Luckily, we humans are social creatures, so we have plenty of time to practice asking great questions—what Tim Ferriss vividly calls “mining mental gold” from other people’s brains (where questions are the pickaxes…ouch). As a bonus, the better the questions we ask, the more we can learn from others.